But however much it might be accounted justifiable and even necessary for the Christian layman to wield the sword, the priest still continued under the prohibition to shed blood or compass the death of any man. And if a priest lay under such an injunction, so must a tribunal that was controlled by priests.
Therefore it follows that not only was it admittedly illicit for the inquisitor to pass a capital sentence, to send a man to his death, but even to be in any way a party to such an act.
This was the letter of the law, and, happen what might, that letter must suffer no violence. Nor did it. When the accused was found guilty of heresy, when he was impenitent, or relapsed, the inquisitor was careful that the sentence he passed contained no single word that could render him responsible for the delinquent’s death. Far from it. The inquisitors earnestly implored the secular justiciaries to whom they abandoned him not to do him any hurt whatever.
But consider the actual formula of the sentence as prescribed by Eymeric. It concluded thus:
“The Church of God can do no more for you, since you have already abused its goodness.... Therefore we cast you out from the Church, and we abandon you to the secular justice, beseeching it none the less, and earnestly, so to moderate its sentence that it may deal with you without shedding your blood or putting you in danger of death.”[125]
They were careful not so much as to say that they delivered him to the secular arm; for delivery suggests activity in a matter in which they must remain absolutely passive. They merely abandoned him. Pilate-like, they washed their hands of him. If the secular justiciaries chose to bear him away and burn him at the stake in spite of their “earnest intercessions” to the contrary, that was the secular justiciaries’ affair.
Thus was the letter of the law most scrupulously observed, and the inquisitor displayed in his intercession on the heretic’s behalf the benignity proper to his sacerdotal office. His conscience was entirely at peace.
For the rest, he knew, of course, that there was a bull of Innocent IV, known as “ad extirpanda,” which compelled the secular justiciaries, under pain of greater excommunication, and of being themselves prosecuted as heretics and fautores, to put to death within a term of not more than five days any convicted heretic taken within their jurisdiction.
Francesco Pegna recommends inquisitors to be careful not to omit the intercession on the prisoner’s behalf, lest they should render themselves guilty of an irregularity. At the same time he raises the interesting question whether an inquisitor can reconcile this intercession with his conscience—not, as you might suppose, upon the score of the dissimulation it entails; but purely on the ground that it is most strictly forbidden to intercede on behalf of heretics; to do so, indeed, is to incur suspicion of being a befriender of heretics—an offence as punishable as heresy itself.