This question he has no difficulty in answering. Thus:
“In truth it would not be permitted to employ for a heretic an intercession that would be of any advantage to him, or which tended to hinder the justice which is to be executed upon his crime, but only an intercession whose aim it is to relieve the inquisitor of the irregularity he might otherwise incur.”
He goes on to say that when the heretic has been abandoned to the secular justiciaries, the latter must pronounce their own sentence and conduct him to the place of execution, permitting him to be accompanied by pious men, who will pray for him and not leave him until he shall have delivered up his soul. And he reminds the inquisitors—though it hardly seems necessary—that should the magistrates delay in putting to death a heretic who has been abandoned to them, they must be regarded as fautores and themselves prosecuted.
Innocent IV, as we have seen, allowed the magistrates a term of five days in which to do their duty in this matter, and in Italy it was usual to take the heretics back to prison after sentence, and bring them forth again upon a week-day—always within the prescribed term—to be burnt. In Spain, however, the custom was that the magistrates having pronounced their own sentence—as soon as the heretic was abandoned to them—should immediately proceed to execute it.
According to some authorities the sentence, by which was meant the Auto de Fé generally, should not take place in church. Pegna agrees with these, but not upon the score of the desecration of sanctuary, which was their reason. He agrees because in a large open space higher scaffolds can be erected for the Auto, and greater multitudes can assemble to witness this uplifting spectacle of the triumph of the Faith. On the same grounds does he belittle those who maintain that heretics should not be put to death on Sundays. He considers it quite the best day of the week, and excellent the Spanish custom that appoints it for the Auto, “for,” he says, “it is good that large multitudes should attend, so that fear may turn them from evil ways; the spectacle being one that inspires the attendance with terror and presents a fearful image of the last judgment.”
That it is expedient to put heretics to death no pious authority has ever ventured to dispute. But there have been differences of opinion on the subject of the means by which this should be done. The scholiast is entirely on the side of the large majority that considers fire the proper instrument, and actually cites the Saviour’s own authority for this: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch that is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned” (John xv. 6).
If the accused should happen to be a cleric, he must be unfrocked and degraded by a bishop before being arrayed in the hideous sanbenito and abandoned to the secular arm, whilst those convicted of contumacy were—if still absent at the time of the sentence—to be burnt in effigy pending their capture, when, without further trial, they would be burnt alive.
In effigy also were burnt those convicted after death, these effigies being cast into the flames together with the remains of the dead man, which were exhumed for the purpose.