The Council of Arles, A.D. 452, condemned it as a crime, which could only be due to diabolical energy.
The Council of Braga, A.D. 563, repeated the condemnation.
The Council of Auxerre, A.D. 578, inflicted a penalty on its commission, viz.: no commemoration was to be made in the Eucharist, and no Psalms were to be sung at the burial.
The Council of Troyes of the ninth century renewed these ecclesiastical penalties.
Pope Nicholas I. says, “a suicide must be buried, but only lest the omission should be offensive to others.”
Charlemagne adopted the principle of refusing the Mass, but allowed psalms and charitable subscriptions for prayers for the dead to be used, because, he said, “no one can sound the depths of God’s designs.”
The Roman Catholic canon law, section De Pœnitentia, assures us that Judas committed a greater sin in killing himself than in betraying his master Christ to a certain death.
In our own country we find the Anglo Saxon King Edgar assimilated the crime of suicide to that of murder in general, and ordered that the suicide was not to be buried in holy (i.e. consecrated) ground, and neither psalms nor masses were to be used.
For several centuries afterwards, the civil lawgivers of England remained content to allow suicide to fall under Ecclesiastical Law, but at the Reformation the Ecclesiastical Statutes were incorporated with the Statute law of the realm, thus constituting it a civil offence as well as a great moral crime.
In France, Louis IX., Saint, d. 1270, enforced the penalty of the confiscation of the property of a suicide; and by the criminal law of Louis XIV., dated 1670, the statutes relating to suicide were revised, and the body was ordered to be dragged at the cart’s tail.