I wasn’t going to show these, as they’re pretty grim, and even grimmer if you realize how they were used. Catholics, this used to be the business of your church, and not just in Europe. How much pain would have been spared had there not been faith?
The heretic’s fork:
The heretic’s fork was a torture device, loosely consisting of a length of metal with two opposed bi-pronged “forks” as well as an attached belt or strap. The device was placed between the breast bone and throat just under the chin and secured with a leather strap …show more content…
This instrument was mostly reserved for women accused of conducting a miscarriage or those accused of adultery. The claws were used either hot or cold on the victim’s exposed breasts. If the victim wasn’t killed, she would be scarred for life as her breasts were literally torn apart. A common variant of the breast ripper is often referred to as “The Spider” which is a similar instrument attached to a wall. The victim’s breasts were fixed to the claws and the woman was pulled by the torturer away from the wall; successfully removing …show more content…
Below is their beginning info on the inquisitions.
By this term is usually meant a special ecclesiastical institution for combating or suppressing heresy. Its characteristic mark seems to be the bestowal on special judges of judicial powers in matters of faith, and this by supreme ecclesiastical authority, not temporal or for individual cases, but as a universal and permanent office. Moderns experience difficulty in understanding this institution, because they have, to no small extent, lost sight of two facts.
On the one hand they have ceased to grasp religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God, and therefore outside the realm of free private judgment; on the other, they no longer see in the Church a society perfect and sovereign, based substantially on a pure and authentic Revelation, whose first most important duty must naturally be to retain unsullied this original deposit of faith. Before the religious revolution of the sixteenth century these views were still common to all Christians; that orthodoxy should be maintained at any cost seemed