Originally posted by ivanhoe
Ivanhoe: "If you ask me the question "Why should anyone ever be put in prison or put to death for believing heresy? That is not the way of the Gospel, nor the path of reason." you are again failing to put things in the necessary perspective as I pointed out above."
The issue of whether or not to put heretics to death had been debated within the Church since early times, with plenty of good rational (Christian) argument against burning them. Read the Catholic Encyclopedia--you'll see that the turning point in favour of roasting heretics came with the Cathars. Then the CE goes on with its own mythology--that the Crusade was necessary to keep Europe from falling apart due to the incipient Cathar menace. The Crusade is justified as a sort of pre-emptive strike.
With regard to your historical context, "...most learned figures in the Church who are still on record opposed the murder of heretics. Peter Canter, the most learned man of his time says:
Whether they be convicted of error, or freely confess their guilt, Catharists are not to be put to death, at least not when they refrain from armed assaults upon the Church. For although the Apostle said, A man that is a heretic after the third admonition, avoid, he certainly did not say, Kill him. Throw them into prison, if you will, but do not put them to death.
So far was S Bernard of Clairvaux from agreeing with the methods of the people of Cologne, that he laid down the axiom:
By persuasion, not by violence, are men to be won to the Faith."
However,
"Alarmed especially by the spread of the Albigenses, the popes issued increasingly stringent instructions as to the methods for dealing with heretics. But they [the Cathars] translated the New Testament into Provençal, and, soon after, those reading it for the first time saw, in the Scarlet Woman of Revelation, the Roman Church. In 1209, Innocent III lost his cool, and began preaching a crusade against the Albigenses.
...
The last discourse of S Dominic to the Albigenses betrays a man who, as H.G. Wells puts it, “has lost his faith in truth because his truth has not prevailed”:
For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying and weeping. But according to the proverbs of my country, “Where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail”, we shall arouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas! will arm nations and kingdoms against this land… and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have been powerless."
And so on and so on. The quotes come from http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0811Inquisition.html.