A reader asks about Exsurge Domine and burning heretics.

n light of my posts on infallibility—and assent to Church teach­ing even when not infal­li­ble (one / two / three)—a read­er asks:

Can we say that some things that past popes taught, which the Church no longer teach­es, were wrong? I will cite the most obvi­ous exam­ple: Leo X’s papal bull Exsurge Domine. One of the propo­si­tions that Pope Leo con­demned was ‘It is against the will of the Spir­it that heretics be burned.’ In light of what the Church teach­es today, I feel safe in assert­ing that it is, in fact, against the will of the Holy Spir­it that heretics be burned. But, if that’s the case, then con­demn­ing that state­ment must be an error, no?

I’ve read a cou­ple of apolo­get­i­cal appraisals of that par­tic­u­lar con­dem­na­tion, and they typ­i­cal­ly point out that Exsurge Domine is not infal­li­ble, but that state­ment seems mean­ing­less unless you go on to say that he got it wrong. In your opin­ion, is that a valid option for a Catholic?

The short answer is that Leo X would have got­ten it wrong if he had writ­ten Exsurge Domine in 2020. But he wrote it in 1520, and sev­er­al impor­tant things were dif­fer­ent in 1520. But we need to take a few step backs first.

Exsurge Domine was the bull excom­mu­ni­cat­ing Mar­tin Luther; and the pope lists forty-one “errors,” but takes care to point out that the errors fall into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. “Some of these,” he says,

have already been con­demned by coun­cils and the con­sti­tu­tions of our pre­de­ces­sors, and express­ly con­tain even the heresy of the Greeks and Bohemi­ans. Oth­er errors are either hereti­cal, false, scan­dalous, or offen­sive to pious ears, as seduc­tive of sim­ple minds, orig­i­nat­ing with false expo­nents of the faith who in their proud curios­i­ty yearn for the world’s glo­ry, and con­trary to the Apostle’s teach­ing, wish to be wis­er than they should be.

In oth­er words, not every­thing on this list of forty-one is nec­es­sar­i­ly false. Some are mere­ly “scan­dalous” or “offen­sive” or “seduc­tive.” Leo X nev­er says which of the forty-one fall into which cat­e­gories. And some of them “reflect a proud curios­i­ty” and a “wish to be wis­er than [one] should be.”

We must pause over that last one. Here are Leo’s exact words as they con­cern the present ques­tion; here is the con­demned propo­si­tion: “That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spir­it.” One school of thought says that Leo did not at all mean to assert that burn­ing heretics is “the will of the Spir­it”; he only meant to assert that the will of the Spir­it on this point could not be known. He was con­demn­ing the idea that Luther knew the will of the Spir­it one way or the oth­er. Luther, in oth­er words, had a “proud curios­i­ty” and a “wish to be wis­er than he should” on this ques­tion.

That’s very pos­si­ble. Leo X may have had in mind pas­sages in Scrip­ture in which God com­mands the death penal­ty against those pur­su­ing false reli­gions:

• Exo­dus 22:18: Thou shalt not suf­fer a witch to live
• Deuteron­o­my 13:5: [The false] prophet … shall be put to death; because he hath spo­ken to turn you away from the Lord your God
• Deuteron­o­my 18:20: [T]he prophet, which shall pre­sume to speak a word in my name, which I have not com­mand­ed him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of oth­er gods, even that prophet shall die.

Giv­en these exam­ples of times when God appar­ent­ly did will the death of heretics, how did Luther know that the Spir­it did not will it in 1520? Who was he to say? Leo X may have been think­ing some­thing along those lines.

•••

It is impor­tant to remind our­selves in these dis­cus­sions that heresy was, once upon a time, a far more seri­ous mat­ter for the com­mu­ni­ty and the state than it is today. His­to­ry pro­fes­sor Thomas Mad­den put it best when he wrote:

[T]he medieval world was not the mod­ern world. For medieval peo­ple, reli­gion was not some­thing one just did at church. It was their sci­ence, their phi­los­o­phy, their pol­i­tics, their iden­ti­ty, and their hope for sal­va­tion. It was not a per­son­al pref­er­ence but an abid­ing and uni­ver­sal truth. Heresy, then, struck at the heart of that truth. It doomed the heretic, endan­gered those near him, and tore apart the fab­ric of com­mu­ni­ty. … The mod­ern prac­tice of uni­ver­sal reli­gious tol­er­a­tion is itself quite new and unique­ly West­ern.

That is to say, one can’t read Exsurge Domine anachro­nis­ti­cal­ly, with our own pre­sup­po­si­tions about intel­lec­tu­al lib­er­ty and free­dom of con­science. At a time well before the sep­a­ra­tion of Church and state, heresy was not just false doc­trine; it was trea­son. Because of their abil­i­ty to win con­verts, “Heretics divid­ed peo­ple, caus­ing unrest and rebel­lion.” It was a ques­tion of the secu­ri­ty of the state. Because of the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion, entire nations aban­doned Catholi­cism, thus demon­strat­ing the pow­er that heresy had. Even in mod­ern times, think of the polit­i­cal unrest between north­ern and south­ern Ire­land over the divide between Protes­tants and Catholics.

By putting heretics to death, the state was act­ing to guard against—or tamp down—civil unrest.

In addi­tion, heresy could damn you. And if a heretic won con­verts in large num­bers, those souls might be damned too. That was the think­ing then. In the same way the state uses the death penal­ty to pro­tect inno­cent life, so the state used the death penal­ty to pro­tect the eter­nal lives of those who might suc­cumb to a heretic’s per­sua­sive pow­ers. On what grounds did Mar­tin Luther think it was not the will of the Spir­it that such poi­son be root­ed out of soci­ety?

There’s many a Tra­di­tion­al­ist wind­bag who should be glad we’re no longer burn­ing heretics at the stake.

•••

Time is change. Don­um Ver­i­tatis—which I have writ­ten about sev­er­al times since 2017—talks about the kind of “defi­cien­cies” that might creep into Mag­is­te­r­i­al doc­u­ments that “inter­vene in the pru­den­tial order.” (And though it is true that Exsurge Domine is not infal­li­ble, it is a Mag­is­te­r­i­al inter­ven­tion in the pru­den­tial order on the ques­tion at hand. For the Church nev­er burned heretics; the state did.) Here is what Don­um Ver­i­tatis says:

[I]n order to serve the Peo­ple of God as well as pos­si­ble, in par­tic­u­lar, by warn­ing them of dan­ger­ous opin­ions which could lead to error, the Mag­is­teri­um can inter­vene in ques­tions under dis­cus­sion which involve, in addi­tion to sol­id prin­ci­ples, cer­tain con­tin­gent and con­jec­tur­al ele­ments. It often only becomes pos­si­ble with the pas­sage of time to dis­tin­guish between what is nec­es­sary and what is con­tin­gent.

I’ll make a few points in clos­ing about the appli­ca­tion of these words to Exsurge Domine.

First, the CDF speaks about times in which the Mag­is­teri­um warns the faith­ful of “dan­ger­ous opin­ions that could lead to error.” Leo X may not so much have thought that Luther’s views on burn­ing heretics was itself error, but that it had the poten­tial to lead to error. For exam­ple, if it’s not the will of the Spir­it that heretics be burned, then per­haps Truth is not as seri­ous as peo­ple think it is, and con­trar­i­ous reli­gious opin­ions can be set loose upon the world to run wild. (A far more alarm­ing thought in 1520 than 2020.)

Sec­ond, the view that burn­ing heretics might be the will of the Spir­it is “con­tin­gent” on the facts of the time in which Mar­tin Luther lived, when heresy was uni­ver­sal­ly viewed as a threat to the civ­il order and the idea of reli­gious tol­er­ance would have been utter­ly strange. To the extent that any­one had such views at the time, they were nov­el.

Final­ly, it was con­jec­ture that, if God willed the burn­ing of heretics in the Old Tes­ta­ment, Luther could hard­ly claim cer­tain knowl­edge that it was against the will of the Spir­it in 1520. It has only been with the pas­sage of time, with the devel­op­ment of doc­trine, with the growth our under­stand­ing of indi­vid­ual con­science and reli­gious tol­er­ance, that the Church has come to under­stand that God may once have “suf­fered” cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment due to the hard­ness of our heart; but that from the begin­ning it was not so. God spared Cain and promised vengeance “sev­en­fold” on any­one who exact­ed a death penal­ty upon him. (See my ear­li­er arti­cle here.) The death penal­ty is not the will of the Spir­it; but no one could claim to know that in 1520.

•••

So was Leo X “wrong” in Exsurge Domine? A lot of it depends on what you think he was con­demn­ing. He may very well have been con­dem­i­ning only the idea that any­one could know the will of the Spir­it. The text of Exsurge Domine nev­er tells us on what grounds any one par­tic­u­lar error is con­demned. But even if it could be proven that Leo thought it was the will of the Spir­it that heretics be burned, how do we know that the Spir­it did not will this in 1520? How do we know that God did not suf­fer it because of hard­ness? Does any­one have any such rev­e­la­tion from God? We should­n’t seek to be wis­er than we can be.

That part of Exsurge Domine is defunct now. If I were to say, “Christ is Lord of all,” I would be right no mat­ter when I say it. If, how­ev­er, I were to say, “Don­ald Trump is pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States,” I will be cor­rect today. But that state­ment will not be cor­rect in the year 2050. In the same way, the con­demned propo­si­tion about heretics was true in 1520—independent of the sense in which Leo X meant it to be condemned—but not true in 2020. That’s not real­ly alarm­ing, unless you think time is sta­t­ic.

Change is often a gift.