I've seen these ads for "Christian Debt Relief"...(cartoon)...

[Charlie in Dayton]

...and I'm almost wondering if this is the same sort of thing... (http://sinfest.net/comikaze/comics/2006-07-13.gif)

[Katana]

Same sort of what? Is this building on another thread? Sorry.

[Charlie in Dayton]

Oh, y'know...doing it God's way is right, all others are wrong, doing it any other way means you're low-down, immoral, etc etc etc...besides, it was just a cartoon...

[Meffy]

I always wondered how Christian debt relief was supposed to differ from... erm, any other kind of debt relief. Free unguents? Nice soothing choirs? Gets you signed up for all kinds other scams? Hmmm.

[blutoski]

I always wondered how Christian debt relief was supposed to differ from... erm, any other kind of debt relief. Free unguents? Nice soothing choirs? Gets you signed up for all kinds other scams? Hmmm.

I'd be curious, too. The Inquisition used to execute people for charging interest (until the Vatican changed their mind on the subject), so it's possible that there are some hardcore fundies who still regard interest as usury and have worked out a non-interest-paying debt consolidation strategy.

The above cartoon looks more like a titheing pitch. I've heard there are churches that have set up pre-authorized deductions from credit card or chequing accounts.

[grayman]

Check out this cartoon from the 14th of July: http://www.comics.com/creators/speedbump/index.html

[ceo_esq]

I'd be curious, too. The Inquisition used to execute people for charging interest (until the Vatican changed their mind on the subject), so it's possible that there are some hardcore fundies who still regard interest as usury and have worked out a non-interest-paying debt consolidation strategy.

I'm familiar with a range of historical punishments inflicted by Catholic religious authorities on usurers. On the spiritual side: censure, excommunication, denial of communion or Christian burial. On the material side: forfeiture of principal and interest; occasionally public humiliation or incarceration. However, I was not aware that the Inquisition (which one?) "used to execute people for charging interest".

[blutoski]

I'm familiar with a range of historical punishments inflicted by Catholic religious authorities on usurers. On the spiritual side: censure, excommunication, denial of communion or Christian burial. On the material side: forfeiture of principal and interest; occasionally public humiliation or incarceration. However, I was not aware that the Inquisition (which one?) "used to execute people for charging interest".

Well, technically, there was only one inquisition (renamed in the 20th century to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), whose popularity and local fervor seemed to have had phases. They usually all adhered to the same set of rules, and in this case, usury was on the list of heretical practices.

As you may imagine, its application was sporadic, since authorities who held power often made a good living off of lending. My impression of the history of executions was situations where the local corrupt political leader was overthrown by the masses, and the Inquisition was recruited to do what would otherwise be a lynching, in the form of executing with the convenient charge of usury.

Are you looking for specific examples of sentencing, or is it acceptable for me to establish that usury was on the list of charges?



Note of interest: When I did my most recent forage into the Inquisition records, I learned that no documents from the Inquisition / CDF are available post-1903. The suspected reason is that it would implicate the Vatican in international treaty violations (eg: spying - Pius X established an intelligence and blackmail network to combat Modernism/Communism, long since dissolved).

[blutoski]

Oh, yes, of course. My wife just reminded me: usury was a typical provocation for the Inquisition, especially in Spain, to invoke pogroms against Moors and Jews.

It's not the same thing as being individually executed, but establishing licence for the locals to kill groups for usury is pretty much aligned with the claim.

[ceo_esq]

Well, technically, there was only one inquisition (renamed in the 20th century to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), whose popularity and local fervor seemed to have had phases. They usually all adhered to the same set of rules, and in this case, usury was on the list of heretical practices.

Technically, that is simply untrue. There were many inquisitions, but these entities frequently had little or nothing to do with one another and were often constituted, controlled, and terminated independently. You have the Episcopal Inquisition and the Papal Inquisition of the Middle Ages; the Spanish Inquisition; the Portuguese Inquisition; and so forth. The one you seem to have in mind is the Roman Inquisition founded in the 16th century, which, having undergone substantial transformation, eventually became the CDF as you point out.

UPenn's Edward Peters, in Inquisition (1988), stresses the lack of identity and continuity among the various inquisitions, noting: "Between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries ... these procedures, personnel, and institutions were transformed by polemic and fiction into a myth, the myth of The Inquisition. ... Although the inquisitions disappeared, The Inquisition did not" (italics in original).


As you may imagine, its application was sporadic, since authorities who held power often made a good living off of lending. My impression of the history of executions was situations where the local corrupt political leader was overthrown by the masses, and the Inquisition was recruited to do what would otherwise be a lynching, in the form of executing with the convenient charge of usury.

People were undoubtedly lynched for usury, and some were executed by the state. Secular judicial authorities tended to view usury as primarily a secular offense, and frequently objected to inquisitorial attempts to take cognizance of usury cases. Relatively early on in the Spanish Inquisition (within three-quarters of a century from its founding) ecclesiastical tribunals appear to have stopped dealing with usury, while civil tribunals carried on. (We must recall, of course, that the Spanish Inquisition was controlled by the Spanish crown rather than Rome.)


Are you looking for specific examples of sentencing, or is it acceptable for me to establish that usury was on the list of charges?

I don't really expect you to come up with specific examples of sentencing.

What bothers me about the claim, because the history and development of Western legal and judicial traditions are an area of academic focus for me, is that I haven't been able to uncover specific examples of ecclesiastical usury sentencing more severe than the penalties I described earlier. This leads me to suspect that, if it is at all true that "the Inquisition used to execute people for charging interest," it must have represented at most a negligible percentage of inquisitorial usury cases. I daresay the actual practice of usury, when not simply ignored, was generally treated far more harshly by civil courts and by the masses (including execution or lynching) than by any inquisition.

There's a part in the classic History of the Inquisition in Spain by Henry Charles Lea (certainly no friend to the Catholic Church) where he excoriates an earlier historian for "expos[ing] his ignorance" when he "implie[d] that the Inquisition burnt for usury and smuggling".

I'm just not personally aware of any evidence for the practice, and haven't come across any reputable scholar who indicates a familiarity with such evidence.


Note of interest: When I did my most recent forage into the Inquisition records, I learned that no documents from the Inquisition / CDF are available post-1903. The suspected reason is that it would implicate the Vatican in international treaty violations (eg: spying - Pius X established an intelligence and blackmail network to combat Modernism/Communism, long since dissolved).

That is interesting, if true. It must just be certain kinds of documents, though, because the CDF has promulgated a number of well-known documents in the past century.

[Meffy]

inquisition (renamed in the 20th century to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith)
And until recently headed by a Cardinal Ratzinger. He's got a bigger hat now.