Modern apologists have clearly recognized this. For that reason they have tried their best to show that the execution of heretics was solely the work of the civil power, and that the Church was in no way responsible. "When we argue about the Inquisition," says Joseph de Maistre, "let us separate and distinguish very carefully the rôle of the Church and the rôle of the State. All that is terrible and cruel about this tribunal, especially its death penalty, is due to the State; that was its business, and it alone must be held to an accounting. All the clemency, on the contrary, which plays so large a part in the tribunal of the Inquisition must be ascribed to the Church, which interfered in its punishments only to suppress and mitigate them."[1] "The Church," says another grave historian, "took no part in the corporal punishment of heretics. Those executed were simply punished for their crimes, and were condemned by judges acting under the royal seal."[2] "This," says Lea, "is a typical instance in which history is written to order.... It is altogether a modern perversion of history to assume, as apologists do, that the request for mercy was sincere, and that the secular magistrate and not the Inquisition was responsible for the death of the heretic. We can imagine the smile of amused surprise with which Gregory IX and Gregory XI would have listened to the dialectics with which Count Joseph de Maistre proves that it is an error to suppose, and much more to assert, that a Catholic priest can in any manner be instrumental in compassing the death of a fellow creature."[3]
[1] _Lettres à un gentilhomme russe sur l'Inquisition espagnole_, ed. 1864, pp. 17, 18, 28, 34.
[2] Rodrigo, _Historia verdadera de la Inquisición_, 1876, vol. i, p. 170.
The real share of the Inquisition in a condemnation involving the death penalty is indeed a very difficult question to determine. According to the letter of the papal and imperial Constitutions of 1231 and 1232, the civil and not the ecclesiastical tribunals assumed all responsibility for the death sentence;[1] the Inquisition merely decided upon the question of doctrine, leaving the rest to the secular Court. It is this legislation that the above-named apologists have in mind, and the text of these laws is on their side.