Holy Cow! WHATS UP WITH THIS POPE?!

[struggle4progress]

192. The poster, to whom I responded, suggested that burning "witches" was somehow a Catholic notion

I just documented that burning "witches" was actually the Roman punishment

In the old Judaic texts, the first mention of burning as a punishment is Genesis 38: 15-19, 24-26, in the story of Judah and Tamar, where the penalty is rapidly revealed to be entirely unjust. It is later prescribed in Leviticus 20: 14 as the punishment for a man marrying both a woman and her daughter, and in Leviticus 21: 9 as the punishment for a priest’s daughter who becomes a prostitute, which seems consistent with the story of Judah and Tamar

The passage that you cite doesn't mention burning; Leviticus 20: 27 suggests the penalty was stoning. Not being an expert on the place or time, I do not know how commonly "witchcraft" might have been punished in ancient Judaism

The early Catholic church took the practice of witchcraft seriously, as reversion to paganism, but did not punish it according to the old Levitical law:

... The Council of Elvira (306), Canon 6, refused the holy Viaticum to those who had killed a man by a spell ... Irish canons in the far West treated sorcery as a crime to be visited with excommunication until adequate penance had been performed ... In these earlier centuries a few individual prosecutions for witchcraft took place, and in some of these torture (permitted by the Roman civil law) apparently took place. Pope Nicholas I, indeed (A.D. 866), prohibited the use of torture ... Gregory VII in 1080 wrote to King Harold of Denmark forbidding witches to be put to death upon presumption of their having caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence ... It was at any rate at Toulouse, the hot-bed of Catharan infection, that we meet in 1275 the earliest example of a witch burned to death after judicial sentence of an inquisitor, who was in this case a certain Hugues de Baniol (Cauzons, "La Magic", II, 217) ... On the other hand, after the middle of the thirteenth century, the then recently-constituted Papal Inquisition began to concern itself with charges of witchcraft ... link

Saint Augustine of Hippo, an influential theologian in the early Christian Church, argued in the early 400s that ... neither Satan nor witches had supernatural powers or were capable of effectively invoking magic of any sort. It was the "error of the pagans" to believe in "some other divine power than the one God" ... The late medieval Church accepted St. Augustine's view, and hence felt little need to bother itself with tracking down witches or investigating allegations of witchcraft. link

The persecution of "witches," including "witch"-burning and other executions, is largely concentrated in a few locales, mostly French and German, and mostly in the early modern era, over a thousand years after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. These activities were not the result of some continuing Judaic or Christian practice