Priests were trained to torture people, for example to break every bone in someone's body in order to drive the demon away from them. It was believed that if they broke every bone, then the demon would not have anything to hold on to and it would have to leave the body.
I'd like some sources on this, if you don't mind. Priests rarely did the torture themselves, and Catholic priests least of all. They were certainly not
trained to torture people -- what's the point with that when you simply take the accused to the local henchman? The Catholics had the Inquisition, and not even the inquisitors performed the actual torture themselves. They oversaw it, supervised it, but torture was always left to the professionals. There are reasons why executioners were shunned by everyone, and torture is one of them. Priests, however, were not shunned, and would not have engaged in "unclean" tasks such as torture or execution. There were exceptions (I know of exactly one), but highly unlikely to have occurred among the Catholics, who were sticklers for red tape.
I have also never heard this nonsense about breaking every bone in the body. This was a secular capital punishment, called breaking on the wheel, but actually breaking every bone in the body was never done. What a tedious job that would be, and the condemned would be dead from internal bleeding and/or shock long before the last bone was broken anyway. And how would they go about with the vertebrae?
The policy of torture differed greatly from one nation to the next. Some places it was strictly prohibited. In Rome, torture could only be used if there was doubt as to the
guilt of the defendant -- it was not allowed to be used to extract confession.
reply
share