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Sunday Services

Heretics & Martyrs

Lady Phaedra

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First presented at Universalist Unitarian Church of Peoria IL, October 25, 1992, also presented at All Souls Welcoming Congregation, Kernersville NC, October 29, 1995

I created this service for the Sunday closest to Samhain in commemoration of the 300th Anniversary of the Salem Witch Trials. For research help and for his role in the initial presentation of this service, I must thank Aidan A. Kelly, Ph.D. As some remarks were specific to him, minor changes were required for the second presentation. Some hymns were from songbooks peculiar to the UU Church of Peoria; if they do not appear in the new hymnal, alternate hymns from Singing the Living Tradition have been suggested in [square brackets].

The service was conceived as as a dialog between two voices, one female (Voice 1), and one male (Voice 2 ).

Opening Words

We meet this morning in a space sanctified by a commitment to affirm and promote the principles of the inherent worth and dignity of every person; of a free and responsible search for truth; of acceptance of one another. We meet this morning not by coercion, but by choice; not by legislation, but by choice; not out of fear, but by free choice.

Chalice Lighting

The flame in the Chalice is a symbol of our religious heritage, Unitarian Universalism. Let it be a light for us by which we see our path, a beacon for those who have yet to come, and a memorial to those for whom choice, tolerance and acceptance have been denied.

Welcome & Announcements

[Good morning. Welcome to the Universalist Unitarian Church of Peoria. . . .]

Hymn

What Is This Church? [#113 Where is Our Holy Church? ]

Joys and Concerns

Today is the dark of the moon, the Sunday before All Hallow's Eve, the holiday we call Halloween and the ancient Celts called Samhain. The Celtic people believed this was a sacred time, a magic time, when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead was thinnest. This was the time to honor the ancestors, to name the beloved dead, to remember.

As a community, we remember that we have both joys and sorrows, laughter and concerns. Does anyone have anything to share with us this morning?

Litany of the Lost: A Dialog

Voice 1
Aidan, You're a religious historian, [Robert, you're a history buff,] what can you tell me about the early Gnostic Christians? What did they believe?

Voice 2
Well, we're not really sure, because they did not all believe the same things, and they valued their right to innovate. Although they produced an immense body of literature, all we have now is a single, book-length collection of their writings, plus stray quotations and fragments. The Church cast them out as heretics and ordered their writings destroyed.⁽¹⁾

Voice 1
Oh. (pause) And other unorthodox religious thinkers from the first and second century; what did they believe?

Voice 2
Well, we're not really sure. All their writings were systematically destroyed.⁽²⁾

Voice 1
Oh. (pause) What about Donatus, of the fourth century. Augustine though his writings brilliant.⁽³⁾

Voice 2
They were destroyed.

Voice 1
And Gottschalk, the ninth-century monk?

Voice 2
Forced to burn his writings with his own hands, then imprisoned for twenty years and forbidden to write.⁽⁴⁾

Voice 1
We know nothing?

Voice 2
Nothing. Nothing at all.

Voice 1
Well what about the Cathars, from the 12th and 13th century?

Voice 2
Nothing remains.

Voice 1
How can that be? There were hundreds of thousands of them.

Voice 2
Rome declared a crusade against them. At some places in southern France entire cities were destroyed. Like at Beziers. When the town was taken, the commanding general asked the Inquisitor how his soldiers could distinguish good Christian citizens from Cathar heretics. He replied, "Kill them all, God will recognize his own!"⁽⁵⁾

Voice 1
And their writings?

Voice 2
Destroyed.

Voice 1
What was the fate of Marquerite Porete, who influenced Meister Eckhart?

Voice 2
Burned at the stake. Paris, 1310.⁽⁶⁾

Voice 1
David Joris in the 16th century?

Voice 2
His body was disinterred and burned with his writings.⁽⁷⁾

Voice 1
The social reformer Thomas Muntzer?

Voice 2
Tortured and executed, 1525.⁽⁸⁾

Voice 1
The philosopher Giordano Bruno?

Voice 2
Burned at the stake Rome, 1600.

Voice 1
Need I go on!

Voice 2
Need I?

Voice 1
So much was lost! So many died!

Voice 2
By conservative estimates, a thousand times more than all the Christians condemned by Roman emperors.⁽⁹⁾

Voice 1
For what crime?

Voice 2
Heresy. Their crime was what they believed.

Reading: On Heresy

Voice 1
A reading from A History of Unitarianism, Earl Morris Wilbur, D.D.

"In 380 CE, the Emperor Theodosius decreed that all nations in the empire should to adhere to the orthodox belief in the trinity and that all that would not do so should be branded as heretics and be punished . . .

Voice 2
"We, the three Emperors, will that all our subjects . . . believe the one divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, of majesty co-equal, in the Holy Trinity. We will that those who embrace this creed be called Catholic Christians. We brand all the senseless followers of their religions by the infamous name of heretics, and forbid their conventicle to assume the name of churches . . .

Voice 1
" . . . Henceforth, for centuries the question of crucial importance was not, How does one act, what is his character? but, How does he believe, what is his creed?

Voice 2
"In the fifth century the Emperor Justinian incorporated the doctrine of the accepted creed into the Roman law, and the door was closed to freedom of belief or teaching on these subjects . . . . Tolerance was a sin, toleration was treason, heresy was a crime to be punished at the stake; and to propagate heretical views was deemed as much worse than murder as the eternal life of the human soul is of greater importance than the temporal life of a human body."⁽¹⁰⁾

Responsive Reading

#657 It Matters What We Believe, Sophie Lyon Fahs

Offering

Reading: The Inquisition

Voice 1
from The Heretics, by Walter Nigg

Voice 2
"In the year 385 of the Common Era . . . the Spanish Christian Priscillian advanced a number of Gnostic ideas, denied the Trinity and resurrection, denounced marriage and the eating of meat, and cited various apocryphal writings. For these crimes of doctrine, he was put to death together with a number of his followers. Although heretics in the past had been threatened with death . . . this was the first time that the step from theory to practice had been taken . . . The case . . . remained an isolated instance for centuries . . .

"The ruthless extermination of heretics was resumed at the end of the 12th century. After the year 1200 the campaigns of annihilation against heretics assume forms that mock all attempts at description . . . And where the first execution of heretics in the Early Church had awakened unanimous protest, in the Middle Ages butchery became an institution with the express blessing of the Church."⁽¹¹⁾

Voice 1
"The aim of the Inquisition was the stamping out of heresy; its task, to inquire into the souls of men in order to bring their beliefs to light.⁽¹²⁾

I warn you that what follows may not be suitable for the more sensitive listener. It is ugly. But it is true.

Voice 2
"The trial began with the arrest of the heretic, who was then cut off completely from the outside world. At the same time his property was sequestered. The defendant was cast into prison where he was kept in chains throughout the proceedings . . .

Voice 1
"Although the defendant was regarded as guilty from the start, the Inquisitor needed proofs in order to convict him. If possible, a confession must be obtained from him. If he did not voluntarily admit his guilt, witnesses were called. Their testimony, even if it was mere hearsay and the most idle gossip, was taken as convincing evidence. Anonymous letters were similarly credited, and the populace was directly invited to make denunciations. The defendant's only chance to overturn the witnesses' evidence was to prove that a deadly enmity had existed between himself and them. All other grounds were rejected.

Voice 2
"No one was exempted from the duty to give evidence, not even the closest relations. Mothers were expected to denounce their daughters, sons their fathers, husbands and wives each other. If they failed to do so, they were held to be likewise guilty of heresy. The testimony of minors and servants was also accepted, if it was incriminating, whereas favorable evidence by such persons was considered worthless.

Voice 1
"Defense was not allowed. Consequently, no lawyers participated in Inquisitional trials. A legal defense would have needlessly hampered the work of the Inquisitor, and the defense lawyer himself would have run the risk of being charged with heresy . . . Thus the defendant was thrown upon his own resources, even if he was uneducated and had no knowledge whatsoever of legal procedures. If the testimony of the witnesses did not lead to the desired confession, torture was applied.

Voice 2
" . . . Torture was first applied by the Inquisition under pope Innocent IV, who likewise established . . . rules regarding its use.

Voice 1
"It saved the effort and . . . expense of a long imprisonment . . .

Voice 2
"The heretic was dragged to the torture chamber, and all the instruments of torture were vividly demonstrated to him. If the sight of these horrible tools did not move him to confess, the torture was begun, slowly and by stages . . .

Voice 1
"During the procedure the instruments were frequently sprinkled with holy water.

Voice 2
"Of the numerous ghastly implements available, the thumbscrew was usually the first to be applied; the fingers were placed in clamps and the screws turned until the blood spurted out and the bones were crushed. The defendant might also be placed on the iron torture chair, the seat of which consisted of sharpened iron nails that could be heated red-hot from below. There were the so-called `boots' which were employed to crush the shinbones. Another favorite torture was dislocation of the limbs on the rack, or the wheel on which the heretic, bound hand and foot, was drawn up and down while the body was weighted with stones. So that the torturers would not be disturbed by the shrieking of the victim, his mouth was stuffed with cloth. By such means a heretic would be tortured for hours, until his body was a flayed, crushed broken and bloody pulp.

Voice 1
"From time to time the victim would be asked . . . whether he was ready to confess. Most heretics, half mad with pain, would then be ready to supply any information the Inquisitors wanted to hear . . . ⁽¹³⁾

Voice 2
"The Church organized the act of burning at stake as a grand public performance. The execution was generally set upon a holiday so that the crowd would be the larger and the warning of the heretic's example the more effective . . .

Voice 1
"On the way to the stake the heretic was tormented with red-hot tongs . . . or his right hand was cut off before the execution. He was dressed in a penitent's shirt, and sometimes wore a paper cap on which diabolic marks were painted.

Voice 2
"In some few exceptional cases the victim was mercifully strangled before hand. Usually he was bound living to a stake that was raised high enough above the heap of fuel, so that the crowds of the faithful could see every detail of the spectacle. Bundles of twigs mixed with straw were heaped to a height of three feet around the victim. The condemned man was gagged, lest in speaking forth he arouse sympathy among the people and perhaps cause a riot.

Voice 1
"After the heretic had been exhorted for the last time to recant, the signal was given for igniting the pyre. Soon the flames leaped upward, and it depended upon the direction of the wind whether the smoke was carried into the victim's face, so that he suffocated quickly or whether it was blown away from him, so that he had to suffer all the torments of slow burning . . .

Voice 2
"When the fires died down, the ashes were gathered and scattered to the four winds, so that not the slightest relic of the heretic would remain. . . .

"There can be no serious Christian defense of the annihilation of heretics, especially since Christianity teaches that all killing of human beings is a crime. The activities of the Inquisition can only be described as a 'total eclipse' of all Christian feeling. The beast of the abyss rose up and threatened to overwhelm all of Christendom."⁽¹⁴⁾

Voice 1
We will now have a moment of silence for the dead.

(pause)

Voice 2
Michael Servetus: A Story adapted from A History of Unitarianism by Earl Morris Wilbur, D.D. and The Heretics, by Walter Nigg⁽¹⁵⁾

Voice 1
For a thousand years after the decrees of the Roman Emperors, trinitarianism was a central doctrine of Christianity. Until 1531, when it was attacked by Michael Servetus.

Servetus was a Spaniard who left Spain early in life . . .

Voice 2
. . . and never returned for fear of the Inquisition.

Voice 1
He studied law in Toulouse, then turned to medicine and natural science. He was a keen observer, discovering the circulation of blood long before Harvey. He wrote a famous treatise on digestion, and published a new edition of Ptolemy. But his passion was religion.

Voice 2
It was in Toulouse, at a school that insisted on an inflexible orthodoxy, that Servetus and some fellow students began to meet in secret to read the Bible. An activity which was highly frowned upon.

Voice 1
Servetus became passionate about the Bible. It presented a view of his religion from which he had been isolated. It gave him the inspiration of the New Testament Jesus Christ, which became the heart of his belief. "He found something to which his whole religious nature responded, yet, in his words . . .

Voice 2
. . . 'not one word about the Trinity, nor about its persons, nor about an Essence nor about a unity of the substance, nor about one Nature of the several beings.'"⁽¹⁶⁾

Voice 1
From his new understanding, his enthusiasm had no bounds. He would never be "just" a lawyer, or "just" a doctor, but be a religious reformer, making known to the world his great discovery, a pure Christianity that would be embraced not just by good Christians, but Mohammedans and Jews as well.

Voice 2
The world was less enthusiastic. In the employ of a distinguished Franciscan monk, Servetus traveled to Italy, where he was able to observe both the royal court of the Emperor Charles V and the papal court of Clement VII close at hand. Both seemed a shocking contrast to the simplicity and purity he had found in the Bible. Where he, in his words, "expected to find sincerest piety and spotless sanctity of life, he found worldliness, selfish ambition, cunning intrigue, cynical skepticism, and shameless immorality."⁽¹⁷⁾ He saw the pope treated with an awe that bordered on idolatry. Even the Emperor knelt to kiss his feet. To work his reforms through the institutional Church seemed hopeless. Instead, he transferred his hopes to the reformers in the North.

Voice 1
The Northern reformers were not enthusiastic. His doctrines reeked of blasphemy. Some worried if this impetuous young man were not silenced, his ideas might endanger their whole cause. Servetus was rebuffed again and again.

Voice 2
In 1531, Servetus put his views into print. De trinitatis Erroribus, libri septem, " . . . a little book . . . , neatly printed, . . . in none too perfect Latin"⁽¹⁸⁾ that set out his views on the Trinity --- or rather the lack of it. Thus Servetus brought into the public arena a doctrine that had until then remained untouched⁽¹⁹⁾.

Thus began his persecution.

Voice 1
In our day, in the land we live in, we have little sense as to what it means to have an "established" Church; as to what it means to have the line between religious and civil authority finely drawn, or not at all.

Servetus found himself unwelcome, and perhaps not safe, in city after city of Northern Europe.

He had not thought to give offense.

Voice 2
In order to avoid a heresy trial, he printed a retraction in 1532, the Dialogues on the Trinity.

Voice 1
It didn't help.

Voice 2
The Lutherans were outraged; the Catholics incensed. Orders came forth to burn the books and arrest the heretic.

Voice 1
Too late. Servetus had managed to disappear. He would stay hidden in France for 21 years. Under an assumed name, he studied medicine, edited books and lectured on geography and astrology. Years passed. But Scripture remained his consuming passion.

Voice 2
The cutting edge in Protestant thought now belonged to Calvin in Geneva. Intrigued by his writings, Servetus began a correspondence with Calvin -- both using a go-between and assumed names. But Servetus wished less to be enlightened by Calvin than to convert Calvin to his own views.

Voice 1
The correspondence becomes short-tempered and insulting.

Voice 2
"`Instead of one God you have a three-headed Cerberus, instead of faith you have a fatal dream, and you say that good works are nothing but empty pictures.'"⁽²⁰⁾

Voice 1
Calvin declines to answer further. Servetus wishes the return of his writings. They are not returned. Later, they will be used as evidence at his trial.

Voice 2
"`That for this matter I must die, I know full well; but for all that I am not faint of heart, that I may become a disciple worthy of my Master.'"⁽²¹⁾

Voice 1
The letters ended. Servetus realized he could have no more effect on these reformers than the ones who rejected him years before. But he had one outlet left. The printing press.

Voice 2
For the next four years, Servetus worked to prepare an edition of his writings that would present his vision of Christianity. In 1553, the monumental Christianismi Restitutio was printed. He took the precaution of not indicating on it the author, publisher or place.

Voice 1
He was not cautious enough. Calvin received a copy of the book and recognized the writings of his correspondent from years before.

Voice 2
Yet Servetus thought himself safe living in Catholic France, where no one knew his identity or authorship. But friends of Calvin betrayed his secret to the Inquisitor. Servetus was arrested and brought to trial.

Voice 1
Midway through the trial, he managed to escape from prison. For months he was a homeless wanderer. Somehow he found himself in Geneva. He expected to leave in a day or two, but almost immediately he was recognized, arrested and brought to trial, that the poison of his prodigious errors might go no further.

Voice 2
The French authorities wanted him back, so they might carry out a death sentence.

Voice 1
The Swiss refused, and passed sentence of their own.

Voice 2
"Servetus, despite warning and correction, has for many years been spreading false and heretical doctrines, to the ruin of many souls."⁽²²⁾ He is therefore condemned.

Voice 1
On October 27, 1553, he was led from prison out through the city gates to a place called Champel. He was ceaselessly exhorted "to confess his fault and disavow his errors, but he replied that he was suffering unjustly, and prayed for God's mercy on his accusers."⁽²³⁾

"Arriving at the place of execution he fell upon his face and continued long in prayer . . . exhorted to say something, he cried,

Voice 2
"`O God, O God, what else can I speak of but God.'

Voice 1
"Then he asked the people to pray for him.

Voice 2
"Being led to a pile of wood made up of small sticks and bundles of green oak with the leaves still on, he was seated on a log with his feet touching the ground, his body chained to a stake and his neck bound to it by a coarse rope; his head covered with straw or leaves sprinkled with sulphur, and his book tied to his thigh.

Voice 1
"He besought the executioner not to prolong his torture; and when the torch met his sight he uttered a terrible shriek, while the horrified people threw on more wood and he cried out,

Voice 2
"'O Jesus, Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me.'"⁽²⁴⁾

Voice 1
After half an hour, he was dead.

Voice 2
"The fact of the execution of the sentence was duly entered on the records of the council, and Servetus's valuables were delivered over to the public treasurer . . . It was voted to reimburse Calvin from Servetus's money for the expenses he had incurred in the case."⁽²⁵⁾

The French contented themselves with hanging his effigy, then burning it and five bales of books.

Voice 1
Neither the Swiss, who burnt his body, nor the French, who burnt his books, were able to totally suppress Servetus's ideas. Antitrinitarianism, with its emphasis on rationalism, became one of the great heresies of the age of the Reformation. Under the name Socinianism, it endured great persecutions. Yet, it has persisted down to the present day. The Socinianists, in English-speaking countries, are known as Unitarians.

Music

Solo
to the tune of #57, 65, 209, 247 (Forest Green C.M.D) in Singing the Living Tradition

Heretic's Heart
   - author unknown

I once was bound but now I'm gone
Away from the faithful fold;
The ones who preach that holiness
Is to do what you are told.
Though law and scripture, priest and prayer
Have all instructed me,
My skin, my bones, my heretic heart
Are my authority.
   - author unknown

[Alternate recorded music: Spirits by Susan Falkenrath Wolf]

Voice 1
We haven't said much about women.

Voice 2
We mentioned Marguerite Porete. The first auto-da-fe in Paris.

Voice 1
That's only one.

Voice 2
There were more. For example, in the early 1900s, Sister Antoinettte Marie Pratt searched the Vatican archives and found the names of 100,000 people executed by the Church. Eighty percent of them were women.

Voice 1
Executed for heresy?

Voice 2
No. For witchcraft.

Reading: The Witches

Voice 1
A reading from The Heretics, by Walter Nigg

"Gregory IX . . . was the first pope to issue orders that witches be indicted along with heretics. The first witch trial under these orders took place in France between 1230 and 1240. Once the first step had been taken, the Inquisitional machinery began to move everywhere.

Voice 2
"Defendants brought before a judge were asked whether they believed in witchcraft.

Voice 1
"To say that one did not was the most incriminating answer one could give.

Voice 2
"If one replied in the affirmative, the Inquisitor began to entwine the defendant in a snare of questions. What had she been doing in the field before the thunderstorm? Why had she quarrelled with such-and-such a person? Why had she laid her hand on this or that little boy? Why did her garden thrive better than her neighbors'? For what reason had she entered the neighbor's barn? And so on.

Voice 1
"If this cross-examination did not lead to a confession, the defendant was examined for the witch's mark.

"For this purpose she was stripped naked and the executioner shaved off all her body hair in order to seek in the hidden places of the body the sign which the devil imprinted on his cohorts. Warts, freckles and birthmarks were considered certain tokens of amorous relations with Satan . . . If the examination did not bring to light the witch's mark, the suspect was handed over to the torturers.

Voice 2
"The Malleus Maleficarum The Hammer of the Witches, a handbook for witch-hunting written by two Dominican priests provided legalistic justification for torture on the grounds that witchcraft was an exceptional crime. One purpose of the torture was to see whether the defendant could weep, since witches `according to the tradition of credible men' could not shed tears . . .

Voice 1
"The Inquisitor was bent not only on extracting a confession from the witch, but also on having her implicate all those who had taken part in the nocturnal sabbath with her. Many women, reduced by indescribable agonies to a state in which they were no longer responsible for what they said, denounced their own mothers or daughters as fellow witches, solely in order to be spared further torture. Of course it did not help if next day they withdrew the confessions that had been extorted from them.

Voice 2
"Yet there were also heroic souls who suffered all the degrees of torture with clenched teeth, never uttering a single word other than asseverations of their innocence. Such strong-nerved women were considered by the Inquisitors to be exceptionally obstinate witches whom the devil had made impervious to pain. For however they behaved upon the rack, whether they screamed in unutterable pain and despair or steadfastly kept silent, they were doomed.

Voice 1
"The crimes of devil worship confessed under torture cold be atoned for only by death. In principle there was no mercy for the witches. They had to be burned. Such was the commandment of Scripture: `You shall not permit a sorceress to live' . . . Anyone who ventured to protest against the burning of witches became himself a moral outcast.

Voice 2
"Witch burnings on a large scale first took place in France, but were soon checked there when the trials passed from the hands of the clerics to secular judges. The hysteria then spread to Switzerland and Germany, where it raged in its most virulent form. It passed on to Scandinavia, England Spain, Italy, Hungary -- in short, to all of Europe.

Voice 1
"Everywhere the pyres flamed. Women and men, idiots and scholars, children of four and grandmothers of eighty -- all were burned indiscriminately . . . A somewhat too long nose or a malformed body, but also rare beauty or unusual intelligence, sufficed to arouse suspicion of witchcraft.

Voice 2
"As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the persecutions of witches swelled to a torrent, reaching a crest in the post-Reformation age. There were villages left with only two women after the witch trials were over. It seemed as if the flames of the pyres could never be extinguished as, from the fourteenth to the eighteen centuries, countless human beings went to their deaths."

Voice 1
A moment of silence for the dead.

Naming the Dead

Voice 1
One hundred thousand names.

Voice 2
Mostly women. Many children.

Voice 1
One hundred thousand names.

Voice 2
Only for trials controlled by Rome.

Voice 1
One hundred thousand names.

Voice 2
Not including the Reformation countries, or those who died in prison, or those who were lynched . . .

Voice 1
Or those in America?

Voice 2
Or those in America.

Voice 1
Like Margaret Jones, executed as a heretic in Boston 1648,

Voice 2
Or the women and men at Salem.

Voice 1
Bridget Bishop of Salem Village, executed, June 16, 1692.

Voice 2
Sarah Good of Salem Village

Voice 1
Elizabeth How of Topsfield

Voice 2
Susanna Martin of Amesbury

Voice 1
Rebecca Nurse

Voice 2
Sarah Wilds of Topsfields

Voice 1
All executed on July 19, 1692

Voice 2
George Burroughs of Wells, Maine

Voice 1
Martha Carrier of Andover

Voice 2
George Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard, all of Salem Village

Voice 1
All executed on August 19, 1692

Voice 2
Giles Cory of Salem Village, crushed to death on September 19, 1692

Voice 1
Martha Cory of Salem Village

Voice 2
Mary Esty of Topsfield

Voice 1
Alice Parker and Ann Pudeator of Salem

Voice 2
Mary Parker and Samuel Wardwell of Andover

Voice 1
Wilmot Reed of Marblehead

Voice 2
Margaret Scott of Powley

Voice 1
All executed on September 22, 1692.

Voice 2
Salem Village later changed its name to disguise its history.

Voice 1
Were they really witches? Any of them? All of them? Witches like you and I are witches?

Voice 2
Does it matter? But . . . they died in our name . . . so we need to remember them.

Music

Solo:

Amazing Grace for Witches
   - Reclaiming Community

Amazing grace, how sweet the earth
That formed a witch like me.
I once was burned; now I survive.
Was hanged, but now I sing.

[Alternate recorded music: The Burning Times by Charlie Murphy, Rumors of the Big Wave, or others]

America: A Dialog

Voice 1
How could this happen? America was founded on freedom.

Voice 2
Well, the United States may have been, but many of the colonies weren't.

Voice 1
But they came here for religious freedom, to escape the horrible persecutions of Europe.

Voice 2
And in many cases instituted official religions of their own.

Voice 1
But it did change. How? Why?

Voice 2
Partly political expediency. They would have had a terrible time getting all those different colonies to agree on a state religion!

Partly it was the vision of men like Thomas Jefferson . . .

Voice 1
. . . who put freedom of religion in the Constitution.

Voice 2
And that was a fight. Remember, it is in the Bill of Rights, an amendment, not in the main body of the Constitution.

Voice 1
Even so, we created a country where the right to be different, to think and believe outside the norm is our Constitutional right.

Voice 2
Unless maybe if you're queer.

Voice 1
And I thank the Goddess or God or whatever anyone holds dear that these horrors can no longer happen.

Voice 2
Can't they?

Voice 1
Surely not today.

Voice 2
Well, in 1957 all the works of Wilhelm Reich were burned.

Voice 1
What was he, a spy?

Voice 2
No, a psychiatrist. A rather unorthodox one.

Voice 1
Well, who did it? I hope the government prosecuted whoever was responsible.

Voice 2
The Government did it. Agents seized all his books at the publisher, trucked them to an incinerator, and burned them. Other agents used axes to smash the equipment in his research laboratory. Dr. Reich was thrown in prison, where he died a few months later.⁽²⁶⁾

Voice 1
What was his crime?

Voice 2
It's hard to tell; perhaps heretical science. It wasn't even legal to print his books in America until 1967.

Voice 1
That wasn't so long ago.

Voice 2
No.

Voice 1
Well, at least the Inquisition is over!

Voice 2
Oh?

Voice 1
Isn't it?

Voice 2
No, the office was never disbanded. After Vatican II, its name was changed, to the "Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith", but not its function.

Voice 1
But it can't do anything to anyone now!

Voice 2
Ask Hans Kung, the Dutch theologian banned from teaching Catholic theology.

Voice 1
And certainly not in America!

Voice 2
Ask Matthew Fox, the Dominican priest silenced by Rome.

Voice 1
All right, I will ask. But I have only one question for them.

Voice 2
What's that?

Voice 1
Why aren't they here? With us?

(pause)

Music

Solo
to the tune of #57, 65, 209, 247 (Forest Green C.M.D) in Singing the Living Tradition

Heretic's Heart
   - author unknown

And while I breathe this glorious air
an outlaw I'll remain.
My body will not be abused
and I will not be saved.
And if I cannot shout out loud
I'll sing it secretly:
My skin, my bones, my heretic heart
Are my authority.

Hymn
#287, Faith of the Larger Liberty

Closing Words

Voice 2
Freedom of religion is of the utmost importance for any religion. However much you may disagree, however odd or crackpot another's beliefs may seem, allowing an attack on any religion undermines the very foundations of that freedom. For who will protest when it is your religion under attack?

Voice 1
On this morning when we come together to honor the dead, and in community come together to honor our commitment to freedom of thought and belief; to tolerance and to free expression; to freedom to live and love as each of us sees fit; we ask, in the name of whatever each of us holds dear, that these things we sometimes take for granted be in fact the rights of all people.

Both Voices
So mote it be.

© 1992, 2001 Lady Phaedra

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Sources

1. The Heretics, by Walter Nigg; New York, Dorset Press, 1990; p 41

2. Nigg, p 86

3. Nigg, p 112

4. Nigg, p 148

5. The Sacrament of Abortion by Ginette Paris, Dallas, Spring Publications, Inc., 1992 p 46-47; also Nigg p 190-191

6. The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages by Robert E. Lerner, Berkley, University of California Press, 1972; p 1

7. History of Unitarianism Vol 1 Earl Moss Wilbur D.D, Boston, Beacon Press, 1945, 1972; p 46

8. Nigg, p 315

9. Paris, p 46

10. Wilbur, p 11.

11. Nigg, p 211-212

12. Nigg, p 116

13. Nigg, p 217-220

14. Nigg, p 121-122

15. Nigg, p 323-329; Wilbur, Chapters 5, 9-12.

16. Wilbur, p 53

17. Wilbur, p 55

18. Wilbur, p 61

19. Wilbur, p 63

20. Wilbur, p 136

21. Wilbur, p 136

22. Wilbur, 178-179

23. Wilbur, p 180

24. Wilbur, p 180-181

25. Wilbur, p 181.

26. The New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson, Scottsdale, AZ, New Falcon Publications 1991; p 38