That is so very sad.
Hi Jeremy –
What a terrible story. I’ve posted this extract elsewhere but I thought it might help here. It comes from S.Mark Heim. ‘Saved from Sacrifice’. Pages 186 – 187. Mark Heim is a Girardian and – it now appears – is a friend and colleague of our own Richard Beck too.
Perhaps the most influential single work in ending the European witch trials was written by Father Friedrich von Spee, a professor of theology at Wurzburg. He lived at ground zero in an affected region where the devastations of war and plague created the classic conditions of sacrificial crisis for the ravaged communities. He had served as a confessor to a number of those about to be executed, and he quickly became convinced that he was seeing a process in which those in charge of the trials were manufacturing false witness by torture. He did not cease to believe in the possibility of witchcraft, but he insisted that the greater imperative was to avoid becoming the crucifiers of the innocent…
In his book on the witch trials, Spee identifies clearly the sacrificial dynamic he sees at work: ‘Should some plague infect cattle…, should a doctor not know the cause of a new disease…, then some sort of shallowness, superstition, or ignorance immediately leads us to turn to thoughts of sorcery and conclude witches are the cause. Then we exclaim that we hold the source of evil in our hands’. Among the chief inciters of persecution are lawyers, who do so for gain (‘Woe to you lawyers’), and crowds of jealous and malicious people who, he says, ‘Everywhere avenge their feuds through defamation’.
If the woman has a bad reputation this proves her guilt. If she has a good reputation, it does the same, for witches notoriously put up this appearance. ‘If there are any people who ever wanted to do her harm, they now have a wonderful opportunity to hurt her. They can allege whatever they want, they will easily find things. So they shout from all sides that she is incriminated. Since she die whether she confesses or not, I would like to know, may God love me, how can she escape, no matter how innocent she may be.’ Either the trials must be stopped, or the judges ‘must in the end burn their own families, themselves and everyone else’.
Spee calls forth the examples of Daniel and Susana to demonstrate that Christ‘s law requires a special concern to avoid the shedding of innocent blood. He devotes a special appendix to the Christian martyrs under Nero, who were crucified like Christ, falsely accused as the cause of a terrible fire that had devastated Rome. Some of those innocent Christians too had named other innocents under pain of torture. This did not make them lesser martyrs, nor break their likeness to Jesus, Spee take his argument to the point of identifying the witches with Christian martyrs and their deaths with that of Christ himself, with the unequivocal moral that what is happening to them is wrong and must be resisted…Spee is not an obscure and ineffectual voice, but one that (along with others) finally prevailed against the persecutions at the time they burned most fiercely. To read his work is to grasp only more vividly the horrors of this Christian violence, and to see what elements within the Christian tradition were crucial to overcoming it. We should not lose touch with either.
It just makes me sad. How blind, and confused we are. Lord help us to see.
Amen
how absolutely tragic, that poor woman