THUD . . . thud . . . thud. The iron bar struck heavily on the limbs and chest of Jean Calas. His broken body was then exposed on a horizontal cartwheel in a public square of Toulouse, southern France. Thereafter it was burned to ashes.

Calas died on the wheel as a convicted murderer. The previous day, March 9, 1762, this Huguenot (French Protestant) was found guilty of murdering his son so as to prevent his conversion to Catholicism. A solemn burial service honored Calas’ son as a Catholic martyr.

French philosopher Voltaire, however, suspected that Calas had been a victim of Catholic intolerance. After proving that Calas’ son was actually a suicide, he launched a three-year campaign to arouse public opinion throughout Europe. Voltaire’s strategy worked. He finally succeeded in getting the French authorities to review the case, and on March 9, 1765, Calas was declared innocent posthumously. This glaring case of anti-Huguenot prejudice became one of the world’s causes célèbres. It prompted Voltaire to write his famous Treatise on Toleration.

Catholic Intolerance

Catholic canon law states: “Most firmly hold and in no way doubt that every heretic or schismatic is to have part with the Devil and his angels in the flames of eternal fire, unless before the end of his life he be incorporated with, and restored to the Catholic Church.” And up to this day the oath of allegiance of Roman Catholic bishops states: “With all my power I will persecute and make war upon heretics.” Thus intolerance was built into Catholic thinking. But justifying this attitude, the authoritative French Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique states: “Being the guardian of revealed truth, faith and morals, the church cannot tolerate the spreading of any teaching that is harmful to the faith of the faithful.”

Thus the Catholic Church has often hounded down “heretics,” judged them and then handed them over to the secular authorities for punishment. The New Encyclopædia Britannica writes: “In the imperial church [after Constantine]​—especially after the emperor Theodosius in the late 4th century—​heresy became a criminal transgression punishable by the state. The enemy of the church was likewise viewed as the enemy of the empire. Thus, bishops at the imperial synods of the 4th to 8th centuries attempted to declare as heretics the minority of dissenters and to eliminate them as enemies of the state.”

The church also used the secular authorities to show its intolerance toward the Jews, the Muslims, the Cathari and the Albigenses (massacred in a “holy war” in southern France in the early 13th century), heretics and European Protestants. True, most of this blood was shed by the “secular sword.” But in his bull Unam Sanctam, issued in 1302, Pope Boniface VIII decreed that the “secular sword” must submit to the “spiritual sword” of the church and “be employed for the Church . . . under the direction of the spiritual power.” (The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 15, page 126) So the Catholic Church cannot escape responsibility for the blood shed as a result of its policy of religious intolerance.