You wrote:
“Why was the government under Mary executing heretics?”
1) It was the law.
2) Some were responsible for murders, or theft, and causing massive upheavel.
3) They did not pay attention to warnings to leave England and take their heretical views with them.
“Thank God I live in the US, where I don’t have to worry about fanatics on either side trying to burn me at the stake.”
Not nowadays - until the Muslims take power (God help us!). Thankfully the days of Protestants persecution of Catholics ended long ago in the US. They no longer burn our convents or attack our churches as they once did.
Even stranger that someone holds to it in 2010.
If someone comes after me because I am a Protestant, they will find I push back.
1) It was the law.
2) Some were responsible for murders, or theft, and causing massive upheavel.
3) They did not pay attention to warnings to leave England and take their heretical views with them.
Exactly the same rationale that was used to persecute the Catholics under Elisabeth I.
The disarray and corruption in the Catholic Church during the Late Middle ages and early Rennaisance was enough to put anyone off the established church.
See this extract from University of Wisconsin - Green Bay.
Collapsing Institutions
In the midst of all these upheavals, the Church was scarcely in a position to offer comfort. Since 1309 the Pope had resided at Avignon in southern France, rather than Rome. The "Babylonian Exile" began after the King of France attempted to tax the incomes of Church officials. The Pope responded by forbidding secular rulers to tax the Church and threatening to excommunicate the King, whereupon agents of the King attempted to kidnap the Pope. When a French Pope was elected in 1309, he moved to Avignon for safety and to be closer to his French mistress.(?????)
At Avignon, the corruption and moral laxity of the Church reached all-time lows. Tuchman states flatly that in all the secular literature of the time, "clerical celibacy is a joke."
The Italian writer Petrarch called Avignon "the Babylon of the West." Avignon was governed by one simple rule: absolutely everything in the Church was for sale, ecclesiastical offices, pardon for sins, holy relics.
Pope Clement VI, hardly a spiritual man himself, at one point launched a tirade against his fellow churchmen:
What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices of the world are not enough for you. If on chastity - but we will be silent on this, for God knows what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts.
The Pope was still ruler of much of central Italy - the Papal States, but that rule turned out to be impossible to enforce from Avignon. Revolts were frequent, inspired by resentment at the Papal exile, the general air of corruption, and heavy taxes to support the lush lifestyles of Avignon. They were fanned by the city-states of northern Italy, who were profoundly uncomfortable at having French power on both sides and who hoped to pick up any pieces of the Papal States that broke off.
During one revolt, Cardinal Robert of Geneva subdued the town of Cesena and had about 5,000 civilians massacred, for which he earned the undying hatred of the Italians and the nickname "Butcher of Cesena."
When Florence offered Rome inducements to join the revolts, it became obvious that the Pope had to return to Rome or lose it. Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377 and died the next year. With the French cardinals divided among themselves and Italian mobs demanding an Italian Pope, the Cardinals elected the apparently harmless Urban VI, who promptly launched a campaign to end some of the more flagrant forms of Church corruption. Urban made peace with the northern Italian city states and refused to leave Rome, earning the support of the Italians and the enmity of the French.
However, Urban quickly went beyond rational reform and became progressively more irrational and megalomaniacal as his reign wore on. He also began meddling in secular politics in a way that directly threatened French interests. Within a few months the French cardinals declared the election invalid, claiming Italian coercion to name an Italian Pope, They called a conclave of their own and elected as Clement VII none other than Robert of Geneva, the "Butcher of Cesena."
Faced on the one hand with the megalomania of Urban and the stupefying French arrogance in naming the one man most hated by the Italians as Pope on the other, even the articulate Tuchman is almost at a loss for words. She comments: "Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of [historian Jules] Michelet, 'no epoch was more naturally mad.'"
The so-called Great Western Schism lasted until 1447, during which time there were rival Popes in Rome and Avignon. Since the Catholic Church based its claim to authority on an unbroken succession of Popes, the existence of two parallel papacies was more than just a power struggle; it was a fundamental challenge to the whole medieval world-view. The corruption of the papal court at Avignon reached legendary proportions and the priestly vows of poverty and celibacy were widely viewed as jokes by the general public. Public disgust with Church scandals fueled some of the earliest stirrings of the Protestant Reformation.
The Englishman John Wycliff and the Bohemian Jan Hus were the first of the reformers. Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415; Wycliff died a natural death in 1384 but was tried for heresy after the execution of Hus and his bones dug up and burned.
Not exactly a model of rectitude and moral enlightenment.