First of all, I’ve never read any Dan Brown at all, so I do expect an apology for that slander. Secondly, if the Inquisitions were established and authorized by the Papal Bulls, you cannot divorce them from Ecclesiastical Authority. Charles Manson didn’t actually murder anyone in the Tate-LaBianca killing spree, but he gave the order for it to happen, and every rational person agrees that he is the one who bears the lion’s share of the blame in the matter.
I didn’t divorce the two, temporal and spiritual authority. I distingushed the two.
If you don’t know that the temporal rulers took over control of the Inquisition in Spain, then you don’t know much modern history. If the one who gives the orders is the one most responsible then I have a simple statement for you:
the
one
who
gave
the
orders
to execute
heretics was . . . . . . .
THE TEMPORAL AUTHORITY.
I’m glad to hear you haven’t read Dan Brown. You’ve gotten your propaganda lessons elsewhere—the Anglo-American textbooks and culture are full of it—Church as bogeyman, while making apologies for the tyrannical temporal governments. There’s blame to go around, but you, apparently, simply must put it predominantly on the Church.
The problem is that the by 1500 the emerging State (there was no such thing in the Middle Ages) had seized most power for itself. That’s just a fact.