Catholics had their savage moments, too, when it came to roasting Luther’s Augustinian associates. Unfortunately, savagery is common wherever there are humans being humans. The Huron were not unique in having a savage past :
Hendrik Voes and Johann van Esschen, on the other hand, received the complete treatment. On July 1, 1523, the two were arrayed in the full ecclesiastical regalia of their order and led in a procession that included Aleandro, Latomus, and Egmond. The procession terminated at the square in front of the Brussels cathedral, St. Gudala, where pyres stood prepared. The friars were then ceremonially degraded, their monastic garb replaced with plain robes. Both were given one last chance to recant. Refusing the offers of last-minute reprieve, Voes and Esschen were fastened to stakes. Torches applied fire to the wood. According to reports, the two young friars sang Te Deum laudamus before succumbing to the smoke and flames.[9]
And a mob riled up by Dominicans and alcohol against the reformation in the low counties attempted to burn Brother Henry after abducting him in the middle of the night and dragging him naked behind a horse to another town. When they tried but couldn’t burn him to death, they opted to beat him to death, instead.
Well, Martin Luther called for death to heretics.
In 1530 Luther advanced the view that two offences should be penalized even with death, namely sedition and blasphemy. The emphasis was thus shifted from incorrect belief to its public manifestation by word and deed. This was, however, no great gain for liberty, because Luther construed mere abstention from public office and military service as sedition and a rejection of an article of the Apostles’ Creed as blasphemy.
In a memorandum of 1531, composed by Melanchthon and signed by Luther, a rejection of the ministerial office was described as insufferable blasphemy, and the disintegration of the Church as sedition against the ecclesiastical order. In a memorandum of 1536, again composed by Melanchthon and signed by Luther, the distinction between the peaceful and the revolutionary Anabaptists was obliterated . . .
Luther may not have been too happy about signing these memoranda. At any rate, he appended postscripts to each. To the first he said,
I assent. Although it seems cruel to punish them with the sword, it is crueler that they condemn the ministry of the Word and have no well-grounded doctrine and suppress the true and in this way seek to subvert the civil order.
In any case the killing of those two monks was horrendous and un Christian and should not have happened