When and how did the Catholic Church have police powers, and how do we answer skeptics who say the church had people killed?
A viewer asks: can you discuss when and how the church had police powers? I often hear from skeptics that the church had people killed, was brutal, etc. It would be good to have an explanation of the real history here.
Answer
Yes, the church did have a police force; those guards at the Vatican in the unusual colored uniforms, the Swiss Guard, are the remnant of it. Here is the history. Rome fell in the fourth century and left a vacuum, and the church, which had survived three centuries of persecution, more or less took over. From then on there was a symbiosis: the pope would not act without the king's approval, and the king would not act without the pope's. God works this way because men are evil, so he uses one against another. He used Babylon against Israel, then Persia against Babylon. That is why we want sovereign nations and not a one world government, because they check each other, the way the nuclear powers deter each other today. Whenever the church got too big for her britches, God brought the Muslims in to punish her, back and forth from about 600 to 1600. The church did enforce her moral and marriage laws with something like a police force, just as the Levites policed the Jews. The Inquisition had the power of the sword, and where the church itself did not act, the pope got the secular government to do it. That is what happened to Giordano Bruno: the church convicted him on doctrine and the secular government burned him at the stake. Reformers were killed. Eventually the church realized this was not her domain, that she should act more like Paul in 1 Corinthians 5, handing a sinner over to the secular authorities rather than wielding the sword herself. You already see the overkill in the Crusades: Catholics led by saints killing people on the way to save Jerusalem, but that is not Christianity. The Papal States became a symbol of the church's temporal power, and once you use land for political and military purposes you become just like the world. So God took it all away, even the Papal States, until all that is left is Vatican City with its guard. And still we got the Vatican bank scandal with mafia money, and Pope John Paul I was probably assassinated because he wanted to stop it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, whether it is the church or the government.