Heresy

As a criminal offense, heresy is the holding or teaching of a belief that a religious or state authority has declared to be a serious departure from established religious law or doctrine, historically prosecuted by secular courts, ecclesiastical courts, or both acting together, with penalties ranging from excommunication to death. Its formal criminalization dates to the Edict of Thessalonica issued in AD 380 by the Roman emperor Theodosius I, which made Christianity the Roman state religion and gave secular authorities a basis to prosecute heresy; within six years, Priscillian became the first Christian condemned as a heretic and executed, put to death with several followers in 386 on related charges of sorcery. Enforcement blurred church and state authority for centuries afterward, most extensively under the Catholic Inquisition, credited with burning some seven thousand people at the stake over nearly seven hundred years; the last person executed by sentence of the Catholic Church for heresy was the Spanish schoolmaster Cayetano Ripoll, in 1826.