Martin Antonio Del Rio, Anti-Witch Writer of the Netherlands
In 1599, Jesuit Martin Antonio Del Rio wrote a study of witchcraft entitled Disquisitionum magicarum libri VI. This work reached Munich in the spring of 1600 in a Louvain print, and aroused much interest among Bavarian lawyers.
Del Rio was a well-known and well-respected scholar, having published impressive volumes since his teens. In his Disquisitionum he wrote:
To omit to destroy the wicked when you can what is that but to cherish them? To fail to oppose error is to approve it: to fail to defend truth is to oppose it. Those who do so are strengthening the tyranny of the devil in the Church of Christ. By their deeds is the security of the commonweal betrayed. They are accumulating lucre at the cost of the destruction of the community. Their pleasure it is to sleep soundly (in utramque aurem dormire) while the cunning Dragon occupies the whole body; and the poison of apostacy, idolatry and of unspeakable lusts, incredible cruelty and of daily and execrable crimes against those of tender age and against the sustenance of men, to the injury of their fatherland and that of the whole human race and the structure of society--this is gradually spreading throughout the whole Body of Christ. Who would not agree that such are guilty of the greatest possible disservice to the state and to the Church? Who would not hate and destroy them? For, if we can see anything, this is obvious: that impunity makes the witches grow in wickedness and enables them readily to enlist, all the time, more and more accomplices--and nothing do they desire more than to accomplish the constant requirement of the Devil by infecting the part that yet remains sound with the same cancer. By sparing the evil-doer the safety of the innocent is endangered. If this old saying is true of any accusatino it is surely most true of all in this instance. God himself openly declared to the Babylonians by Isaiah that he would never show favour to any land in which witches were spared, but that on the contrary he would extract from it the severest penalties. 'Those two things' he saith 'shall come to thee (Babylon) in a moment in one day, the loss of children and widowhood. They shall come upon thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries and for the great abundance of thine enchantments. Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee. Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth: and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly.'
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Martin Antonio Del Rio, Anti-Witch Writer of the Netherlands copyrighted 1996-1998 to Shantell Powell.