21 THE CATHOLIC CHURCHRead more at location 4006
Note: 1 miti sulla riforma protestante...ml contro la modernità la razionalità la bellezza nella chiesa... il fondamentalismo... iconoclastia talebana 2 crociate...una guerra difensiva...una guerra xsa... la parola crociata x un musulmano... l ipicrisia cristiana la schiettezza islamica 3 caccia alle streghe...cc disinteressata intervenne x frenare un isteria laica e democratica (signorotti e popolo)... salvate migliaia di vittime innocenti... un fenomeno della riforma... 4 inquisizione... medievale: fenomeno laico e democratico... la chiesa chiamata come perito... proscioglimento e mitezza delle pene... i re erano tali x diritto divino e l eretico delegittimava... spagnola: tortura in 2% dei casi meno che nei tribunali laici 1% finito in condanna... i criminali comuni si professavano eretici... i conversos... fatto grave con scuse ma in prima fila ci stava il re nn il vaticano... cfr il tasso delle assoluzooni tra i.cristiana e i. comunista si accusa l cc di essere scettica con le novità proprio quando si predica lo scetticismo Edit
For the conservative, a “tradition of existence” can be a strong defense. Like sunken ships that over time become overgrown reefs for teeming colonies of sea life, some things increase in value simply by being around long enough. Social capital has a compound interest rate all its own. But old things also attract old barnacles, hard to remove and easy to confuse with the structure itself. So it is with a slew of untruths that have evolved into defining clichés of our age.Read more at location 4023
Sometimes simple benign ignorance is to blame, sometimes something more malignant.Read more at location 4028
Everyone likes to say that we must learn from history, but that’s difficult to do when the history you’re learning from didn’t happen.Read more at location 4030
Since September 11, calls for a “Muslim Martin Luther” to reform the Islamic world can be heard with metronomic regularity. In Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Martin Kramer’s brilliant indictment of the academic establishment, he notes that scholars of the Arab and Muslim world “were so preoccupied with ‘Muslim Martin Luthers’ that they never got around to producing a single serious analysis of bin Laden and his indictment of America” prior to 9/11.Read more at location 4032
The idea seems to be that Martin Luther was some sort of moderate, soft-spoken reformer, a champion of tolerance and open inquiry.Read more at location 4043
He objected that the Church was too “worldly,” too corrupt, too modern, technological, rational, and intellectual. “Luther despised both intellectualism and good works,” argued Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, though that might be overstating it.Read more at location 4049
“Before, man could be saved sola fide, by faith alone.”2 Luther was even skeptical of philosophical scholasticism, believing it was tainted by the paganism of the Greeks and Romans. He loathed religious innovationRead more at location 4051
Just because the Reformation was modernizing doesn’t mean the reformers saw themselves as modernizers. In fact, much of the Reformation simply seems modernizing because it was carried aloft by “modern” trends. For example, Luther’s revolution may not have taken root had he not opted to address his fellow Germans in their native tongue rather than in Latin. And had the printing press not existed, it’s doubtful Protestantism would have spread so rapidly.Read more at location 4056
Luther and his fellow theological revolutionaries arrived—and not entirely by coincidence—as the nation-state was emerging as the primary political unit of European society.Read more at location 4059
In riots of puritanical iconoclasm Lutherans and Calvinists burned paintings, smashed statues, and ransacked allegedly corrupt churches.Read more at location 4065
Protestants sought to cleanse and purge Europe of the worldly excesses and corrupt practices (including graven images) of the Catholic Church. Theocratic regimes, morals police, executions, terror—these were all tools used by various forces of Protestantism during the early Reformation (and, in fairness, the Catholic Church often gave as good as it got).Read more at location 4069
Catholic Church saw early reformers as heretics. But the heretics believed other dissenting reformers were heretics, too. Calvinists attacked Zwinglians, Zwinglians drowned Anabaptists, Anabaptists put saran wrap on the toilet bowls of Calvinists.Read more at location 4072
Without Luther there is no Protestant work ethic and no Scottish Enlightenment and none of the needed reforms within the Catholic Church.Read more at location 4074
Those yearning for a “Muslim Martin Luther” don’t realize there are Muslim Martin Luthers all over the place, and they’ve been fomenting religious oppression and cruelty in the Middle East and terrorism abroad for generations now.Read more at location 4079
The new Islamic Puritans wanted to restore Islam to its glory days, to a past that probably never existed. The Salafists seek a return to the Islam that existed during the first three generations after Muhammed.Read more at location 4082
Salafists, Taliban, and Wahhabis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are roughly—and only roughly—analogous to the Calvinists, Lutherans, and Zwinglians (not necessarily in that order) of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Read more at location 4084
Crusades belong alongside the slaughter of the Indians, slavery, and disco in the long line of Western sins? After all, it’s been in the papers for a while. In 1999, Muslim leaders demanded that Pope John Paul II apologize for the Crusades.Read more at location 4114
Even Campus Crusade for Christ opted to change its name to Cru partly because the word crusade has become too radioactive.Read more at location 4119
“The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis,Read more at location 4125
Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”Read more at location 4128
At first the larger Muslim world didn’t much care about the Christian reclamation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.Read more at location 4130
The real fight was in the East, where caliphs were rolling up victory after victory in the old Byzantine Empire.Read more at location 4133
In 1291, the Muslims expelled the last of the crusaders, and all remaining Christians and Jews in the Islamic world lived as second-class citizens (though often better than Muslims or Jews might have in many parts of Christendom).Read more at location 4133
Crusades period was several centuries in the rearview mirror, and most Muslims considered them one of their many, if minor, victories.Read more at location 4138
“In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period,” writes Lewis, “there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called ‘Franks’ or ‘infidels.’ The words ‘Crusade’ and ‘crusader’ simply do not occur.”Read more at location 4139
the word only starts to gain wide currency in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, when Western notions of imperialism seep into the Muslim mind. And that’s the irony. In the nineteenth century Europeans (and Americans) invoked the Crusades to justify their imperialist agenda. When imperialism fell into disrepute in the twentieth century, the Crusades fell with it. But the idea that twelfth-century Muslims—or even eighteenth-century Muslims—saw the Crusades as European imperial aggression is nonsense.Read more at location 4141
crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.”Read more at location 4148
The Crusades were launched not as a war of conquest but as a war to save Christians from Muslim persecution and conquest.Read more at location 4151
one can single out Christianity for its hypocrisy, since the crusaders at times violated their ideals of love, forgiveness, and charity, while Islam was under no such restraint.Read more at location 4153
Leading textbooks continue to describe the Crusades as the dawn of Western colonialism and imperialism rather than an effort to beat back Eastern colonialism and imperialism.Read more at location 4155
Joseph McCarthy was a bully and an often irresponsible loudmouth. But he was right about a very important point: There were Communists in our midst working to undermine America.Read more at location 4179
what is clear beyond any doubt is that the fantasies of feminists, atheists, and Wiccan propagandists (which is not to say all Wiccans), anti-Catholic bigots, Hollywood screenwriters, and some leading theorists of the Third Reich are all staggeringly wrong.Read more at location 4185
“The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed,” insisted Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler.11 Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the witch-hunting “atrocities” committed by the Catholic Church.Read more at location 4188
Coming from a different perspective, in her Revolution from Within Gloria Steinem laments the “killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity.”Read more at location 4192
The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. “Malleus Maleficarum”—or The Witches’ Hammer—indoctrinated the world to “the dangers of freethinking women” and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed “witches” by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.”Read more at location 4195
For the record, the best, most scholarly estimates are that somewhere around forty-five thousand people—not five million, and not just women (in Iceland, 90 percent of the witches were men)15—were killed as witches.16 The Malleus Maleficarum, primarily written in 1486 by Heinrich Kraimer, a Dominican inquisitor, was purported to be the essential guidebook to identifying, trying, torturing, and killing witches.Read more at location 4204
Catholic Church never much cared about witches, and for the most part intervened in the business of trying witches—and other alleged heretics—in order to halt bloodshed and hysteria by secular authorities and the laypeople of Europe.Read more at location 4209
It turns out that the most irresponsible parties in the persecution of alleged witches were not Catholic officials but neighbors of the accused, followed closely by ignorant secular authorities. Women were just as likely to turn in other women for witchcraft as men, and victims were not particularly likely to be folk healers, midwives, or keepers of some ancient tradition.Read more at location 4212
Most witch trials were conducted not by the Church but by the local lords and other nobles at the behest of the mob.Read more at location 4218
Witch trial documents often recorded a sentence “by inquisition,” which simply meant “inquiry” or “investigation,” but subsequent historians assumed it meant a capital-I Inquisition sanctioned by the Church.Read more at location 4219
Local officials were sometimes reluctant, other times eager to appease the people with a good witch trial.Read more at location 4221
The problem was that the nobles were often just as ignorant and backward as the mob yelling “burn her!” They were reliably ill equipped to handle such cases.Read more at location 4222
In this, the witch trial in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is dismayingly accurate (“If she weighs the same as a duck… she’s made of wood!”).Read more at location 4224
It was against this backdrop that the Church felt it had to intercede, to bring order, reason, and an end to such spectacles. The Church saved thousands of innocent people from horrific sentences by secular authorities.Read more at location 4225
As a rule, the Church did not burn witches or heretics, contrary to popular conception. That’s something the mobs or their lords did.Read more at location 4227
while there were certainly witch trials throughout the Catholic Church’s history, witch hysteria was essentially a product of the Reformation.Read more at location 4228
“it was those areas with the best-developed [Catholic] inquisitions that stopped the hysteria in its tracks. In Spain and Italy, trained inquisitors investigated charges of witches’ sabbaths and baby roasting and found them to be baseless. Elsewhere, particularly in Germany, secular or religious courts burned witches by the thousands.”Read more at location 4231
Where the Catholic Church’s authority was unquestioned, there were fewer—or no—witch trials.Read more at location 4234
When the Church was at the height of its power (11th–14th centuries) very few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe’s indisputable moral authority.”Read more at location 4241
The first misconception is that there was a single thing called the Inquisition. In fact, there were numerous individual inquisitions in countless countries over several centuries.Read more at location 4248
the Medieval Inquisition, the Portuguese Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition, etc. There was also the famous inquisition of GalileoRead more at location 4253
This too is a blanket term for a series of responses to heretical Christian movementsRead more at location 4254
It was the secular authorities who punished heresy with death, and it was the people themselves who did most of the rounding up of heretics.Read more at location 4256
Local lords, clerks, and bureaucrats had no idea how to determine whether someone was a heretic, unless of course the heretic made things extremely easy for the official by saying something like, “Hey, I am a heretic!” or driving a mule cart with a satan is my Co-pilot! bumper sticker. That’s why the Church was called in to provide expert advice on the question, like a theological CSI team.Read more at location 4258
Most accusations of heresy under the Medieval Inquisition ended in either acquittal or a suspended sentence. Persons found guilty of “grave error” were for the most part permitted to confess their sins,Read more at location 4261
Capital punishment for heresy was a secular sanction imposed by secular authoritiesRead more at location 4267
kings derived their authority by divine right, so heresy was perceived as a threat to their legitimacyRead more at location 4269
“The simple fact,” writes Madden, “is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.”Read more at location 4270
There was torture in the Spanish Inquisition, though surprisingly little—indeed, considerably less torture than in secular jails. In “only” 2 percent of the cases under review of the Spanish Inquisition was torture employed.Read more at location 4280
“Abhorrent compared to what?” The practices of the Muslims? The monarchies of Europe? The traditions of Asia or Africa? Such barbaric practices were a staple for roughly 98 percent of human history, and the fact that we have moved beyond them today is a thing to celebrate.Read more at location 4285
why did some criminals profess their own heresy just so they could be transferred from the far crueler secular prisons to those of the Church?Read more at location 4289
No Jews were tortured in the Spanish Inquisition. Open Jews had nothing to fear from it whatsoever. The issue to be decided by the Inquisition was whether conversos (and Moriscos, i.e., converted Muslims) were in fact Catholics.Read more at location 4292
The ancient madness of Jew hatred arrived in Spain later than in most European lands (as a generalization, Jews have always been treated better in the Latin countries of southern Europe than in the north or east), but when it did break out it was particularly virulent. Waves of anti-Jewish hysteria erupted across the country, sometimes fueled by various kings or local Church leaders, sometimes against their wishes. Jewish quarters suffered murderous pogroms. Jews were told they must convert or leave the country.Read more at location 4295
The conversos—baptized Catholics of Jewish descent—thrived in Spain for nearly a century.Read more at location 4300
Their success was resented both by the “Old Christians” as well as by the Jews who had refused to convert in the first place. Both groups fueled vicious conspiracy theories about conversos being “secret Jews”Read more at location 4304
“The vast majority of conversos were good Catholics who simply took pride in their Jewish heritage.Read more at location 4307
Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand persuaded the Vatican to sanction an inquisition into the status of the conversos, giving birth to the Spanish Inquisition. However, the whole enterprise was ultimately run under the authority of the crown, not the VaticanRead more at location 4310
It was not a proud or honorable moment for European Christianity or the Church—a fact the Vatican has never denied and for which it has formally apologized. Ferdinand, now utterly ensorcelled by anti-Semitic fervor, replied that the pope had been bribed with converso blood money. He and Isabella appointed Tomas de Torquemada to oversee the Inquisition.Read more at location 4320
Church’s had indelibly sunk in. Over the course of the 350-year Spanish Inquisition some four thousand souls were put to the stake. It is worth noting that as horrible as this chapter of human history is, it is not nearly so horrible as portrayed by centuries of propagandists—first aided by the invention and spread of the printing press in the Protestant North, later by philosophes, secular humanists, atheists, and various flavors of socialists.Read more at location 4325
The Church was intolerant of heresy to be sure, as one would expect of a church, but the exoneration rate of the Inquisitions is a monument to human decency and restraint compared to the inquisitions of the Communist world, which consigned men and populations alike to miserable deaths based on the diktats of a secular faithRead more at location 4355
Catholic heretics had the right to a trial. Under communism whole populations did not.Read more at location 4358
Where the Church was strong, civilization was strengthened. Where the Church was weak or absent—at least prior to the Reformation—mankind was more likely to operate according to its more barbaric default settings.Read more at location 4388
Church survived not because it was conniving and mercenary but because good men who believed more than they knew did their best to light the darkness
