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ORGOGLIO CATTOLICO

Sei dei sette paesi che stavano pianificando di indossare le fascette OneLove per rivendicare i diritti dei gay in Qatar sono storicamente protestanti. Come mai?

IMO: perché hanno la coscienza sporca.

Per esempio, quale altro paese ospitante un mondiale, oltre al Qatar, considerava illegali i rapporti sessuali tra uomini? L'Inghilterra, ovvio. La Francia del 38 era piuttosto conservatrice e l'Italia del 34 era fieramente fascista, ma gli atti omosessuali erano legali da molto tempo in entrambi i paesi, così come nella maggior parte dei paesi latini. Benché Mussolini perseguitasse i gay in vari modi, non è mai arrivato a mettere fuori legge gli atti omosessuali, come accadeva in Gran Bretagna e Germania. Persino nell'Argentina dittatoriale l'omosessualità era consentita. La voglia di rimuovere questo passato rende i paesi protestanti tanto rumorosi e particolarmente fiduciosi su questo tema culturale, almeno se paragoniamo questo chiasso al completo silenzio che avvolge la questione della persecuzione religiosa in Qatar, un paese dove convertirsi al cristianesimo è tecnicamente un reato da pena di morte (*).

Orgoglio cattolico: sii mite nelle condanne ed eviterai buffonesche esibizioni per segnalare la tua inversione ad U e lavarti la coscienza.

(*) Si tratta di crimini e punizioni abbastanza teoriche (un po' come il furto di biciclette da noi). Ma se all'autorità gira male, la norma per procedere ce l'hanno

La grande divisione

Ricorre quest’anno il 500esimo anniversario della riforma protestante, evento capitale nella storia d’occidente.

Bisognerà pur dire due parole. O no?

Parto con la domanda delle domande: ne è valsa la pena?

Chi considera le 95 tesi luterane latrici di verità ultime penserà di sì, per noi cattolici no. Ma qui di seguito escludo la dimensione di fede.

La riforma fu fenomeno sfaccettato, questo rende difficile trattarla: da un lato si trattò di una radicale svolta fondamentalista in ambito cristiano, dall’altro diede risalto alla coscienza del singolo gettando le basi dell’individualismo. Due aspetti all’apparenza inconciliabili ma nei fatti, a quanto pare, conciliati.

In concreto scatenò guerre orribili: quella dei trent’anni (8 milioni di morti), nonché le guerre francesi (3 milioni di morti). Se consideriamo che la Germania all’epoca contava 20 milioni di abitanti e la Francia 15, ci rendiamo conto della carneficina.

Si dice che senza Lutero il malcontento per lo status quo sarebbe comunque esploso perché già bolliva in pentola da tempo.

Puo’ anche darsi, difficile però pensare ad un simile pedaggiodi vite umane!

Salvare la chiesa dalla corruzione papale valeva una simile macelleria?

Ne dubito: proprio la corruzione presente nella chiesa la rendeva paradossalmente più aperta alle riforme, più malleabile.

Corruzione significa essenzialmente disponibilità alla trattativa e alla negoziabilità dei propri valori. L’intransigenza, a quei tempi, allignava altrove, innanzitutto tra i “riformatori”.

La stampa, le nuove tecnologie militari, il rinascimento… la chiesa subodorava tempi nuovi ed era pronta a cambiare qualora l’alternativa non fosse stata posta in termini tanto radicali.

Certo, la fede nella libertà di espressione avrebbe evitato il massacro. Purtroppo nessuno dei giocatori in campo professava valori del genere, inutile allora perdere il proprio tempo fantasticando sul nulla.

La tolleranza poteva funzionare? Difficile: se uno legge Lutero e Calvino si trova di fronte uomini di grande fede, ma anche a due invasati violenti e senza freni.

Spuntata l’arma della tolleranza, forse, la strategia migliore per minimizzare le sofferenze sarebbe stata quella di soffocare nella culla in modo spietato la sedizione luterana, così come era stato fatto con successo in passato per altre eresie fondamentaliste. L’ alternanza incoerente di trattative, doppiogioco e colpi di mano non ha giovato alla causa cattolica, e nemmeno a quella dell’uomo più in generale.

Bisogna anche ammettere che nella guerra dei 30 anni molti protagonisti avevano mire estranee alla religione: il caso più clamoroso è quello che vide la Francia cattolica (del Cardinale Richelieu e di Luigi XIII) schieratasi con i protestanti per meglio combattere il Sacro Romano Impero!

Tuttavia, è anche vero che l’ardore dei combattenti sul campo era di stampo religioso. Difficile pensare a tanta spietatezza senza motivazioni profonde. Il pragmatico non affonda il colpo in quella maniera.

C’è chi afferma che senza riforma non si sarebbe avviata la modernizzazione del continente. Che senza riforma avremmo ancora il monopolio intellettuale della chiesa cattolica.

Anche qui sottoscrivo solo parzialissimamente: dalla riforma all’illuminismo, tanto per dire, passano due secoli. Difficile scorgere un legame così netto tra i due movimenti, se ci aggiungiamo la personalità di molti “ribelli”, la distanza si fa abissale. E poi la chiesa cattolica uscì comunque in buona salute, e con la controriforma tornò persino ai suoi splendori, almeno in Italia, Francia e Spagna.

Più che una religione rivale, sarà l’apatia dei suoi adepti a relegarla in un angolo della storia. Di certo non i protestanti europei, nel frattempo tenuti in vita con la bombola dell’ossigeno dagli stati a cui si sono volontariamente consegnati mani e piedi.

La “riforma senza vittime” dell’apatia sarà l’unica veramente letale per la chiesa di Roma.

I media (a cominciare dalla stampa del ‘400) diffondono nuove idee e creano nuovi interessi. L’informazione esplode, distoglie l’attenzione e svaluta l’autorità (ogni autorità) colpendo al cuore i concetti stessi di “sacro”, di “chiesa” e di “infallibilità”.

Gli zombi del protestantesimo continentale e la melassa populista del cattolicesimo bergogliano si uniscono oggi per fronteggiare un nemico che di fatto li ha già sconfitti da tempo senza versare una goccia di sangue. E’ la comica sorte di due arci-nemici che hanno combattuto a lungo una guerra cruenta e forse evitabile.

In difesa della Chiesa Cattolica SAGGIO

“Dobbiamo imparare dalla storia”, è un mantra che risuona a martello nella testa di tutti noi.

Peccato che per molti “la storia” sia una serie di eventi mai accaduti.

E’ questa osservazione che anima il lavoro di Jonah Goldberg, almeno quello contenuto nel libero militante: The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

Nel suo libro sui cliché dedica un capitolo alla Chiesa Cattolica.

Quando l’apologetica è praticata da un non-cattolico, chissà perché,  diventa molto più interessante.

Nel capitolo si affrontano 4 temi: la riforma protestante, le crociate, la caccia alle streghe e l’inquisizione.

1.

Con l’avvento del terrorismo islamico molti analisti guardavano alla storia lamentando come all’ Islam mancasse cio’ di cui ha beneficiato il cristianesimo: la riforma protestante. Forse costoro non sanno bene cosa fu la riforma protestante.

… 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….

In questo rammarico aleggia il fantasma di un Lutero progressista:

… The idea seems to be that Martin Luther was some sort of moderate, soft-spoken reformer, a champion of tolerance and open inquiry…

In realtà Lutero puntava il dito contro il “modernismo” della CC:

… 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…

Le nuove dottrine intellettuali non gli piacevano affatto:

… “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 innovation …

Sarebbe da ingenui confondere l’idea di Lutero con i mezzi (questi sì moderni) con cui venne diffusa:

… 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…

Lutero sfruttò l’emergere di un’istituzione moderna come lo “stato”, ma anche in questo caso non confondiamo i mezzi con i fini:

… 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…

L’iconoclastia protestante, invece, fu un fenomeno intimamente connesso con la mentalità riformista:

… In riots of puritanical iconoclasm Lutherans and Calvinists burned paintings, smashed statues, and ransacked allegedly corrupt churches…

Lutero era ossessionato dalla “purificazione”:

… 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)…

Se la CC combatté le eresie non pensiamo che gli eretici non si combattessero a vicenda: era un devastante tutti contro tutti.

… 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…

Con questo non si vuol negare il positivo che portò la riforma:

… Without Luther there is no Protestant work ethic and no Scottish Enlightenment and none of the needed reforms within the Catholic Church…

Cio’ non toglie che se ai musulmani i “Luteri” non mancano, ne hanno fin troppi:

… 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… 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… 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…

2.

Veniamo alle crociate. Se nella storia dell’uomo c’è qualcosa di riprovevole queste sono le crociate. Almeno nei libri di storia del buon democratico. E infatti la CC non sa più come scusarsi:

… 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… Even Campus Crusade for Christ opted to change its name to Cru partly because the word crusade has become too radioactive…

Ma gli storici (seri) non sembrano avvalorare questa idea. Bernard Lewis parla delle crociate come di controffensiva limitata, tardiva e inefficace:

… “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…

Thomas Madden parla esplicitamente di guerra difensiva.

… 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.”…

Un conflitto talmente secondario (Gerusalemme era la periferia dell’impero) che il mondo islamico lo ha snobbato nel ricostruire la sua storia, il termine “crociata”, tanto per dire, era sconosciuto.

… At first the larger Muslim world didn’t much care about the Christian reclamation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land… The real fight was in the East, where caliphs were rolling up victory after victory in the old Byzantine Empire… 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)… Crusades period was several centuries in the rearview mirror, and most Muslims considered them one of their many, if minor, victories… “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.”…

Quando la parolina comincia a circolare nel mondo islamico? nell’ottocento, per bollare l’imperialismo europeo (quello vero). Non certo all’epoca delle crociate vere e proprie, che nessuno considerava un atto imperialistico quanto piuttosto un tentativo di difendere i cristiani in terra santa, un tentativo condotto per lo più da persone in buona fede con uno spirito eroico.

…  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…

In sintesi:

… crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.”… The Crusades were launched not as a war of conquest but as a war to save Christians from Muslim persecution and conquest…

La condanna per le crociate puo’ anche esserci ma appare estremamente ridimensionata rispetto a quella usuale:

… 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…

3.

Vaniamo alla caccia alle streghe. La storia comunemente raccontata non quadra e i comuni accusatori della CC dovrebbero rivedere la loro versione dei fatti:

… 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…

Deprecare la caccia alle streghe era una fissa di molti capi nazisti:

… “The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed,” insisted Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the witch-hunting “atrocities” committed by the Catholic Church…

Ma le femministe non sono da meno:

… 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.”…

Recentemente, è stato  il Codice da Vinci ad incarnare bene una sensibilità diffusa intorno al fenomeno:

… 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.”

I fatti:

… 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)—were killed as witches. 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… the Church rejected the book instantly and censured its authors…

Alla CC le streghe interessavano ben poco. Cio’ che interessava era calmare il clima di isteria che si era creato negli ambienti laici:

… 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…

Un’analisi di accusati e accusatori fa luce sul fenomeno. Il populismo delle autorità laiche sale sul banco degli imputati:

…  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… Most witch trials were conducted not by the Church but by the local lords and other nobles at the behest of the mob… Local officials were sometimes reluctant, other times eager to appease the people with a good witch trial… 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… 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!”)…

In merito parecchi equivoci – oggi chiariti – hanno alimentato il pregiudizio:

… 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…

la CC è intervenuta per porre ordine e moderazione in questo “casino laico”. Migliaia di vittime innocenti furono salvate.

… 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… As a rule, the Church did not burn witches or heretics, contrary to popular conception. That’s something the mobs or their lords did…

Inoltre, la caccia alle streghe fu prevalentemente un fenomeno protestante. Dove la CC dominava incontrastata i processi furono minimi, così come durante l’ apogeo  della CC.

… while there were certainly witch trials throughout the Catholic Church’s history, witch hysteria was essentially a product of the Reformation… “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.”… Where the Catholic Church’s authority was unquestioned, there were fewer—or no—witch trials…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.”…

4.

Quanti equivoci sull’Inquisizione! Partiamo col primo: 

… 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… the Medieval Inquisition, the Portuguese Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition, etc. There was also the famous inquisition of Galileo… This too is a blanket term for a series of responses to heretical Christian movements…

Partiamo con l’inquisizione medievale.

Ci si scorda spesso che gli eretici erano puniti dalle autorità laiche. La CC fungeva da perito nel processo.

… 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… 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…

Le pene erano generalmente lievi. La pena di morte era un’esclusiva dell’autorità politica. D’altronde la legittimazione politica derivava dal diritto divino cosicché l’eresia si configurava come una sedizione.

… 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… Capital punishment for heresy was a secular sanction imposed by secular authorities… kings derived their authority by divine right, so heresy was perceived as a threat to their legitimacy…

Anche in questo caso la CC costituì un fattore di moderazione e di rigore nei processi, la sua azione salvò molte vite umane altrimenti destinate al patibolo dall’autorità secolare:

… “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.”…

Se è possibile tirare le somme la sintesi potrebbe essere questa:

… 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 faith… Catholic heretics had the right to a trial. Under communism whole populations did not…

Veniamo ora all’inquisizione spagnola e alle sue leggendarie “torture”. Comunque meno frequenti e meno atroci di quelle praticate nelle prigioni dell’autorità laica:

… 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… A total of 1 percent of the cases ended in execution…

La tortura è una pratica orribile. ma non dimentichiamoci che la sua introduzione costituì una forma di progresso. E poi orribile rispetto a cosa?

… “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…

Una domanda che pochi si pongono: perché mai tanti imputati facevano in modo di farsi trasferire presso le prigioni della CC?

… 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? …

E che dire dell’anti-semitismo spagnolo e del fenomeno dei conversos?

… 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… 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

La vita del conversos non era poi così penosa nella Spagna dell’epoca:

… The conversos—baptized Catholics of Jewish descent—thrived in Spain for nearly a century…

Chi erano i loro nemici?

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” …

Nacquero una serie di teorie complottiste circa la falsità di queste conversioni. La verità era ben diversa:

… “The vast majority of conversos were good Catholics who simply took pride in their Jewish heritage…

Il motore della persecuzione furono la regina Isabella e il re Ferdinando, non certo il Vaticano che, anzi, fu ripetutamente accusato dalla corona per il poco vigore nella campagna inquisitoria:

… 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 Vatican… 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…

Conclusione:

… 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…

Prima di chiudere del tutto con l’inquisizione, due parole sul rapporto scienza e fede. Innanzitutto l’eterna questione “Galileo”.

Galileo Galileo confermò che Copernico aveva ragione: la terra non stava al centro dell’universo.

John Bargh, uno scienziato di Yale, considera questa tesi scioccante per le autorità ecclesiastiche. Wikipedia, in modo un po’ meno autorevole, conferma.

Difficile però che le cose stessero in questi termini, innanzitutto per un motivo…

… The Church did not consider the “center of the universe” to be a place of privilege. That is a modern conceit. Before Copernicus the consensus among Western scientists and theologians was, in accordance with Aristotle, that the Earth was either at, or was, the anal aperture of the universe, literally…

Dennis R. Danielson è uno studioso che ha ricostruito il mito per cui la Chiesa ci tenesse a collocare la terra “al centro dell’universo”, risale allo scrittore Cyrano de Bergerac…

… “the insupportable arrogance of Mankinde, which fancies, [sic] that Nature was only created to serve it.”… In 1686, the French writer Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle hailed Copernicus for taking the Earth and throwing it “out of the center of the World.” According to de Fontenelle, Copernicus sought to “abate the Vanity of men who had thrust themselves into the chief place of the Universe.”…

Sta di fatto che la CC non adottò l’ipotesi Copernicana perché la sua scienza era debole, non per fantasie legate alla posizione privilegiata che avrebbe dovuto avere la terra. Lo stesso fu per Galileo.

In questa vicenda c’è solo un’arroganza…

… The real arrogance here is on the part of those who see the past as populated with unsophisticated bumpkins, as if ignorance of scientific truth is the same thing as stupidity…

E se qualcuno tra 100 anni dirà di noi: “ma guarda quegli idioti che non riconoscevano l’esistenza della vita su Marte”, come andrà giudicato? Come un idiota, naturalmente.

Sul mito della “terra piatta” la fallacia si ripete. E’ semplicemente non vero che la cristianità medievale insegnava queste cose.

Ma qui il mito da dove origina?…

… This myth, like many others discussed later in this book, stems from the biases of Protestant historians in the nineteenth century, who were eager to paint the Catholic Church as a giant wet blanket on scientific and human progress…

Mitologica anche la storiella delle torture subite da Galileo. Si, conobbe la cella (per ben 3 giorni) ma si trattava praticamente di un appartamento e non fu certo torturato.

Ma se non era affare teologico, chi spinse per colpire Galileo in modo tanto duro?

… clamored for the Church to silence and punish Galileo were his jealous, lesser, scientific colleagues…Rivalry, jealousy, and vindictiveness from other scientists and philosophers…

Se l’accanimento contro Galileo proveniva dai suoi colleghi, dobbiamo forse dire che la scienza è un ostacolo alla scienza? Assurdo.

Venendo al merito, le prove portate da Galileo a supporto della sua ipotesi erano oggettivamente debolucce. Come le avrebbe giudicate uno scienziato contemporaneo?

Dipende dalla mentalità dello scienziato in questione.

Secondo Paul Feyerabend, una mentalità conservatrice come quella di Einstein le avrebbe respinte come insufficienti; una mentalità più avventurosa come quella di Niels Bohr le avrebbe prese in considerazione.

A questo punto giova ricordare che Galileo non si limitava a presentare i suoi studi e le sue conclusioni (Copernico era già insegnato nelle università cattoliche, un Galileo umile avrebbe avuto gli stessi onori). Si presentava invece come molto confidente, chiedeva di rettificare i testi sacri e rinunciava a considerare la sua teoria una semplice “ipotesi in lizza”.

Un altro mito senza fondamenta è quello che considera Giordano Bruno il primo martire della scienza.

Giordano Bruno fece una brutta fine, ma non fu certo per la sua opera scientifica…

… it was because he was an unrepentant theological heretic who denied the virgin birth and thought Jesus was a clever magician…

Possiamo ben dire che né Galileo, né Bruno furono mai puniti per le loro idee intorno all’astronomia.

Bruno era un eretico e – se proprio vogliamo fare un parallelo con la modernità – l’eresia puo’ essere assimilata semmai al terrorismo destabilizzante. link link

Quando una società si regge sulla fede, dire (senza avere prove concrete) che tutto è una “magia” significa destabilizzarla alle fondamenta. Se ripetutamente avvisati, si insiste pubblicamente e in tono provocatorio con questo atteggiamento, si possono anche scatenare certe conseguenze.

***

Possiamo tirare una conclusione più generale intorno alla CC? Jonah Goldberg ci prova:

… 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…

A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the "Secularization" of Europe di Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone

A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the "Secularization" of Europe di Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone

• tesi: i problemi sono nell offerta + che nella domanda religiosa
• corollario: nn possiamo parlare di secolarizzazione
• l europa nn è secolarizzata le preferenze religiose sono stabili
• cocncentrarsi sulle imprese religiose anzichè sui consumatori di religione
• ...
• definizione di religione: interesse x le cose ultime postulando il sopranaturale
• 1 il monopolio di una religione dipende dall intervento statale
• 2 senza monopolio fiorisce il pluralismo e la specializzazione
• 3 quanto + il pluralismo si afferma tanto più la religiosità si propaga
• 4 la comp. garantisce anche la laicità del paese
• 5 deregolamentare = laicizzare... e evangelizzare
• ...
• Cosa incide sulla religuosità di un popolo? the degree of regulation of religious economies
• Cosa conta? we stress supply-side weaknesses (ovvero: i preti)... rather than a lack of individual religious demand.
• Dopo i test: the results, suggest that the concept of secularization be dropped for lack of cases to which it could apply.
• There also has been nearly universal agreement that Europe's secularization represented the future of all societies
• Anthony F. C. Wallace: The evolutionary future of religion is extinction.
• secularization is an absorbing state - that once achieved it is irreversible,
• L'anomalia: the enormous vigor of religion in the United States causes great difficulty. "deviant case."
• Few have been willing to accept Tocqueville's (1956: 319) elegant solution that the secularization theory is simply wrong
• We dispute the claim that any European nation is very secularized.
• what is needed is not a theory of the decline or decay of reli- gion, but of religious change,
• ethnic diversity is the source of America's religious vitality... high levels of religious vitality in other immigrant based societies
• emphasis on the changing behavior of religious firms rather than on the changing attitudes of religious consumers
• A THEORY OF RELIGIOUS MOBILIZATION
• Past discussions of secularization usually postulate a decline in the demand
• consumers in a mod- ern, enlightened age no longer find a need for faith
• What happens when only a few, lazy re- ligious firms confront the potential religious consumer?
• Scandinavia, for instance, reflect weak demand primarily, or an unattractive product,
• Definizione di religione. Religion is any system of beliefs and practices concerned with ultimate mean- ing that assumes the existence of the supernatural.
• Prop. 1: The capacity of a single religious firm to monopolize a religious econ- omy depends upon the degree to which the state uses coercive force to regulate the re- ligious economy.
• Prop. 2: To the degree that a religious economy is unregulated, it will tend to be very pluralistic.
• Prop. 3: To the degree that a religious economy is pluralistic, firms will spe- cialize.... the medieval church was surrounded by heresy and dissent.
• Prop. 4: To the degree that a religious economy is competitive and pluralistic, overall levels of religious participation will tend to be high.
• Un esempio di monopolio. Church of England in particular, Adam Smith noted their lack of "exertion" and "zeal":
• Prop. 5: To the degree that a religious firm achieves a monopoly      it will seek to exert its influence over other institutions and thus the society will be sacralized. Abbondano... public political occasions and ceremonies.... Close ties between religion and politics
• Prop. 6: To the degree that deregulation occurs in a previously highly regulated religious economy, the society will be desacralized.
• Prop. 7: The relationship between the degree of regulation of the religious econ- omy and start-up costs for new religious organizations is curvilinear - declining as the state exerts less coercion on behalf of a monopoly firm, but rising again as fully developed pluralism produces a crowded marketplace of effective and successful firms.
• There are two rather independent sources of start-up costs that new religious firms must overcome. The first stems from repression.... in seguito a... complaints of heresy
• EUROPE'S REGULATED AND MONOPOLIZED RELIGIOUS ECONOMIES
• Catholic "Monopolies"
• Writing in 1882, William F. Bainbridge:........."the police detectives of Pius IX searched all our baggage to keep us from taking a Bible into the Holy City"....
• as recently as the 1970s, only Catholic priests could perform valid religious marriage services in Italy and Protestants could not
• Italian law still specifies that criminal offenses committed against Catholic clergy are "aggravated,"
• The government-owned radio and television services broadcast many hours of Catholic programming weekly.
• On October 30, 1981, the Belgian government fmally withdrew its absolute ban on the transportation of Jehovah's Witnesses' publications, including Bibles, by the railroad
• Portugal routinely confiscated Bibles and tracts from them... "to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses . . . was dangerous and even subversive.
• In January 1991, Portugal amended a law that permitted only Catholics to teach religion,
• In 1992 the Spanish government extended tax exempt status to a federation of evangelical Protestant groups... However, these new rights were not extended to Protestant groups that were not part of the federation, nor to non-Christians
• Protestant "Monopolies"
• In most of Europe's Protestant nations the state continues to offer "free" religion - or at least religion that the consumer already has paid for through taxes
• Swedish Lutheranism epitomizes the state church syndrome. Since its inception, the Church of Sweden has served as an organ of the state.
• the King, as head of the Church, names the archbishop... Swedish citizens obtain automatic membership
• Until 1862 all Swedish citizens were required by law to attend church at least once a year.
• Even today, when only two percent of Swedes attend the Church's Sunday services in any given week... social pressures are such that 90% retain official church membership and 80% have their children baptized and confirmed in the Church
• the Church runs on tax funds.
• Tax money pays the salaries of the Lutheran clergy... Swedish clergy are well paid and have civil service job security...
• Direct contributions and payments from worshippers amount to almost nothing.
• Not surprisingly, the Church of Sweden suffers from high costs and low productivity.
• One might suppose that Sweden's Social Democratic Party would have managed by now to dismantle or disestablish the Church... However, after coming to power in the 1930s the socialists became supporters of continued establishment.
• David Martin (1978: 23) has argued that Lutheran State Churches are more subject to the state than the Catholic church and for that reason adapt themselves more rapidly to changes in the character of the state....
• In fact, many Swedish clergy became strong supporters of state socialism.
• Members of parish boards and the church council are elected more for their political positions and convic- tions than for their religious faith.... Indeed, for some years Sweden's Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs was Alva Myrdal, wife of Gunnar Myrdal and herself a famous leftist economist and nonbeliever.
• commission to compose a new translation of the New Testament for "general cultural reasons"
• However, the in- difference of the Lutheran clergy does not extend to potential competitors.
• Protestant groups often find it difficult to get the proper permits to qualify a building
• most Swedes in church on any Sunday at- tend the free churches - which often turn out 70% of their members
• Peter Lodberg (1989: 7), General Secretary of the Ecumenical Council in Denmark, noted that ......"Parliament still has the abso- lute power in the Administration of the National Church [the Evangelical Lutheran Church]."... Parliament had passed a law authorizing fe- male pastors... It is characteristic that this question was not seen as a matter of the inner life of the church, but as some- thing concerning the administrative system of the National Church, that is, it was regarded as being an is- sue for Parliament rather than the bishops.
• .QUANTIFYING RELIGIOUS REGULATION
• six-item scale: "whether or not (1) there is a single, offlcially designated state church; (2) there is official state recognition of some de- nominations but not others; (3) the state appoints or approves the appointment of church leaders; (4) the state directly pays church personnel salaries; (5) there is a system of ecclesi- astical tax collection; (6) the state directly subsidizes, beyond mere tax breaks, the operat- ing, maintenance, or capital expenses for churches."
• Those nations that scored zero, as having unregulated religious economies, were Australia, Canada, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. France received a score of one. Spain and Austria were scored two. Belgium, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, and West Germany were scored three. Norway and Denmark scored five. Sweden and Finland scored six... general lack of free-market religious economies in Europe.
• The elimination of legal ties between church and state is a major step toward a free market religious economy
• PRELIMINARY TESTS OF THE THEORY
• (Iannaccone, 1991). Pluralism was measured with a classic index of market concentration... rates of weekly church attendance operationalized religious participation. Regression results proved very strong, with pluralism accounting for more than 90% of the variation in church attend... Moreover, the United States is not a deviant case, but lies close to the regression line
• A second test of the theory focused on Catholicism (Stark 1992)... the paper tested the proposition that the level of commitment of the average Catholic varies across nations inversely to the proportion of Catholics in the population. That is, the Catholic Church will be more effective in mobiliz- ing its members where it is confronted
• Other research had demonstrated the validity of the number of priests per 10,000 nominal Catholics as a measure of member commitment
• A third test...(Chaves and Cann 1992)...regulation strongly predicted church attendance rates: The more regulation, the less attendance.
• .Finke and Stark (1988) found a very strong re- lationship between religious diversity (measured by the Herfindahl Index) and rates of church membership.
• Deane, and Blau (1991) used religious census data from early in the century to examine pluralism and church membership rates for the coun- ties of the United States, and claimed to have discovered support for the traditional position that pluralism harms religious commitment.... difetto: farmers often cross county boundaries to attend church.
• A third study, by Hamberg and Pettersson, included in this issue, is based on 284 mu- nicipalities of Sweden and also uses the Herfindahl Index... huge effects on rates of at- tendance. This study is of particular interest because the low levels of church attendance and the quite limited pluralism
• Finally, a study based on 198 nations found a huge, positive effect of pluralism on rates of religious conversion or religious switching (Duke, Johnson, and Duke 1993).
• C'è chi interpreya male i tisultati... Frank J. Lechner (1991: 1111)... revivals and innovation are indeed to be expected. But nothing similar is to be found in most Western European countries.
• However, rather than pursue this line of reasoning by asking what might happen if Euro- pean religious economies were deregulated so that they could more closely approximate the American situation, Lechner was content to have thus "explained" American exceptionalism
• Problemone. How can a supply-side approach account for the powerful religious monopolies of times past? 
• MASS PIETY IN SACRALIZED SOCIETIES
• Ortodossia. religion has crumbled since medieval times
• Europe's "Age of Faith" constitutes the primary benchmark against which scholars measure modern secularization.
• historians have assembled evidence that the medieval masses were, in fact, remarkably irreligious, at least in terms of religious participation
• Andrew Greeley (forthcoming) has summarized these historical conclu- sions with characteristic succinctness:.......... There is no reason to believe that the peasant masses of Europe were ever very devout Christians, not in the sense that we usually mean when we use these words. There could be no deChristianization as the term is normally used because there was never any Christianization in the first place. Christian Europe never existed......
• Massa ed elites. The celebrated medieval piety might have characterized the nobility,
• peasants were simple spirit worshippers whose folklore included some Christian content.
• Jane Schneider (1990) described the religion of medieval Europe as "animism," noting that Christian saints
• Competizione tra santi.
• peasants were essentially ignored by the medieval Church which, according to Greeley (forthcoming), lacked the resources "and perhaps the motivation to catechize
• Paul Johnson... The truth is that the Church tended to be hostile to the peasants. There were very few peasant saints. Medieval clerical writers emphasize the bestiality, violence and avarice of the peasant....
• Max Weber (1961: 1139) also noted that "the churches of the Middle Ages" held an "ex- tremely derogatory" attitude towards the peasants.
• Rosalind and Christopher Brooke...typical church to be "a small box with a tiny chancel, the whole being no larger than a moderately large living room in a modern house." The Brookes emphasize the intimacy this made possible between priest and parishioners during mass, but these tiny churches are also indicative of widespread indifference.
• Keith Thomas (1971: 159)... "it is problematical as to whether cer- tain sections of the population [of Britain] at this time had any religion at all"
• Comportamento a messa... "members of the popu- lation jostled for pews, nudged their neighbours, hawked and spat, knitted, made coarse re- marks, told jokes, fell asleep, and even let off guns" (Thomas 1971: 161)... a man...who was charged with misbehaving...after his "most loathsome farting, striking, and scoffing speeches"...
• Ignoranza. In 1551 the Bishop of Gloucester systematically tested his diocesan clergy. Of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments and 27 did not know the author of the Lord's Prayer
• Archbishop Giovanni Bovio, of the Brindisi-Oria... most of his priests "could barely read and could not understand Latin"... the majority kept concubines,
• Peter Laslett (1965) reported that only 125 of 400 adults in a particular English village took Easter com- munion late in the eighteenth century.
• If we use 1800 as the benchmark, then church membership in Britain is substantially higher today. In 1800 there were a total of 1,230,000 church members (Protestant dissenters and Catholics, as well as Anglicans) from a population of 10,686,000 (England, Scotland, and Wales). That comes to 11.5% of the population. In 1850 there were 3,423,000 church mem- bers, or 16.7% of the population. The 1900 church membership rate was 18.6% (calculated from Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley 1977 and Mitchell 1962). In 1980, the church membership rate was 15.2 - a decline, but hardly a precipitous
• There is solid evidence that less than a third of the Irish attended mass in 1840... The celebrated Irish piety - with mass attendance hovering around 90% arose subsequent to the Potato Famine when the Church became the primary organizational vehicle for Irish na- tionalism resisting external domination.
• Usa. Fewer than 20% of the inhabitants.of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts belonged to a church... (Stark and Finke 1988).
• SUBJECTIVE RELIGION AND POTENTLIAL DEMAND
• Medioevo soggettivo: ...magic and animism
• religious tendencies as representing a potential demand for organized religion in these societies - potential in the sense that it awaited activation by aggressive suppliers.
• equal force today. That is, the secularization thesis seems strong when measured in terms of par- ticipation in organized religion, but it seems false when religion is measured subjectively.
• Iceland has often been proposed as the most secularized nation on earth... church attendance is extremely low... sexual norms are very liberal
• Nevertheless, William Swatos (1984) reported high levels of in-the-home religion in Iceland today,... when asked "Independently of whether you go to church or not, would you say you are a religious person?" 66% of Icelanders say "yes."... only 2% say they are "convinced" atheists.... Indeed, these totals are not so dif- ferent from those for the United States... most people believe in life after death,
• In our judgment these data fully justify the supply-side interpretation of Northern Europe's low levels of religious participation.
• PROTESTANT GROWTH IN LATIN AMERICA
• Il libro. David Stoll's Is Latin America Turning Protestant?
• Until these books were published, the steady and rapid growth of pluralism in Latin America and the successful entry of highly competitive firms, had gone largely unnoticed in scholarly circles... scholarly world assumed that such changes were impossible.
• Martin and Stoll deserve great credit, their books were not all that timely.
• Given the lag time involved in the scholarly discovery of the religious reshaping of Latin America, it would not seem premature today to begin assessing the possibility of the rise of highly pluralistic European religious economies,
• THE CHURCHING OF EUROPE
• there has been a substantial allocation of missionaries and mission resources from North America to Europe.
• Jehovah's Witnesses grew by 72% in Europe from 1980 through 1992,
• Moreover, Europe's fate does not await religious instruction from North America. Locally led evangelical Protestant movements are growing all across Europe.
• HOW RELIGIOUS ARE 'RELIGIOUS' SOCIETIES?
• if full-blown pluralism develops in Europe, how religious could we expect it to become?
• Americans who actually belong to a specific church congregation...has hovered around 65%... Perhaps that is about the ceiling under conditions of modern living. Il resto religione fai da te.

continua