The Church gets kind of a bum rap
Last edited Thu Mar 14, 2013, 03:26 AM - Edit history (21)
***THIS IS NOT A RELIGION THREAD***
It is a history thread that is mostly rumminating about the nature and extent of a set of influences on mideval Europe. It is not religion flame-bait or theological argument and doesn't trash hardly anyone except Torqemada, Ferdinand and Isabelle and I guess Cotton Mather.
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It is very easy to trash Catholicism if one fails do take the essential steps of objective analysis... things like subtracting from both sides of the equation, recognizing personal bias (not bigotry or even prejudice, but bias) and comparing apples to apples and such.
For instance, the Catholic Church was not why the middle ages sucked. Really. The pre-Christian Roman Empire was nothing lovely. Nor was Greece... or Carthage... or Persia... or the Norsemen, the Northern Tribes, the peoples of Gaul, Babylon, Ancient Egypt... the Aztecs, fer petes sake... Chacco canyon... whatever.
People are no picnic.
Christianity has the peculiarity of offering an incredibly deep and very attractive spiritual message while having nothing to say about how to run a state. Being a short-term end of the world religion originally, Christianity never gave much thought to statecraft.
Judaism did. Islam would. But Christianity... nope. Render unto Cesar, let the dead bury the dead... Give away your possessions and get right with God 'cause the end is near.
Judaism had statecraft but was not proselytizing, and thus could not sweep over the world. Islam had statecraft and was proselytizing, and demolished Christianity everywhere they met for the better part of a half-millennium.
Christianity was and odd duck... it was aces at appealing to people (the Roman empire killing Christ then eventually turning Christian is impressive!) but not compatible with running military empire top-down. (Of course, the same lack of top-down organization ended up allowing Europe to leap-frog Islam, but that's another story) So the Catholic church was anomalous... a kind of free-standing church/kingdom, in the midst of secular kingdoms, that survived because all kings depended on the Church for their own legitimacy. (Who was the arbiter of the divine in 'divine right of kings'? Aha!)
So no Christian nation could combine church and state, and the Vatican could not conquer everyone... an elegant stand-off.
And compared to other kingdoms (apples to apples) the Church was typically a lot more peaceful and moral.
The Church did not have absolute power. The church could never dictate what Europe would be like, and it is wrong to think that if Europe did X or Y that the church was the cause of X or Y, or even favored X or Y.
Anti-Semitic? Well, the Spanish inquisition sought heretics sometimes for a change of pace, but was primarily a mechanism for stealing the land of Jews who converted rather than leave Spain when ordered to (by secular leaders) in the 1490s. That certainly qualifies!
During the Black Death(s), on the other hand, Europeans murdered Jews on a scale that, in percentage terms (given the lower populations involved) was not entirely unlike the Holocaust. And the Church never favored it. Never allowed it. The Church did what it could to oppose the continent-wide pogrom. Sermons were sent out to be delivered everywhere stating that people attacking the Jews were hell-bound sinners, and that the Jews were not the cause of the plague. The church was ignored by schismatic anti-Jewish movements.
As with Presidents, there were Popes and then there were Popes. There were anti-semitic Popes and Popes who were the only friends in Europe the Jews had. "The Church" was an ever-changing political institution.
And damned either way... were they superstitious or were they atheists? Fanatics or hypocrites? It was a mix of both. The most seemingly Godless Popes (the period around and following the Borgias) financed a lot of what we call the renaissance, so that's fine by me. I prefer the hypocrites to the fanatics.
Take wars. The Church was usually—almost always, really—against them. The doctrine of just war was a great philosophical reigning in of violence, not an expansion of it. But it was usually ignored. (And still is. Just like the many kings involved in the 100 years war, George W. Bush blew off the American Bishops's unjust war nonsense.)
The church would make big threats every time a war got out of hand, but when push came to shove Stalin's question is resonant: "How many divisions does the Pope have?"
If England and France won't end the 100 years war what do you do? Excommunicate both kings? That ends your influence, because most of the people will take their local warlord over the Pope. (See Thomas Moore.)
Here is a fine example—The Church thought tournaments (jousting and such) were grotesque, and outlawed them as best it could. To die fighting in a tournament was, since your involvement was vain and purely voluntary and surely no part of any just war, ruled to be suicide. That meant a ticket straight to Hell.
All knights were chivalrous, with the highest possible devotion to the church, so of course tournaments stopped dead. Not. They didn't even slow down. Nobody cared. Chivalry held that the best way to live was to be in love with a woman other than your wife. (Being in love with your own wife would be unromantic.) The church did not think that was a good thing at all... but nobody cared.
The crusades were usually not a top down thing from the church. (Sometimes, but not most times.) A typical crusade was a way for a secular king to get his own army the hell out of his country because the army raped and pillaged 24/7/365. You did not want an army, even your own, in your own country if you could help it. If there was no European war the army had to go rape and pillage somewhere.
The church would approve a crusade as official for money (they liked money), but if the church said, "No... that's not a holy mission," nobody cared. One of the crusades sacked Constantinople when it was the seat of the eastern Christian church, because it was closer and more convenient than the Holy Land.
The general point here is that the Catholic church has seldom been uniquely or even notably awful when compared with comparable power-institutions at the same time.
Was it backward and primitive? Compared to UC-Berkley, hell yes. Compared to its contemporary secular institutions, though? No, sometimes the church was all that was keeping learning alive. Denying the moons of Jupiter? Dumb move. But the church had kept literacy itself alive... the church had smart people working around the clock working with their minds doing things like classifying plants or trying to reconcile Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and learning. Their devotion to (distinctly non-Catholic) Aristotle was precisely what kept the church wrong on basic physics way too long.
Was it hypocritical about the poor? Yes... but the church still cared more about the poor than almost anyone else. If it were not for religious giving there would have been almost no giving at all.
And so on... Did the church torture people for no good reason? Yup. Did every single other entity of governance in Europe do the same? Yup. Had the pre-Christian Roman empire? Big time. Did people throughout the America's? Sure. Cave-men? Probably.
Of course, in America we are, vis-a-vis the Catholic church, kind of like Britain is vis-a-vis Napoleon. There is something deep in us that says Catholics are suspect. I was raised Catholic but still saw the whole thing as somehow un-American... or non-American. America is not about filigreed robes.
America was founded primarily from a nation (England) that had broken from the church (for some very sketchy reasons) and the early non-Anglicans here were from religions that, in their early forms, were utterly un-Catholic and that were themselves way scarier than Catholicism.
There were Catholics in early America. There were women executed for witchcraft in early America. There is no overlap between those two things. Puritans were scary! (And today most American Catholics accept evolution, since the church accepts it. Can other sects say the same?)
Any brutality, insanity, dogmatic craziness one can imagine was expressed in spades in Lutheranism and Calvinism. Calvin's Geneva was more like Hell than almost anything I've ever read about.
Continental European Protestantism was mostly some people who thought the Church of Rome was too soft. They wanted to "double Guantanamo." (They were religious fanatics, after all.)
But in America the fact that one's vanilla Protestant church used to put women in the stocks for being a "scold," or hang witches, or burn people alive for mystifyingly trivial infractions is disassociated from the present, while Catholicism is still held responsible for the crusades and persecuting Galileo.
Granted, he Catholic church works hard to maintain that vibe of connection with the past, but c'mon... some normal American religions where everyone dresses normal and speaks American handle snakes and say the world is 5,000 years old and beat the gay out of people and say the world is ending quite soon and the good people will fly into the sky... but at least the preacher isn't wearing a dress, so it's normal.
And most white people just voted for a guy who thinks the garden of Eden was in Kansas... but at least he wasn't wearing a dress.
As an un-conflicted atheist I have little sympathy for The church, or any church. It's a crock, to me. But at least Catholicism is the kind of crock that has universities whose law schools produce top-notch lawyers, rather than people who would mount a criminal defense based on the 10th Amendment. (I'm looking at you, Liberty Baptist.)
Catholicism has a track record of usually (not always) being a morally above average European institution. (Yes, that is damning with faint praise. But consider European institutions like, say, Prussian militarism, or the French monarchy... or colonialism. The biggest knock on the Vatican is usually that it failed to stop whatever awful thing Europe was doing.)
I can list the crimes of the church all day long. We all can. But there is a reason that American conservatism has been taken over (at the top levels) by Catholics. Catholicism is waaaaay smarter than conservative protestantism. It is an institution with great respect for intellect. That is dangerous, of course, but stupidity is also dangerous, and harder to talk to.
It has certainly outlived it usefulness, but things could have been even worse without it. It is not obvious to me that pagan Germanic tribes and Vikings would have crafted a more humane or smarter Europe. Perhaps they would have, but it is not obvious.
IMO.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Good and evil are subjective, so saying the RCC is good is just as valid as saying the RCC is evil.
Thoughtful OP, in my opinion. 
