<< gave me A Woman Rides the Beast by Dave Hunt to read >>
Just as the book was being published, Jimmy Akin wrote a reply in This Rock to the main premise in that book: that the Catholic Church is the “Whore of Babylon” in Revelation. Once that premise falls, the whole book for the most part falls. See these articles if you haven’t already
Hunting the Whore of Babylon
More on the Whore
Hunt relies primarily on the following sources (check his endnotes):
Hasler for his history of Vatican Council I
answered by
Cuthbert Butler’s scholarly history of same
von Dollinger for papal infallibility
answered by
Dom John Chapman and
B.C. Butler
Peter De Rosa’s book Vicars of Christ for early papacy
also answered by
Dom John Chapman
Guenter Lewey’s book Catholic Church and Nazi Germany for his history of WWII, Pius XII, and Holocaust is answered by any number of recent books, especially Ron Rychlak who’s been on EWTN and CA Live, check out
these articles at EWTN
For the Inquisition(s), Hunt relies on various sources, especially Canon Lorente, an unreliable “anti-cleric”, answered by Henry Kamen or Edward Peters books on the Inquisition(s)
On the bad popes, there are many books that are quite a bit more fair than Hunt (he relies on De Rosa here), such as “The Bad Popes” by Chamberlin, or the more recent “Saints and Sinners” by Duffy, but there’s no need to whitewash the history since Jesus chose Judas to be an apostle, etc.
All his sources (with the exception of Lewy) are either “ex-priests”, or anti-Catholic, or both. There is no source in the book that can be called scholarly or fair. On the topics Hunt discusses, the articles in either the old Catholic Encyclopedia (now online at
NewAdvent.org) or the New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967) would have cleared up about 99% of the historical claims. The doctrinal claims were answered by Keating in Catholicism and Fundamentalism long ago. Dave Armstrong’s
Biblical Defense of Catholicism (and his web site) answer the remaining 1%.
Give him Armstrong’s book.
Here are my two articles answering two big false claims in the book: that the Waldenses were “early evangelicals”, and the Spanish Inquisition supposedly tortured and killed “millions”
Who Were the Waldenses?
Dave Hunt and the Spanish Inquisition
That pretty much covers Hunt’s now 10 year old book.
Phil P
