Church's Views on The Burning Times?

[SeekingDaughter]

So, being the history buff that I am, I have come across the church’s involvement in the Burning Times (when Witch Hunts were at their peek, etc)… and also read bits of the “Witch’s Hammer” … shudder I admit to being very put off by that book.

I have not heard of whether or not the church has withdrawn it’s opinions from those days or not…can anyone tell me what the church’s current views on the Burning Times are?

 

[Bookcat]

The witch -hunt craze was generally a Protestant-Puritan thing …not Catholic.

Catholic investigators did not go along with it but dismissed the cases as unfounded…

 

[SeekingDaughter]

Really? Wow! I’ve been taught wrong all these years! I’d always been told that over in Europe, they were LED by the Catholic church! WHEW! Well, that actually makes me really relieved.

Thanks!

 

[manualman]

Witch hunts were indeed almost exclusively a protestant phenomenon. Mind you, Catholics burned plenty of those labeled heretics (in fairness most of those executions were performed by state governments who claimed moral justification, but not direct sanction for their actions from the Church), but not for witchcraft.

Actual historians will tell you that the populace at large vastly preferred to be tried by the Church for crimes than to be tried by the state. The Church was always more merciful than the state.

As my favorite radio priest always says, NEVER get your history from the “History” channel. I would add, always check derogatory claims about the catholic church by English speaking authors with non-English speaking sources. It’s remarkable how biased English language sources are by Reformation era bigotry even to this day.

 

[1ke]

The Catholic Encyclopedia has a good article giving a comprehensive overview:

newadvent.org/cathen/15674a.htm

 

[SeekingDaughter]

Thank you! What about the Crusades?

 

[Hadrianus]

With the decline of the Christian Byzantine Empire, the pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land fell under Muslim rule and Western pilgrims were no longer safe. The Crusades started as an attempt to regain Jerusalem and the other formerly Christian territories in the region. As in all wars atrocities took place committed by both sides, But far too much of this is made now by antiCatholic propagandists. Islam was itself a very aggressive force and for nearly 1,000 years actively sought to invade Europe.

 

[Bookcat]

Thank you! What about the Crusades?

catholic.com/radio/shows/how-to-explain-the-crusades-4775

 

[1ke]

Thank you! What about the Crusades?

What about them? That’s a pretty broad topic spanning many centuries.

 

[SeekingDaughter]

LOL well, I mean… have they made any statements about their view on them?

 

[manualman]

Thank you! What about the Crusades?

Books have been written on the subject. For me, the question of whether christianity or Islam is the aggressor simplies quite easily. Islam today is not much different than Islam back then. Do a couple hours of research on the web. What’s life like for Coptic christians in Egypt today? In Iraq? In Lebanon? In Palestine? This is how Islam treats christians and always has. When they invaded the eastern lands of christianity, they subjugated and brutalized the christians living there. At times in history, life wasn’t much better for muslims in christian lands. But when you zoom out and look at the big picture, you have to admit that the pinciples of christianity long term result in respect and toleration of differences in belief while the principles of Islam long term result in oppression.

The Crusades, however badly implemented, were a COUNTER attack in a long term defensive war with Islam. One that we’d like to think is over, but probably isn’t. Islam fundamentally MEANS submission. If you aren’t submitting, then they see you as a problem to be addressed.

 

[tafan]

Thank you! What about the Crusades?

Manualan gave a good answer, I will add a little. There was a war between civilizations that lasted 1000 years, from the 7th to the 17th century. For the first 400 years, Christendom fought a completely defensive action. Islam attacked across north Africa and the. Into Europe on three fronts; Asia Minor, Sicily/ Italy , and the Iberian Pennisula. Look at a map and you will see they had all the bases covered.

And do not think of Europe as today being many different countries. The modern state had not yet come into existence. Beyond a European’s local area, he would have truly considered himself a citizen of Christendom.

The crusades were a belated attempt to turn a defensive war into an offensive war; completely justified. And for a while, very effective. And this war was a war to destroy Christendom, make no mistake about that. And it nearly succeeded several times.

Question the lack of discipline in persecuting the crusades, but not the justification of the crusades themselves.

 

[Contarini]

Really? Wow! I’ve been taught wrong all these years! I’d always been told that over in Europe, they were LED by the Catholic church! WHEW! Well, that actually makes me really relieved.

Thanks!

Whenever these threads come up, I jump into them with the intention of defending the Catholic Church, only to find that Catholics have done the job already in so exaggerated a manner that I wind up having to “attack” the Catholic Church instead.

Witch-hunting was in fact one of the most ecumenical endeavors of the early modern period. You really can’t blame either group for it. It predated the Reformation–as the “Hammer” indicates–so you can’t call it a Protestant phenomenon. (So Kramer and Sprenger were Protestants, back in the 15th century? How did they manage that–time travel?)

There were two major “epidemics” of witch-hunting. One in the fifteenth and very early sixteenth centuries (that’s when the Hammer was written), which obviously was an exclusively Catholic phenomenon, and another–much bigger from what I’ve read–in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This, as I said, was an ecumenical endeavor. There wasn’t much witch-hunting during the years when Protestantism was first taking shape, and historians have speculated as to the reason.

Witch-hunting, again for reasons people debate, seems to have been concentrated along the Rhine valley, but more broadly it primarily affected France, England, Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland. Italy and Spain not so much. This is the truth behind the claim that Catholics didn’t to it. The Spanish Inquisition–and the later Roman Inquisition, established after the Reformation–certainly investigated cases of witchcraft, but generally did so in a rational manner. In fact, there’s a fascinating (if somewhat titillating) book which I read in grad school about cases involving sex and magic, taken from the files of the Roman Inquisition. The impression I got from that book is that the Roman Inquisition was certainly concerned about people practicing magic, but didn’t see such behavior as part of some terrifying demonic conspiracy.

One theory about the second wave of witch-hunting is that it was a kind of aftereffect of the religious divisions–it tended to be concentrated in areas that were divided between Protestantism and Catholicism, where awareness of religious division was very intense.

Edwin

 

[bmonk]

With the decline of the Christian Byzantine Empire, the pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land fell under Muslim rule and Western pilgrims were no longer safe. The Crusades started as an attempt to regain Jerusalem and the other formerly Christian territories in the region. As in all wars atrocities took place committed by both sides, But far too much of this is made now by antiCatholic propagandists. Islam was itself a very aggressive force and for nearly 1,000 years actively sought to invade Europe.

Further, the Muslims didn’t make that much of the aggression at the time. It’s more in the 19th and 20th Centuries that Muslim authors began to gripe–likely more due to the cultural aggression fo the West in those centuries of colonies and world dominance.

 

[bmonk]

As my favorite radio priest always says, NEVER get your history from the “History” channel. I would add, always check derogatory claims about the catholic church by English speaking authors with non-English speaking sources. It’s remarkable how biased English language sources are by Reformation era bigotry even to this day.

I noticed something similar in the current National Geographic article (Dec. 2011) on the King James Bible–it has this line: “In the course of the 16th century, England had undergone something of a yo-yo Reformation, veering from one reign to the next between Protestant and anti-Protestant regimes, never quite settling into either camp.”

Calling it an “anti-Protestant” seems an odd way to express “Catholic”. I find it similar to the
abortion debates that call one side or the other “anti-choice” or “anti-life”. “Anti-” is always going to sound negative and biased.