Defending the Church's History

[yinekka]

hecd2, hindsight is always 20/20. We living in 2004 find it easy to feel superior to those people who lived hundreds and hundreds of years before us. Steve T was merely trying to get into the mindset of the people who lived all those years ago and explain how they might have come to the conclusions they did. They truly believed that to die while in a state of heresy was to lose one’s immortal soul. There was a time when most people believed that our goal in life was to die in the state of sanctifying grace and so for those people hundreds of years ago the thought of someone throwing away their immortal soul and condemming themselves to hell for all eternity was unthinkable and they felt that any intervention was necessary. Of course I am aware that all sorts of political motives were tied up in some of their actions also.

While acknowledging you have the right to disagree with any person’s posts I do think you could do it in a way which promotes charitable dialogue rather than coming across as a schoolmaster chastising a student whom he regards as not as bright as himself.

*I]My thinking is proudly heretical when it comes to the Catholic deposit of faith. *

What do you mean by the above?

 

[hecd2]

yinekka:

hecd2, in post 12 you said Quite so. [ethnic cleansing of the Iberian peninsula by Ferdinand and Isabella under the policy of ‘limpieza de sangre’ (cleaning of the blood), and the idea that the suffrage in a modern state should be limited to ‘Christians’*

Could you please give me your sources for your post.

Thank you

See post #9 for the shameful ideas I was responding to. Do you want references for the disgrace of ‘limpieza del sangre’ or will you undertake the minimal effort to look it up yourself?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Chris_Jacobsen]

There are enough bad Catholics doing bad things in 2004, with having to go back in history to find bad Catholics.

We have bad Catholics leading the fight to hack innocent babies to death, or leading the fight to jab holes in babies heads and suck their brains out.

We have Catholics who have their children hacked up in pieces. Catholics who hack babies up in pieces. And Catholics who believe that those who attack babies should get extra government protection.

We have Catholics who believe that an innocent baby should be executed without trial, because his father raped his mother. And that the death should be death by dismemberment. In the mean time, the guilty father gets either a light sentence or no sentence at all.

We have Catholics who believe that people should be killed the moment they are conceived to further the cause of medical research.

We have Catholics who try to destroy the lives of their children by getting divorced and remarried, divorced and remarried, divorced and remarried.

We have Catholics who use their spouses for their own selfish pleasure by using contraceptives.

We have Catholics who decide for themselves what is right and wrong. These follow in the footsteps of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Nero, and Satan.

Yes, there is plenty of material in 2004. One does not need to go back in history to find evil and evildoers in the Church.

Jesus had an answer as to why there is evil and evil people in the Church. He said a farmer planted a field of wheat. Then an enemy came and planted weeds in the field. The farmer left the weeds in the field until harvest time. He did this so that the wheat would not be pulled up and destroyed along with the weeds.

 

[hecd2]

yinekka:

hecd2, hindsight is always 20/20. We living in 2004 find it easy to feel superior to those people who lived hundreds and hundreds of years before us. Steve T was merely trying to get into the mindset of the people who lived all those years ago and explain how they might have come to the conclusions they did. They truly believed that to die while in a state of heresy was to lose one’s immortal soul.

And Stalin truly believed that the State took precedence over the claims of individual people. Killing people for their ideology is simply indefensible. It is wrong now, and it always has been wrong. This is not a principle that it behoves us to compromise on.

There was a time when most people believed that our goal in life was to die in the state of sanctifying grace and so for those people hundreds of years ago the thought of someone throwing away their immortal soul and condemming themselves to hell for all eternity was unthinkable and they felt that any intervention was necessary. Of course I am aware that all sorts of political motives were tied up in some of their actions also.

Quite. It was then, it is now and it always will be a form of bullying of the most reprehensible kind, bound up as it was with egotism and politics. Ugly ideas abound in human history, and being tortured and killed for the sake of your soul is one of the ugliest ideas that have ever crawled out from under the most slimey rock of humanity . Let us condemn it. You will not find that either the majority of people in the world or the majority of cultures subscribed to these systems of moral intimidation. There always were more victims than sinners, which is the salvation of the human race.

While acknowledging you have the right to disagree with any person’s posts I do think you could do it in a way which promotes charitable dialogue rather than coming across as a schoolmaster chastising a student whom he regards as not as bright as himself.

There is no charitable dialogue to be had with someone who thinks killing people for ideological reasons is defensible. Let those of us who have any shadow of moral integrity stand up and say so . Let’s see what the Catholic Answers board concludes - that Catholics either condemn or defend the killing of people because of their religious or philosophical views.

*My thinking is proudly heretical when it comes to the Catholic deposit of faith. *

What do you mean by the above?

What I say. I am proudly heretical. I reject the Church’s teaching on several fundamental points without cowering or apology, because I believe, with good reason, that she is wrong. I praise the pioneers of the Enlightenment that I can say that without fear of death or bodily disfigurement. Let there be no turning back.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[tru_dvotion]

Alec,

Your response to Steve is nothing more than an attempt to analyze away the mores and the circumstances of an age long past with the humanistic approach of contemporary reasoning. It does not work nor does justice to the past if we evaluate it with present day sentiments. I would take it one step further. What goes on today in the world is in many ways far worse than what went on in the past. I bet far more souls are cast into hell following the completion of their earthly journey from this wonderfully enlightened world of ours than in ages past, “terror of fire and sharp metal” none withstanding. And eternity spent in hell is a hell of a long time.

What do you mean by having proudly heretical thinking? Does it mean defiance on top of being a heretic? Yikes!

 

[SteveT]

Alec:

You miss the point. There is no crime in being mistaken in your beliefs. However, if you TEACH heresy, and so mislead others into damnation, then you are depriving the other person of eternal life by doing so. Aquinas lays out the arguments in the Summa, in 2:2:10:8 and 2:2:11:3.

"My thinking is proudly heretical when it comes to the Catholic deposit of faith. Would you then put me on the rack and burn me to death for the way I think? Look me in the eye and say that. "

David Koresh was entitled to believe his own warped concoctions of faith, and as long as he kept them to himself, it harmed no one but himself. But when he began to convert people to follow himself, building up his “Branch Davidian” religion and leading those souls astray, what was the right thing to do? In an earlier time, when eternity mattered to people, Koresh would have been stopped at the outset, and those souls he brought down to Hell with himself hopefully spared that fate. We permit dozens upon dozens of such cults to exist, leading hundreds, maybe thousands of souls to damnation. Which approach is more charitable - the one which stops such cults, or the one which permits them?

 

[ISABUS]

I apologize on behalf of the Catholic Church for those people within “the Church” who have caused suffering to people throughout the ages.

Thank heavens the past is gone! Let’s look towards the future where mankind can come together and not fear each other because of their different faiths.

TODAY is a new day which brings HOPE that no person will claim to be a Catholic and willing hurt another person, whether it be in action or words. The Catholic Church does not condone killing a human being nor their spirit. Let’s keep love alive!

Peace.

 

[yinekka]

hecd2 you asked me Do you want references for the disgrace of ‘limpieza del sangre’ or will you undertake the minimal effort to look it up yourself?

Yes I would like you to source your statement.

You said: * I reject the Church’s teaching on several fundamental points without cowering or apology, *

What teachings of the Church do you reject?

 

[ISABUS]

Chris Jacobsen:

There are enough bad Catholics doing bad things in 2004, with having to go back in history to find bad Catholics.

We have bad Catholics leading the fight to hack innocent babies to death, or leading the fight to jab holes in babies heads and suck their brains out.

We have Catholics who have their children hacked up in pieces. Catholics who hack babies up in pieces. And Catholics who believe that those who attack babies should get extra government protection.

We have Catholics who believe that an innocent baby should be executed without trial, because his father raped his mother. And that the death should be death by dismemberment. In the mean time, the guilty father gets either a light sentence or no sentence at all.

We have Catholics who believe that people should be killed the moment they are conceived to further the cause of medical research.

We have Catholics who try to destroy the lives of their children by getting divorced and remarried, divorced and remarried, divorced and remarried.

We have Catholics who use their spouses for their own selfish pleasure by using contraceptives.

We have Catholics who decide for themselves what is right and wrong. These follow in the footsteps of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Nero, and Satan.

Yes, there is plenty of material in 2004. One does not need to go back in history to find evil and evildoers in the Church.

Jesus had an answer as to why there is evil and evil people in the Church. He said a farmer planted a field of wheat. Then an enemy came and planted weeds in the field. The farmer left the weeds in the field until harvest time. He did this so that the wheat would not be pulled up and destroyed along with the weeds.

Simple FACT - Chris, people who do the things you have mentioned above are NOT Catholics. A person who calls himself or herself a Catholic and does these things is a person who hates and uses the Catholic Church and has only one desire, to destroy Catholics. Many people claim to be a Catholic in name only which reflects little essence of love. Pray for such people. They obviously need understanding and guidance.

Peace.

 

[SteveT]

Alec:

A final thought, you wrote:

“Any logic that considers murder as a less serious crime than disagreeing with a favourite theology is morally bankrupt.”

The key is your phrase “a favourite theology”. Implicit in your statement is that no one’s theology is any better than anyone else’s, that we have no way to know which theology is true, and that therefore we should tolerate all theologies. That being the case, we must assume that holding correct doctrine cannot be a requirement for salvation. That is a very modernist, post-enlightenment position. It was, of course, a totally alien concept prior to the enlightenment, and I’m not at all sure that it is biblically sound.

“Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” 1 Tim 4:16

“As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer” 1 Tim 1:3
In the Middle Ages, they took the bible seriously, they believed there was only one truth, and that it was accessible to man via the church Christ established. On the question of soteriology, they believed there was one and only one right answer, and that it was important - that souls were on the line getting it right. If you read Luther’s classic “Bondage of the Will”, you’ll see he cites 1 Tim 4:16 as a primary reason why he won’t give in to the church’s authority on a matter of doctrine - he blasts Erasmus for trivializing the importance of such doctrines in his writing. That is why the Catholic Church tried to snuff out Protestantism, and why Protestants tried to snuff out Catholicism. If you want to pass judgment on those folks, then do it in terms of the way they approached the world - make a biblical case for tolerating heresy.

 

[csr]

yinekka:

They truly believed that to die while in a state of heresy was to lose one’s immortal soul.

Which it is. Heresy is mortal sin, in re the ten commandments. Also, in previous generations the effects people have on each other were more accurately recognized. If my math is roughly correct, we are killing more babies every three or four months than died in hundreds of years’ of heresy hunting. Also I think that given the state of the surrounding culture today, precious few souls make it into eternal life. I think that in times of general apostasy, God ‘fishes with a hook’ rather than with a net. But, a carnal culture can’t see the larger reality. It’s part of believing that everything evolved and tends perforce to get better and better.

 

[hecd2]

tru_dvotion:

Alec,

Your response to Steve is nothing more than an attempt to analyze away the mores and the circumstances of an age long past with the humanistic approach of contemporary reasoning. It does not work nor does justice to the past if we evaluate it with present day sentiments. Hey, this is pure relative morality, something that most Catholics abhor. You would rightly object if I said:

‘Condemning abortion is nothing more than an attempt to analyze away the mores and the circumstances of the modern age with the religious approach of superseded reasoning. It does not work nor does justice to the present if we evaluate it with outmoded sentiments’. Why can’t Catholics on this list just say, simply, that killing people for their beliefs is wrong?

I would take it one step further. What goes on today in the world is in many ways far worse than what went on in the past. I bet far more souls are cast into hell following the completion of their earthly journey from this wonderfully enlightened world of ours than in ages past, “terror of fire and sharp metal” none withstanding. And eternity spent in hell is a hell of a long time.

Oh,I see, you are of the community that justifies bodily torment on the grounds that it saves the soul from eternal torment. Well, that view is evil, it is misguided, and it is arrogant in the extreme. I utterly reject and abhor the torture and murder of people for their beliefs on the grounds of authoritative superstition. For heaven’s sake let us work for the welfare and dignity of out fellow humans, whatever religion they might be.

And I utterly abhor and reject the idea of an eternal torment. Any decent well-meaning person who has the vaguest feeling for what eternal torment actually means must surely do the same. Eternal torment? That is a perverse invention of the human mind.

What do you mean by having proudly heretical thinking? Does it mean defiance on top of being a heretic? Yikes!

Yes, I am defiant in the face of unreason, authoritarianism, cruelty and superstition.

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

 

[larryo]

JimG:

Read H.W. Crocker III’s Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, a one volume history. Here is a review.

I certainly second this recommendation. I found *Triumph *to be an excellent and readable introduction to the glory of Church history. It really bugs me when the Catholic Church is blamed for every evil, real and imagined, of the last 2,000 years. The pope has apologized for the excesses of individual Catholics during the Crusades and Inquisitions. But it seems that no amount of apologizing ever satisfies the Church’s critics. If I may be so bold, where are the apologies from the Jews, Moslems, Orthodox, Protestants, and other enemies of the Church for their excesses? For example, I’ve never heard the Anglicans apologize for persecuting Catholics and stealing Church property. I’ve never heard the Jews apologize for persecuting the early Christians. I’ve never heard the Moslems apologize for their 1,400-year assault on Christianity and western civilization.

 

[hecd2]

SteveT:

Alec:

You miss the point. There is no crime in being mistaken in your beliefs. However, if you TEACH heresy, and so mislead others into damnation, then you are depriving the other person of eternal life by doing so. Aquinas lays out the arguments in the Summa, in 2:2:10:8 and 2:2:11:3.

And he is wrong. Profoundly wrong. I am teaching heresy. Look me in the eye and tell me that I should be killed for that.

David Koresh was entitled to believe his own warped concoctions of faith, and as long as he kept them to himself, it harmed no one but himself. But when he began to convert people to follow himself, building up his “Branch Davidian” religion and leading those souls astray, what was the right thing to do? In an earlier time, when eternity mattered to people, Koresh would have been stopped at the outset, and those souls he brought down to Hell with himself hopefully spared that fate. We permit dozens upon dozens of such cults to exist, leading hundreds, maybe thousands of souls to damnation. Which approach is more charitable - the one which stops such cults, or the one which permits them?

Absolutely, without any hesitation whatsoever, the one that permits them. Roman Catholicism is a BIG cult. It has no more inherent intellectual, religious or moral authority than any other cult.

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

 

[hecd2]

yinekka:

hecd2 you asked me Do you want references for the disgrace of ‘limpieza del sangre’ or will you undertake the minimal effort to look it up yourself?

Yes I would like you to source your statement.

La limpieza de sangre (or purifying of the blood) was first enacted in Toledo in 1449 as La sentencia-estatuto. It is the first blatantly racial law in Europe.
The statute states:
‘That we must decree and order, that all the said converses, descendents of the perverse lineage of the Jews, in whichever guise they may be, by virtue of both canon and civil law, and the aforesaid Privileges of King Alfonso as also by reason of the heresies and other crimes, insults and seditions in which they are entrenched… are held to be incapable and unsuitable and unworthy to hold any office or benefice, public or private, whereby they may exercise power over Old Christians… And we name as converses of Jewish lineage the following: Lopez Fernandez Cota – Gonzalo Rodriguez de San Pedro… [twelve other names follow].’
In the decades after 1449 the limpieza spreads throughout Spain and the Spanish New World:
pachami.com/Inquisicion/LimpiezaSangre.html
libro.uca.edu/lea2/4lea4.htm
personal.psu.edu/users/m/z/mzk108/
usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/Faculty/f-files/Martinez/martinez_cv.html
pvmirror.com/mexicomagico/triumphsandtragedy-chapter1-15.html
usc.edu/assets/college/faculty/profiles/190.html
More from the Sentencia-Estatuto:
‘And we prohibit the said converses from acting as notaries and witnesses under pain of death and confiscation of all their property… These are descendents of the lineage and race linaje y ralea] of the Jews… And this sentence against the converses in favour of the Old Christians of pure stock is to apply and extend against past conversos, and present conversos, and future conversos…’

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

 

[hecd2]

SteveT:

Alec:

A final thought, you wrote:

“Any logic that considers murder as a less serious crime than disagreeing with a favourite theology is morally bankrupt.”

The key is your phrase “a favourite theology”. Implicit in your statement is that no one’s theology is any better than anyone else’s, that we have no way to know which theology is true, and that therefore we should tolerate all theologies. That being the case, we must assume that holding correct doctrine cannot be a requirement for salvation. That is a very modernist, post-enlightenment position. It was, of course, a totally alien concept prior to the enlightenment, and I’m not at all sure that it is biblically sound.

You have correctly discerned my position. When it comes to theology, no theology is better than any other. The fact that the vast majority of people who adhere to religious beliefs follow the religion of their parents and the society they are born in, and that these different religons are all incompatible, is very telling.

No-one has ever managed to communicate to me an objective way of distinguishing between religious high truth and superstition. Each religious believer thinks HIS/HER relgion represents the absolute truth and all others are mistaken.

I am not in any way trying to belittle the importance or subjective truth of Catholicism or any other religion. But I am yet to see a compelling means to objectively separate the theological wheat from the chaff.

In the Middle Ages, they took the bible seriously, they believed there was only one truth, and that it was accessible to man via the church Christ established. On the question of soteriology, they believed there was one and only one right answer, and that it was important - that souls were on the line getting it right. If you read Luther’s classic “Bondage of the Will”, you’ll see he cites 1 Tim 4:16 as a primary reason why he won’t give in to the church’s authority on a matter of doctrine - he blasts Erasmus for trivializing the importance of such doctrines in his writing. That is why the Catholic Church tried to snuff out Protestantism, and why Protestants tried to snuff out Catholicism. If you want to pass judgment on those folks, then do it in terms of the way they approached the world - make a biblical case for tolerating heresy.

Absolutely not. That’s like turkeys voting for Christmas. The unseemly row between Catholics and Protestants has blighted western society for centuries and I am not about to pander to that game. I believe in a simple absolute: it is wrong and evil to persecute people for what they believe and the entire Christian community, Catholic and Protestant, have laid a deep shade across humanity by their intolerance, arrogance and impotent bickering. I pass judgement on these contemptible people who condemned others to torture and death for their beliefs (Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, I care not) by applying moral, not biblical apologetical arguments.

As for tolerating heresy, the Church, thankfully, no longer has power over people’s beliefs: tolerance in Western society was won at the Enlightenment and the Church has lost the authority to dictate beliefs. My arguments for tolerance of ‘heresy’ are based on reason not on the bible.

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

FightingFat:

One thing I often get stumped on is defending the History of the Church insofaras someone claiming it has been involved in persecution of other groups, I’m sure you know the sort of thing I mean- ‘The Church is responsible for more bloodshed…’ etc, etc. Normally I would answer that man’s interference and thirst for power does not alter the simple message the Church teaches, the message of the Gospel.

Can anyone offer some help and advice?

Don’t try defending what is indefensible - it only looks immoral and “political”, in a very bad sense; as though being powerful and prosperous were more important to the Church than being Christlike.​

It has persecuted other groups - that’s a fact. It’s not going to go away. It’s made life Hell for Jews, Protestants, and the Orthodox, at various times, in places, to various degrees. A lot of religions have blood on their hands -Catholic Christianity included.

Honesty - not Catholic self-hatred, not being untruthful or evasive - can only do good, I think. Christians should be honest, about the Church’s past, as about anything else.

As for the past - I think we should give it to God. He’ll take care of it, much better than we can. That’s one of the advantages of the fact that the Church is not “our Church”, but is Christ’s; we don’t have to take the ultimate responsibility for it. The present is something we can do something about - but the past is out of our control.

I think your answer is on the right lines - so stay with it.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

hecd2:

La limpieza de sangre (or purifying of the blood) was first enacted in Toledo in 1449 as La sentencia-estatuto. It is the first blatantly racial law in Europe.
The statute states:
‘That we must decree and order, that all the said converses, descendents of the perverse lineage of the Jews, in whichever guise they may be, by virtue of both canon and civil law, and the aforesaid Privileges of King Alfonso as also by reason of the heresies and other crimes, insults and seditions in which they are entrenched… are held to be incapable and unsuitable and unworthy to hold any office or benefice, public or private, whereby they may exercise power over Old Christians… And we name as converses of Jewish lineage the following: Lopez Fernandez Cota – Gonzalo Rodriguez de San Pedro… [twelve other names follow].’
In the decades after 1449 the limpieza spreads throughout Spain and the Spanish New World:
pachami.com/Inquisicion/LimpiezaSangre.html
libro.uca.edu/lea2/4lea4.htm
personal.psu.edu/users/m/z/mzk108/
usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/Faculty/f-files/Martinez/martinez_cv.html
pvmirror.com/mexicomagico/triumphsandtragedy-chapter1-15.html
usc.edu/assets/college/faculty/profiles/190.html
More from the Sentencia-Estatuto:
‘And we prohibit the said converses from acting as notaries and witnesses under pain of death and confiscation of all their property… These are descendents of the lineage and race linaje y ralea] of the Jews… And this sentence against the converses in favour of the Old Christians of pure stock is to apply and extend against past conversos, and present conversos, and future conversos…’

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

Limpieza del sangre is also discussed by William Monter in his book “Frontiers of Heresy”, which was published at about the same time as Kamen’s. Laws of this sort were even introduced into religious orders.​

Some people appear to have thought that Jesus Christ was a Castilian hidalgo. That sort of law is a complete denial of the Gospel, which makes no distinction between Jew and Gentile. Jesus Christ came to break down the wall of division between them, and make them one. That law does the reverse. ##

 

[hecd2]

## Don’t try defending what is indefensible - it only looks immoral and “political”, in a very bad sense; as though being powerful and prosperous were more important to the Church than being Christlike.

It has persecuted other groups - that’s a fact. It’s not going to go away. It’s made life Hell for Jews, Protestants, and the Orthodox, at various times, in places, to various degrees. A lot of religions have blood on their hands -Catholic Christianity included.

Great answer - that is honest mature assessment. Most groups have something to be sorry for. That includes Judaism, Islam and many flavours of Protestantism

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

stellina:

Be careful about owning up, as the last poster put it. Yes, we should be following the Holy Father’s lead in admitting wrongdoings by Christians/Catholics throughout history (something I personally find very difficult to do, but that’s my problem), but we also need to make it clear that in many cases, the wrongdoers were in reality acting OUTSIDE the Christian faith. They were not following the commands of their own faith or misinterpreting and twisting it to suit their own purposes. What Christ gave us in terms of our faith and the institution is perfect: it is mortal individuals who fail it.

So, what does one say about the legal basis given to the use of torture in the procedure of the Inquisition by Pope Innocent IV in 1252 in the Bull “Ad Extirpanda” ?​

He can hardly be described as acting unofficially - he wasn’t some thug, Catholic only in name, beating up Protestants or stealing from pensioners: he was an honest-to-goodness Pope, acting as a legislator for a Papally-founded tribunal, in a matter which was entirely within his competence as a canonist and his jurisdiction as a Pope.

Cases like his are important, precisely because they are about as “official” as it possible to imagine; which makes them a very different sort of objection from the kind of objection one can make about the thuggishness of this or that Catholic - misbehaving or unedifying Catholics can easily be disowned, as “not really Catholics”; which is not so easy, if we’re discussing bishops, such as the Roman bishop. ##