How would you answer the Middle Age "persecution" of women

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rien

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by the Catholic church.

Here is the full e-mail I received. The key point for this poster is the supression of women by the Church in the Middle ages. And even longer.

Can anyone refute this? With specifcs. Espeically female posters?​

Weren’t the abolitionist movement, the movement for equal rights for all races, and the movement for equal rights for both sexes all conflicts between Christians and other Christians? Didn’t Christians on both sides claim Christianity supported their position?

**Didn’t anti-equal rights forces claim that Christianity supported slavery, supported unequal treatment of races, and supported unequal treatment of women, and wasn’t this the position of the most Christians for roughly 1800-1900 years with only the idea of equal rights becoming popular and the standard interpretation of the philosophy for only about 5% of the history of the philosophy?**It seems odd to give credit to Christianity for freeing the slaves when it was used as justification to enslave them in the first place.

Were there non-Christians arguing on the side of the pro-slavery issue in America? I suppose you could argue that certain slave owning founding fathers were Deists and non-Christian, but then you’d lose that whole “We’re a nation based on Christianity” claim very popular with social conservatives. But, I can’t recall an “Athesist against Civil Rights for Blacks” campaign during the 1950s and 60s.
 
During the middle ages the Catholic Church was the only institution that gave women a choice. They could marry or become nuns. I know that in the 21st century that doesn’t seem like much of a choice, but think about it. Everywhere else women were forced to marry. There was no other provision for the support of women. Nuns were also pretty much the only educated women. Under Roman law all women had to marry by a certain age or register as a prostitute. The church allowed women to remain unwed and protected them.
 
The first step, ask the person making the accusation to substantiate these claims with official Church teaching. Anyone can spout off wild claims, one should never attempt to debate claims that are made without any attempt at documentation.

The duty to document is on the side of the person making the claims. Until they document, you have nothing to “refute”.
 
Regine Pernoud’s
Those terrible Middle Ages…debunking the myths
published by ignatius press

has some excellent chapters concerning the real roles for women in this historical period.

I got mine secondhand from Amazon.
 
I would require them to read everything by Regine Pernoud, especially Those Terrible Middle Ages and Women In The Days Of Cathedrals.
 
It is very typical for secularists to blame everything that ever went wrong in history on the Catholic Church.

These myths are all easily debunked, and and numerous books have been written on the subject.

Regarding the slavery point, there was an article in This Rock magazine (available through the main page) showing that the Church has been very active in ending slavery from the beginning, and contributed more to the equality of man than any other institution on Earth. For example, when the Canary Islands were discovered, the Pope issued a statement prohibiting taking natives as slaves, and prohibited the taking of slaves on any other islands discovered. The same applied to North America.
 
Many pop history authors make stuff up off the tops of their heads. I’ve read about the reasons some magazine claimed Medieval women could be burned at the stake. The article made it sound as if all men did back then was torture and burn women. In that case, how did the population keep increasing? And when did these mysogynists get any work done? Some people hate Christianity and make up reasons to justify their attitude to themselves. Others believe the horror stories and are deeply harmed by them.
It was not socially accepted nor endorsed by the Church for a man to abuse his wife or children. Most women chose their husbands, and those who didn’t mainly belongd to the upper classes, which meant their husbands didn’t choose them either. The older generation did, women and men deciding together.
The Church opposed slavery, witch-hunting and cruelty from the beginning. To cite the opinions of people who sought to justify slavery by quoting the Bible in order to condemn the Bible is as absurd as condemning the phone book for inspiring a serial killer to murder people according to their initials. To accuse Christians of hating women because some women called others witches is ridiculous as well. Today, in most of the countries where witch-hunting still occurs, non-Christians are doing the hunting, generally animists who see magic behind everything. To accuse Christians of hating women is to ignore the intense misogyny of the non-Christian world, past and present, and the relative freedom, security and value women have had in Christendom since the time of Jesus, who befriended and honored women throughout His life. Infact, Jewish traditions, harsh as they seem to us today, were far kinder to women than a majority of pagan ways of the ancient world. Norse, Chinese, Egyptian or Bantu, the pagans tended to treat women as property and to put them last in every situation from birth.
 
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