Reconciling Medieval and Modern Catholicism

[alcuin18]

Hello. To start with, this isn’t meant to be a complete criticism of the ‘Middle Ages’ (which I prefer to call the Catholic Age, since the latter is an Enlightenment invention). I love the Middle Ages; I appreciate all the good they did, especially motivated by their Catholic worldview and piety, and how much they contributed to the good things in ages since.

However, my difficulty is in reconciling some of the beliefs, usually only popularly held by sometimes taught more officially as in papal bulls and Magisterial documents, expressed by medieval Catholics which seem to blatantly contradict the way Catholics believe and live today. I’m not implying that everyone in the Middle Ages held these views; there were always some who opposed them, but they were held popularly by a majority of people and influenced many of the worst acts most often cited. The gravest differences I have seen are these:

1. That the physical world is evil - that any pleasure is immoral, including marital sex, and that the body should be suppressed and mortified whenever pleasure is felt.
2. That if someone is not a faithful Catholic, one may treat them however one wishes, without restriction. This is how the torture, burning, etc. of heretics, Jews, Muslims, etc. were justified, and how the enslavement of pagans and Muslims was excused, and was also a later influence on the enslavement and killing of Native Americans and Africans. It was also a matter of not being a faithful Catholic making one legally a traitor, according to the laws of most countries. This also made it acceptable to assume anyone who wasn’t a faithful Catholic is automatically in Hell, as can be seen in works such as Dante’s Inferno and artistic depictions of people like Muhammed in Hell, which is now considered judgmental. Another parallel is the banning of books; if a book had anything at all wrong in it, it could be banned, despite any good it may have in it.
3. That Church leaders can hold political, secular positions in the state. I understand that immediately after the fall of Rome, Church leaders were some of the few administrators respectable enough to lead, and so they did. But they continued to do so, to greater extents over time, with the Papal States being the greatest examples. Obviously, this wouldn’t happen now, even if states did allow it. Politics is considered a corrupting influence on the Church hierarchy now, as they’re supposed to be pastors and spiritual authorities.

I just can’t understand how the Church could’ve permitted any of these things, with so few people speaking out against them at the time, based on what the Church teaches now. I would prefer for conversation here to be civil please, and I’m also not interested in a ‘traditionalist’/SSPX interpretation of my issues. I want it from the standpoint of current, official Church teaching.

God bless

 

[boomerang]

You have to understand that in the Middle Ages, the Church, the state, and popular culture were the same thing. What the people, the secular authorities and clergy thought and believed made their way into Church culture, and vice versa. The Middle Ages was a very harsh time of constant war, famine, plagues, treachery, vying for power, Crusades, Inquistions, etc. Everything was hard. Lives and attitudes were hard. You can’t compare our lives today with times past. It doesn’t work.

Remember, the Church is made of people. If you truly want to understand the mind of the people, you have to study the cultural forces of their day, in other words, what was going on in Europe then? This is what: War, war, war. Everyone was the enemy. Fear and paranoia were the constant companions of Europeans then. If you look back at your questions in this light, the answers should become clearer.

 

[PluniaZ]

Those are rather sweeping generalizations. Can you provide examples from primary source material for each topic, from both Medieval Catholicism and more recent Catholicism?

 

[alcuin18]

Honestly it would be very difficult for me to. I just observed them after reading several books about the Middle Ages and the views held by people at that time.

 

[Fiasco]

Just a couple of comments:

1. That the physical world is evil ???] - that any pleasure is immoral, including marital sex, and that the body should be suppressed and mortified whenever pleasure is felt.

You’re talking about the Manichean heresy which the Church has always condemned, a Gnostic heresy which says that the physical realm was created by an evil demiurge (demigod).
And when was it ever taught that marital sexual pleasure, along with any other sinless pleasure, is bad?

1. That if someone is not a faithful Catholic, one may treat them however one wishes, without restriction. This is how the torture, burning, etc. of heretics, Jews, Muslims, etc. were justified,???] and how the enslavement of pagans and Muslims was excused…

Ever read about the enslaving BY Muslims…by the sword?

…anyone who wasn’t a faithful Catholic is automatically in Hell, as can be seen in works such as Dante’s Inferno and artistic depictions of people like Muhammed in Hell, which is now considered judgmental.[That PC word!] Another parallel is the banning of books; if a book had anything at all wrong in it, it could be banned, despite any good it may have in it.

Not everyone could/can tell the good from the bad. The Index of Forbidden Books was an attempt to protect the flock.

What sorts of anti-Catholic books have you been reading? And “documentaries”?

Sure, things weren’t perfect, but…

Sorry to disappoint you, but i can’t give you politically correct answers.

 

[alcuin18]

Just a couple of comments:

You’re talking about the Manichean heresy which the Church has always condemned, a Gnostic heresy which says that the physical realm was created by an evil demiurge (demigod).
And when was it ever taught that marital sexual pleasure, along with any other sinless pleasure, is bad?

Ever read about the enslaving BY Muslims…by the sword?

Not everyone could/can tell the good from the bad. The Index of Forbidden Books was an attempt to protect the flock.

What sorts of anti-Catholic books have you been reading? And “documentaries”?

Sure, things weren’t perfect, but…

Sorry to disappoint you, but i can’t give you politically correct answers.

You’re not disappointing me, and I don’t want politically correct answers. I understand that not everyone held the views I mentioned, but many did and they did influence the way society functioned. I try to steer clear of anti-medieval books, since as I said that’s not my own position, but reading facts of medieval history illustrate my points relatively often. St. Augustine seemed to view sexual pleasure as wrong, and many shared his views over time. The view of women as evil as descendants of Eve seemed to be common too. Their treatment of people other than good Catholics is difficult too, as I mentioned.

Like I said, I’m not trying to be anti-medieval. I’m just trying to reconcile my Catholic beliefs and all the good things I love about the Middle Ages with some of the errors and evils I’ve heard about. If what I’ve read is inaccurate please tell me, I just want to know the truth.

 

[HelenRose]

The middle ages do not hold a candle to the atrocities done in the twentieth century. Can you explain to me why secular enlightenment did not stop WWI, WWII, The Korean War and the Vietnam War.

 

[alcuin18]

The middle ages do not hold a candle to the atrocities done in the twentieth century. Can you explain to me why secular enlightenment did not stop WWI, WWII, The Korean War and the Vietnam War.

I completely agree with you, but my problem is how Catholics could have done the things they did, without more disapproval from other Catholics, during the Middle Ages.

 

[Wesrock]

1. That the physical world is evil - that any pleasure is immoral, including marital sex, and that the body should be suppressed and mortified whenever pleasure is felt.

I think this is misunderstanding the different views towards “worldliness” than there is today and mistaking that as considering the physical world to be evil. That is a condemned heresy. It sounds like you’re also mistaking monastic spiritual thinking with the Church at large and not putting it and its devotional language into context.

 

[HelenRose]

I completely agree with you, but my problem is how Catholics could have done the things they did, without more disapproval from other Catholics, during the Middle Ages.

How much control do you have over the people around you? History is messy. Life is messy. Two thousand of building roads, creating hospitals, creating universities, learning, growing, making mistakes.

Two thousand years of history and you want simple answers for very complex questions.

In spite of the being the Holy Bride of Christ, the Church was and is made up of sinners. Human nature has not changed. The Church is not a country club for saints. It has been and will always be a hospital for sinners.

It would have been simple for God to fix all these problems but first He would have had to deny human beings free will. He could force His children to do it perfectly but then we would have been puppets on a string.

He meets us where we are at. We learn by falling and picking ourselves up. It is the same with the leaders of the Church. When the Church start going off track he will also send us a Saint to help the Church leaders regroup. Look at the lives of St. Dominic, St. Frances, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Sienna. Read the lives of the saints and find out how God brings His Church back to him.

The Church does not teach that sex is evil. Have you not read the Songs of Solomon? The teaching that the physical is evil is a heresy. God created heaven and earth and saw that it was good.

 

[animalis]

As to the first point, the disordered reaction to pleasure is an aspect of the heresy of Jansenism which developed after the medieval period.

As to the second, your standpoint seems steeped in Protestant historical bais. It was the State that brutally carried out punishments. And Protestantism came right after the medieval period.

Which leads to the third, yes the Church and the State intermingled into an extreme, but the complete separation is an extreme on the other end. (cf. Pius X, Vehementer Nos, 3) Granted the former extreme was a temptation based on self-preservation. For there were enemies who wanted to destroy the Church, and the power of the State provided protection. I do not believe that to be blameworthy (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1746)

 

[alcuin18]

Thank you all for your answers. As I’ve said before, I’m not trying to bash the Middle Ages or the Church. I know the doctrines of the Church and that they haven’t changed throughout history. My point is only about popular opinions and misconceptions in a particular time period. I understand what secular people and Protestants have done, and that they were far worse, as are their beliefs themselves. My point is only that as a Catholic, when I see how Catholic the Middle Ages were and how much good they did, it’s then very difficult to defend the many wrongs Catholics did in the Middle Ages, often done by authorities in the Church and with little condemnation by other Catholics until later times. That is my only point.

 

[boomerang]

Thank you all for your answers. As I’ve said before, I’m not trying to bash the Middle Ages or the Church. I know the doctrines of the Church and that they haven’t changed throughout history. My point is only about popular opinions and misconceptions in a particular time period. I understand what secular people and Protestants have done, and that they were far worse, as are their beliefs themselves. My point is only that as a Catholic, when I see how Catholic the Middle Ages were and how much good they did, it’s then very difficult to defend the many wrongs Catholics did in the Middle Ages, often done by authorities in the Church and with little condemnation by other Catholics until later times. That is my only point.

You just have to accept the fact that people are jerks. And it was a lot easier to be a jerk hundreds of years ago than it is now. World-wide communications makes it a lot harder for the cretins among us to hide. I’m dead serious. It really is that simple. People are jerks.

 

[alcuin18]

I also realized another difficulty: why did so many Catholics in the past, including Church Fathers and Doctors like Aquinas, espouse capital punishment for heretics and non-Catholics? Esecially when the Church now teaches religious freedom and condemns capital punishment. The older view doesn’t seem to fit the Gospel or modern Church teaching.

 

[boomerang]

I also realized another difficulty: why did so many Catholics in the past, including Church Fathers and Doctors like Aquinas, espouse capital punishment for heretics and non-Catholics? Esecially when the Church now teaches religious freedom and condemns capital punishment. The older view doesn’t seem to fit the Gospel or modern Church teaching.

Possibly two reasons for that:

1. Heretics back then were considered a kind of “fifth column” just waiting to destabilize the entire society. Everything was Catholic then, so when a new religion is thrown into this society, it will create instability which will lead to insurrection and civil war. This has been true throughout history, and it’s still true in countries that don’t maintain a separation of church and state.

It was the secular leaders (kings, counts, etc.) that prosecuted the heretics. No Catholic monarch would tolerate large groups of heretics within the boundaries of their realm due to the social instability they presented.

1. There may have been the thought back then that if a heretic is killed for their heresy, that would help atone for their sin of apostasy and help them get to purgatory rather than hell, so capital punishment is doing that person a favor.

I don’t think it is true that the church espoused the killing of non-Catholics. It’s heretics that they went after because of the apostasy, their influence on others and the destabilization of society that always follows.

 

[Genesis315]

1. That the physical world is evil - that any pleasure is immoral, including marital sex, and that the body should be suppressed and mortified whenever pleasure is felt.

This was a heresy the medieval Church vigorously opposed–I’m not sure where you got this to be Catholic.

1. That if someone is not a faithful Catholic, one may treat them however one wishes, without restriction.

This is also not a belief of the medieval Church. The commandments of charity and justice applied to all. See these examples among many:

papalencyclicals.net/Greg10/g10jprot.htm

papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm

Public authorities, however, had the duty or defending and promoting the common good (just as they do now) and sometimes heretics gravely threatened it given the circumstances–in those case grave action was justified. Just as in our modern justice systems, they weren’t perfect and there were excesses and abuses, but this is not a hallmark of just the medieval Church. In any event, private action against such people was not authorized by the Church.

Anyway, the Church still teaches that the state can suppress false religious activity that is harmful to the common good (and the common good includes the supernatural or spiritual well-being of a society):

From the Catechism: 2109 The right to religious liberty can of itself be neither unlimited nor limited only by a “public order” conceived in a positivist or naturalist manner.39 The “due limits” which are inherent in it must be determined for each social situation by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority in accordance with "legal principles which are in conformity with the objective moral order."40

1. That Church leaders can hold political, secular positions in the state. I understand that immediately after the fall of Rome, Church leaders were some of the few administrators respectable enough to lead, and so they did. But they continued to do so, to greater extents over time, with the Papal States being the greatest examples. Obviously, this wouldn’t happen now, even if states did allow it. Politics is considered a corrupting influence on the Church hierarchy now, as they’re supposed to be pastors and spiritual authorities.

This also was opposed by the medieval Church with a couple special exceptions (Milan and Rome). It’s still the case to this day with regard to the bishop of Rome.

To conclude, I’m not sure where you got the information you put forth (especially since you didn’t cite anything).

 

[alcuin18]

Thank you both for your responses, they are very helpful. One thing I’ve come to understand while looking into the issues I’ve raised here is the true extent of bias present against Catholicism and the Middle Ages in modern history writing and scholarship, particularly derived from atheistic and Protestant influences. I already knew it was there, but its full extent surprised me, especially at the lack of professional objectivity in historians. I thank everyone here for helping me in this realization. There was still a great deal of sin and abuse in Catholic history and the Middle Ages, as in every age, but in many ways they were far more virtuous, just and rational than any other period or institution, and all of the good aspects of the modern world derive from them. Perhas if more people knew this, there would be less animosity towards the Church and her history, and the Middle Ages would instead be known as the Catholic Age, with the Renaissance as its apex.

God bless