Church History Apologetics: December Edition

This morning on the Son Rise Morning Show, at about 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central, Matt Swaim and I will conclude our Church History Apologetics series for the year with a consideration of the Legend of Pope Joan. Every so often there's a new book--or redesigned reissue of an older one--or a cable network documentary about the legend, which was first recounted in the thirteenth century, of a woman disguised as a man, who became pope in the eleventh century.

The old Catholic Encyclopedia entry sums up reputable historical reaction to the legend:

This alleged popess is a pure figment of the imagination. In the fifteenth century, after the awakening of historical criticism, a few scholars like Aeneas Silvius (Epist., I, 30) and Platina (Vitae Pontificum, No. 106) saw the untenableness of the story. Since the sixteenth century Catholic historians began to deny the existence of the popess, e.g., Onofrio Panvinio (Vitae Pontificum, Venice, 1557), Aventinus (Annales Boiorum, lib. IV), Baronius (Annales ad a. 879, n. 5), and others.

It is, nevertheless brought up again and again as a way to attack the male-only priesthood in the Catholic Church and the office of the Pope, the hierarchy of the Church, etc.

Mary I on the Son Rise Morning Show

On this the 457th anniversary of her death in 1558, Matt Swaim and I will discuss on the Son Rise Morning Show (at about 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central) the reign of Mary I, the first Queen Regnant of England and the only reigning Catholic Queen of England--there were Catholic consorts after her. Mary's reputation has undergone a change in the past five or so years. The sobriquet "Bloody Mary" is still common, and we certainly can't argue away almost 300 heretics and Protestants burned alive at the stake, but a more realistic view of religion in the 16th century has pointed out that whether the judgement of the government was heresy or treason, religious freedom did not exist in sixteenth century England.

G.J. Meyer's 2010 hardcover survey of the Tudor dynasty was re-issued in the U.K. as a two volume paperback with Henry VII and Henry VIII covered in the first volume and Edward VI through Elizabeth I in the second volume.

Meyer continues the re-evaluation of Mary I's reign in his book, noting that Mary's first Parliament reversed--except for the Dissolution of the Monasteries--all the Reformation legislation of Henry VIII and Edward VI's reign without much dissent at all. Parliament re-established the relationship between the Catholic Church in England and the Papacy and Mary gladly relinquished any claim to headship or governorship over the Church. Unlike her father, half-brother and half-sister, Mary did not want to rule the Church; she would not decide what orthodoxy and heresy were; that was up to the Church, not the State. He also regrets that the same Parliament revived the heresy laws in England--the State would assist the Church in examining, charging, and executing heretics.

In his first chapter on Elizabeth's reign, which begins at the end in March 1603, Meyer notes that the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth followed a similar pattern (the difference was of course duration): their reigns each began with enthusiastic welcome; they share a middle period of success and popularity; they both ended in exhaustion and disillusion. The crucial difference in Meyer's view is that Mary wanted to do more than survive: she wanted to achieve something:

No historian today could dispute that Mary was a capable and conscientious queen, or argue that her government killed or tortured or imprisoned as many people as Elizabeth's. She devoted herself to what she perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be the interests of her subjects, and she might have achieved her objectives if she had reigned even half as long as Elizabeth. The process of winnowing the facts has taken four centuries, but it is clear by now that Mary was the more ambitious of the sisters--that she aspired to much more than her own survival, certainly--and that the reason for her failure many be nothing more mysterious (or shameful) than the fact that at the time of her death she was 28 years younger than Elizabeth would be at hers.

Mary had aimed at the restoration of Catholicism in England and in her brief reign she had done much, with the aid of Reginald Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and his bishops, to restore the Church and even implement reforms in the Church. When she died on this day in 1558 she thought, because Elizabeth had sworn to her that she was a true Catholic, that her work in England would continue.

Like each of the Tudors before her, she would be betrayed by her successor. Henry VIII betrayed his father by placing glory and pleasure above statecraft and investment; Edward VI betrayed his father by destroying what was left of the structure of prayer for the dead, the communion of saints, and the sacramental order; Elizabeth betrayed Mary by lying to her about the one thing, except for the love of her father and mother, most dear to Mary: Jesus Christ and His Church. Mary had not betrayed Edward: he knew what she believed and what she would do--that's why he wanted Jane Grey Dudley to succeed him.

Church History Apologetics: The Bad Popes

Matt Swaim will appreciate that we are not discussing The Bad Popes, a band in Greenville, SC. Instead we are going to talk about how to answer questions about "The Bad Popes" of Church history, popes who lived scandalously corrupt personal lives, committing nepotism, violating their vows of celibacy, etc. Listen live here after the 6:45 a.m. Central time news break with Annie Mitchell.

As the chaplain at St. Paul's Parish-Newman Center, Father William Carr, reminded us when he taught us Church History, the Pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals; he is not impeccable, unable to err or sin. Popes can and have sinned personally, made errors in judgment, failed in good management, etc. Mike Aquilina expresses it well in his introduction to Good Pope, Bad Pope: Their Lives, Our Lessons:

What do we mean when we say the pope is infallible?

We certainly don't mean that he's always right about everything. The pope is a human being like everyone else. He may be uncommonly good. In the last few centuries, we have had more popes who were uncommonly good than otherwise. But there have been times when the pope was an uncommonly bad man. And even an uncommonly good pope can still trip over the carpet or mispronounce a word. If he falls flat on his face, he doesn't have to pick himself up, brush himself off, and say, "I meant to do that," in order to maintain the truth of papal infallibility.

Papal infallibility is something much more limited and much more comforting. Because Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would protect the Church from error — and because Christ keeps his promises — we know that when the pope, acting in his official capacity as leader of the Church, defines a doctrine that is a matter of faith or morals, he cannot teach error. But the pope can be wrong about astronomy. He can be wrong about biology. He can be wrong about all sorts of things, and — being human — he frequently is.

This distinction is important when somebody points to a notoriously corrupt pope and asks, "How can you say your pope is infallible?" No one has any trouble with the obviously good popes, the ones like St. Leo the Great, who steered the Church through perilous waters and stood up heroically for the faith against long odds. But it's really the bad popes who make the best argument for infallibility.

When we read history, it's clear that God's graces do not depend on our works. He makes his sun rise on the evil popes and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (see Matthew 5:45). Bring on the worst popes in history! If even they, with all their power, haven't been able to make a dent in Catholic truth, then it really does look as though something more than natural is going on. The Spirit really must be protecting us, because even the legendarily immoral Benedict IX and Alexander VI never managed to teach error in matters of faith and morals.

One of the bad popes Chamberlin put in his 1969 book was Pope Clement VII, the pope who did not grant Henry VIII the decree of nullity he sought re: his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Clement VII was  not a nepotist, although he had benefited from his cousin Pope Leo X's "enjoyment" of the papacy. He may have been too much of a Medici and picked the wrong sides in the conflicts between France and the Holy Roman Empire, etc., but he was not a morally reprehensible man. He did uphold the validity of Henry and Katherine's marriage.

Some authorities have thought that Pope St. Pius V erred with the Papal Bull Regnans in Excelsis, both in timing and in content, deposing Elizabeth I and encouraging her subjects to rebel against her, depose and replace her; it came too late to aid the Northern Rebellion and provoked Elizabeth and her Government to pass stricter recusant laws and persecute Catholics.

The other bad popes Chamberlin identifies:

• Pope Stephen VI (896–897), who had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied, and thrown in the Tiber.
• Pope John XII (955–964), who gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife.
• Pope Benedict IX (1032–1044, 1045, 1047–1048), who "sold" the Papacy
• Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who is lampooned in Dante's Divine Comedy
• Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who complained that he did not hear enough screaming when Cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.
• Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), a Borgia, who was guilty of nepotism and whose unattended corpse swelled until it could barely fit in a coffin.
• Pope Leo X (1513–1521), a spendthrift member of the Medici family who once spent 1/7 of his predecessors' reserves on a single ceremony

Next month: the Legend of Pope Joan.

Tomorrow on the Son Rise Morning Show: The Bad Popes

Perhaps you remember the days before amazon.com when the Barnes & Noble catalog came in the mail with lists of bargain books. One of the remainders they listed--and stocked in their brick and mortar stores--was E.R. Chamberlin's book, The Bad Popes.

Matt Swaim and I will continue our series on Church History Apologetics on the Son Rise Morning Show, held over by Annie Mitchell demand, tomorrow morning at 7:45 a.m. Eastern time/6:45 a.m. Central time.

I will continue to occupy this time slight every third Monday of the month as we discuss different historical issues. Please note that Monday, October 19 is also the anniversary of St. Philip Howard's death as a martyr in chains, held in the Tower of London, in 1595, so I will be certain to mention him too.

Listen live here, on Sacred Heart Radio.

Historical Apologetics Series on the Son Rise Morning Show

Matt Swaim and I will close out our series on Church History and Apologetics with another of the positive contributions of the Church to Western Culture: the establishment of the university (and Church contributions to education in general). You'll have to listen on-line or with the Sacred Heart Radio app, because my 6:45 a.m. Central/7:45 a.m. Eastern time slot isn't carried by EWTN anymore.

As Thomas E. Woods, Jr., explained in his book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization the Church's development of the university should put to rest the claim that the culture of the Middle Ages was anti-intellectual and superstitious (the Dark Ages):

It was, after all, in the High Middle Ages that the university came into existence. The university, which developed and matured at the height of Catholic Europe, was a new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, comes to us directly from the medieval world. And it is no surprise that the Church should have done so much to foster the nascent university system since, according to historian Lowrie Daly, it was "the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

The precise origins of the very first universities are lost in obscurity, though the picture becomes ever clearer as we move into the thirteenth century. We cannot give exact dates for the appearance of universities at Paris and Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, since they evolved over a period of time — the former beginning as cathedral schools, and the latter as informal gatherings of masters and students. But we may safely say that the process occurred during the latter half of the twelfth century.

In order to identify a particular medieval school as a university, we look for certain characteristic features. For one thing, a university possessed a core of required texts, on which professors would lecture and to which they would add their own insights. A university was also characterized by well-defined academic programs lasting a more or less fixed number of years, as well as by the granting of degrees. The granting of a degree, since it entitled the recipient to be called master, amounted to admitting new people to the teaching guild. Although the universities often struggled with outside authorities for self-government, they generally attained it. They also desired and received legal recognition as a corporation. . . .

The university and the intellectual life it fostered played an indispensable role in Western civilization. Christopher Dawson observed that from the days of the earliest universities "the higher studies were dominated by the technique of logical discussion — the quaestio and the public disputation which so largely determined the form of medieval philosophy even in its greatest representatives. "Nothing," says Robert of Sorbonne, "is known perfectly which has not been masticated by the teeth of disputation," and the tendency to submit every question, from the most obvious to the most abstruse, to this process of mastication not only encouraged readiness of wit and exactness of thought but above all developed that spirit of criticism and methodic doubt to which Western culture and science have owed so much."

According to historian of science Edward Grant, the creation of the university, the commitment to reason and rational argument, and the overall spirit of inquiry that characterized medieval intellectual life amounted to "a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world…though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged. Perhaps it will always retain the status it has had for the past four centuries as the best-kept secret of Western civilization."

In his Historical Sketches, Blessed John Henry Newman traced the history of the development of the university from the Academy of Athens, through the Schools of Charlemagne, to Paris and Oxford. He wrote The Rise and Progress of the Universities while working on the Catholic University of Ireland. In the chapter on the collegiate system of Oxford he provided some details of the room and board provided during the Middle Ages:

Accordingly, one of the earliest movements in the University, almost as early as the entrance into it of the monastic bodies, was that of providing maintenance for poor scholars. The authors of such charity hardly aimed at giving more than the bare necessaries of life,—food, lodging, and clothing,—so as to make a life of study possible. Comfort or animal satisfaction can hardly be said to have entered into the scope of their benefactions; and we shall gain a lively impression of the sufferings of the student, before the era of endowments, by considering his rude and hardy life even when a member of a College. From an account which has been preserved in one of the colleges of Cambridge, we are able to extract the following horarium of a student's day. He got up between four and five; from five to six he assisted at Mass, and heard an exhortation. He then studied or attended the schools till ten, which was the dinner hour. The meal, which seems also to have been a breakfast, was not sumptuous; it consisted of beef, in small messes for four persons, and a pottage made of its gravy and oatmeal. From dinner to five p.m., he either studied, or gave instruction to others, when he went to supper, which was the principal meal of the day, though scarcely more plentiful than dinner. Afterwards, problems were discussed and other studies pursued, till nine or ten; and then half an hour was devoted to walking or running about, that they might not go to bed with cold feet;—the expedient of hearth or stove for the purpose was out of the question.

Church History Apologetics Series: The Catholic Church and Art

Anna Mitchell and I will continue our discussion of Church History and Apologetics on the Son Rise Morning Show tomorrow (Monday, August 24) at 6:45 a.m. Central time; 7:45 a.m. Eastern time--right after the quarter hour news headlines. Listen live online here.

We are a week later than usual because she was on vacation last week. This month's topic is a little different than the others: we are going to look at the Church's positive contribution to culture in art and architecture and how that often turns into an attack.

When we think of the glories of Gothic art and architecture or the great achievements of Renaissance and Baroque churches in all the great capitals of Europe, we must recognize that the Church, through its patronage and with the assistance of contributors rich and poor, built those churches and cathedrals, commissioned those paintings, mosaics, and statues for the honor and glory of God. At the same time that many appreciate the beauty of those works, some wonder about their source and value. As I noted a couple of years ago in an article for Homiletic and Pastoral Review:

The strange flipside of these achievements, however, is that someone might say that the Vatican, and the churches around the world, should sell priceless artwork, using the money to eliminate poverty. That adjective “priceless” points out one of the flaws of that argument: who could afford to pay what it’s worth? But, even if other museums, and private collectors, could pay what that vast treasure of beauty is worth, would it really be enough to take care of all the poor? What happens when that money has been distributed, and the problem of poverty has still not been solved?

As nearly every guidebook comments about each great European capital with a Catholic heritage, the cathedrals and churches are a great free refuge and resource for the weary tourist. They offer shelter from heat and rain, a place to rest, and a feast for the eyes to see great artwork by Titian, Raphael, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Rubens, Tintoretto, and many others, especially that great and prolific artist, “Anonymous.” What about justice to the benefactors who gave artwork to the Church for the purpose of praising God in beautiful churches? Is it fair to their memory? Once the artwork is in private hands, for example, who will have access to it? The poor? Not likely.

I've encountered this rather twisted view of how the Church should sell this artwork--as if it belongs to the Church in the first place--often. When Pope Francis spoke about a poor Church for the poor, there were several comments (see this one in The Catholic Herald for example) that suggested he should sell off these priceless works. Even The National Catholic Reporter, with an article by John Allen, showed how ridiculous such an idea is:

To begin with, the legendary wealth of the Vatican is to some extent more myth than reality. The Vatican has an annual operating budget of under $300 million, while Harvard University, arguably the Vatican of elite secular opinion, has a budget of $3.7 billion, meaning it's 10 times greater. The Vatican's "patrimony," what other institutions would call an endowment, is around $1 billion. In this case, Harvard's ahead by a robust factor of 30, with an endowment of $30.7 billion.

The Vatican bank controls assets estimated at more than $6 billion, which is nobody's idea of chump change, but most of that isn't the Vatican's money. It belongs to religious orders, dioceses, movements and other Catholic organizations, and is managed by the Institute for the Works of Religion to facilitate moving it around the world.

Of course, these figures don't include the value of masterpieces of Western art housed in the Vatican, such as Michelangelo's "Pietà." The Vatican considers itself custodians of these items, not their owners, and it's a matter of Vatican law that they can never be sold or borrowed against. As a result, they have no practical value and are listed on the Vatican books at a value of 1 euro each.

National Geographic years ago published a special issue on great human artistic achievements: of all the buildings and sites mentioned, it was only in the article about St. Peter's Basilica that the author thought everything should be sold and given to eliminate poverty. Does anyone ever suggest that the National Cathedral in Washington or the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, two Episcopalian churches, should sell all their artwork and give the proceeds to the poor? 

Such a comment always reminds me of the episode of Jesus at Bethany being anointed with costly perfume: in St. John's Gospel, Judas Iscariot protests that the nard should have been sold to feed the poor, in St. Matthew and St. Mark, the disciples make the same comment, but Jesus defends her action: she has done something good for Him and they should not begrudge it.

Church History Apologetics: Blessed Junipero Serra

It's the third Monday of the month, so I'll be talking Church History Apologetics with Matt Swaim on the Son Rise Morning Show during the last national segment on EWTN: after the 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central news break with Annie Mitchell. We'll discuss the controversy over Blessed Junipero Serra and Spanish colonization in California.

Pope Francis will canonize the Mallorca-born missionary priest when he visits the United States in September this year. There has been some controversy about this because some people accuse Blessed Junipero Serra of abusing the natives in California while establishing the missions. The first thing to establish is that critics are chronologically confused, according to Professor Ruben Mendoza of California State University, Monterey Bay, in this National Catholic Reporter article:

The professor has been involved in research and conservation projects at several California missions founded by Serra. He said many of the Spanish missionary's critics are confusing the impact of Spanish colonizing and missionary activity on the native communities with what happened after California became a U.S. territory in 1848.

"A decimation of the Native American population," Mendoza said, occurred "in the period after 1850; Serra had no connection to that phenomenon. Those who criticize Serra the most tend to conflate the American period with that of the missionaries."

Another major objection to Serra's canonization involves reports that Native American adults at his mission were beaten.

"There is no documentation that Serra himself abused any Native American," Mendoza said. "The system under which he operated did use corporal punishment, but that was also used for transgressors from all walks of life, including soldiers."

Mendoza supports the canonization and said he believes it "has much to offer the peoples of Latin America, especially those of us of Mexican-Indian heritage who currently live under a shadow of doubt and denigration."

Just as with St. Thomas More during the Wolf Hall controveries, I've seen some articles with the headline or comment: "Saint or sinner?" and the answer, just as with St. Thomas More, is: both! Sainthood does not mean that the canonized confessor or martyr was perfect or never sinned; it means that the Church has determined that the confessor practiced the theological virtues heroically and that, by evidence of both devotion and miracles through the intercession of the saint, the Church is certain that the confessor is in heaven. Everyone in heaven is a saint, canonized and recognized by the Church or not; that's one reason we have the glorious feast of All Saints Day.

As the head of the Knights of Columbus noted, these attacks on Father Serra are part of the "Black Legend":

The “black legend” is a term historians use to explain a propaganda war of English speaking nations against Spain. It originally arose when Spain had a vast empire and England was competing with Spain.

We all know, for example, the story of the Spanish Armada trying to invade England. It has come down through history as a prejudice against Spaniards as being unusually cruel, unusually greed, unusually untrustworthy. . . .

The presumption of the black legend is that the Indians — the native peoples — were treated cruelly, maybe were tortured, were exploited. When the fact of the matter is, what drove and motivated Junípero Serra and the other missionaries was the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe, that these people have dignity. When she appeared to Juan Diego, she said: “Am I not your Mother?” Did she not come with their appearance, as one of them. She also said: “I have the honor to be your mother.”

Disciples of Our Lady of Guadalupe understand that she is coming out of respect. And therefore, evangelization does not mean domination; it doesn’t mean exploitation. It means bringing the Gospel to people and cultures that you respect.

And Carl Anderson notes that it was the State of California, in the days of the 49ers, that abused the natives:

And that’s the key to understanding Junípero Serra. In fact, many of the horrible things that people want to say occurred under the Spanish missionaries actually occurred after Spain and Mexico were driven out of California. It is during the gold rush — in 1849 and 1850 — that you see the suppression of the Indian people, i.e. the natives of California. . . .

You even have the governor of the time saying the Indians must be exterminated. There was no thought of treating the native people with the kind of respect and multiculturalism that Junípero Serra wanted. The governor stated this quite clearly and used the word ‘extermination’, so it’s very clear what was going on.

The Black Legend is one of those sloppy, easy ways to think (or not think) about history, using some simplistic, generalized framework to sort out the heroes and the villains. We know that history is more complex than that but this propaganda device is hard to dislodge from popular culture.

A final aspect of this issue is the statue of Blessed Junipero Serra in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection (pictured above/public domain)--there was a move to have it replaced with one of Sally Ride, but that has been put on hold, at least until after Pope Francis' visit. St. Damien of Molokai, the Leper priest, is the other Catholic saint depicted in the hall. Do you know which historic figures represent your state? Perhaps I'll quiz Matt on who represents Ohio!

The Third Monday of the Month: Historical Apologetics Series

Matt Swaim and I will discuss another topic of Church History this morning on the Son Rise Morning Show, this one in the not so distant past: The case of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. We'll be live after the 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central news break and you could listen live here if there's no EWTN affiliate carrying the show in your area.

From my article in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, on which this series is based:

In the modern era, of course, the great historical attack against the Catholic Church comes from the supposed silence and inaction of Pope Pius XII, standing by while Jews were tortured and murdered during the Nazi Holocaust. The supreme irony about this historical canard is that after World War II, Pope Pius XII was hailed by survivors of the Holocaust and the first leaders of Israel, like Golda Meir, as a great “righteous Gentile.” He was lauded for his efforts to protect the Jewish people in Italy (in Rome especially), and throughout the period leading up to and during the war, his consistent call for peace. Yet, because of a play, a work of dramatic fiction presented in the early 1960s, Pope Pius XII posthumously became the target of attack because he supposedly did not denounce the Nazi regime, at least not in the terms that some now wanted him to use then. The title of the play is “The Deputy,” by Rolf Hochhuth. Once it appeared on the stage, the pope’s reputation changed dramatically. He became known as “Hitler’s Pope” (from the title of John Cornwell’s 1999 book).

Here are a few facts to present against the view that the Catholic Church or Pope Pius XII was silent in the face of Nazi atrocities:

~Pope Pius XII spoke out clearly against the entire Nazi campaign of invasion of sovereign lands, like Czechoslovakia and Poland.
~He spoke out against the extermination of Jews directly in his Christmas message of December 1942, and The New York Times praised him for it.
~Pope Pius XII took many actions to defend Jews:
~~He issued false documents, including baptismal documents, so that Jewish refugees could emigrate;
~~He worked with other governments to obtain visas (but not the United States of America or Great Britain, which would not allow immigration of Jewish refugees);
~~He opened Castel Gandolfo, as well as convents and monasteries throughout Rome and Vatican City, for Jewish Italians to take refuge.

And then there is the deeper issue of the danger that Jews, as well as Catholic and Protestant converts from Judaism, would face if he had directly and pointedly attacked Nazi policies toward their “race.” The International Red Cross knew at the time, just as Pope Pius XII did, that such statements would lead to reprisals. The bishop in Holland learned this by experience. Hitler’s agents warned the Archbishop of Utrecht not to speak out against the deportation of Dutch Jews, and when he did, the Nazis rounded up Catholic converts from Judaism, sending them to the death camps. These included the Carmelite nun, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (previously known as Edith Stein) who died at Auschwitz.

Finally, since this attack is aimed at the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, it’s important to remember the pope is infallible only when teaching on matters of faith and morals. The Church has never taught that the pope is impeccable, unable to err in practical matters and actions.

Please let me know if you have suggestions of other topics to cover in this series, which started in January this year.

Galileo, Science, and the Catholic Church

Since tomorrow is third Monday of the month, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show to discuss another "troublesome" event in Church History: Galileo, his Heliocentrism hypothesis, and Church reaction to not just his scientific theories but his scriptural interpretations. The Galileo episode is usually presented as one of the proofs that the Catholic Church is opposed to science.

The Vatican Observatory offers some insight here:

Why did Galileo get in trouble with the Church?

Many theories have been put forth over the years to explain why Galileo came into conflict with the Church. The mystery arises precisely because Galileo actually stood squarely in the long history of the Church’s support of science. Many churchmen of high standing, such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, had suggested even more radical cosmologies than Galileo did; Copernicus’ work itself had been available without controversy for more than sixty years before Galileo first published his telescopic observations. Most theories explain Galileo's problems with the Church as a clash of strong personalities; as coming from a fear that his ideas would threaten the basis of contemporary theology; or as a reaction by the Pope to the political pressures of the day.

The interpretation of the bible was certainly one of the principal contributing factors to the controversy. At the council of Trent, at the height of the protestant reformation just about twenty years before the birth of Galileo, the Catholic Church had solemnly declared that only the church could authentically interpret the bible and that private interpretation was forbidden. Now in 1616, just as the controversy about a sun-centered Copernican universe was heating up, the church’s holy office declared that Copernicanism was formally heretical because it contradicted many passages in the bible (e.g. Joshua 10: 11-13, in which the sun stops moving in the sky). Galileo had already written several essays on the interpretation of the bible in which he essentially said that the bible was written to teach us how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go. In these documents he essentially anticipated by about 400 years what the Catholic Church would teach about the interpretation of the bible, but he did so privately.

In these documents and in many others Galileo certainly showed himself to be a person with an acerbic writing style who courted controversy. He also had friends in high places, including Prince Cesi, the head of the scientific “Academy of the Lynxes”. Unfortunately for Galileo, Prince Cesi died just before the controversy arose over Galileo’s book: “Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems” (Dialogue).

For many years Galileo had a close friendship with cardinal Maffeo Barberini who had even sent Galileo a latin ode composed by the cardinal in praise of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries. This same cardinal became Pope Urban VIII, the reigning pontiff at the time of the church’s condemnation of Galileo.

In the dialogue, Galileo provided persuasive, but not conclusive, evidence for a Sun-centered system. In so doing, he challenged the classical Greek philosophy of nature, which had dominated thinking about the universe for millennia. To embrace Copernicanism was to threaten Aristotelianism. The persistent requirement of fidelity to Aristotelianism had nothing to do with a Sun-centered system; rather, Aristotelianism was the basis for the philosophical and theological teachings of the time. If Aristotelian natural philosophy crumbled, some feared that the whole system of theology that it supported would also crumble.

In addition, the trial of Galileo occurred during the Thirty Years War, which entered a critical phase exactly at the time of the Galileo trial in 1632. The trial may have been a reaction to the political pressure being put on Pope Urban VIII by the Spanish (and others). By attacking Galileo, the Pope could be seen as showing the more conservative elements that he was not a radical. Perhaps also this was a veiled way of putting political pressure on the rich and powerful Medici family, who were Galileo’s patrons, to stay out of choosing sides in that war.

You may listen live here tomorrow at 7:45 a.m. Eastern, 6:45 a.m. Central.

It's the Third Monday of the Month

That means that I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show to continue our series of discussions of Church History and Apologetics!

Matt Swaim and I will talk about St. Thomas More this morning after the 7:45 a.m. Eastern (6:45 a.m. Central) news headlines from Anna Mitchell. We'll base our discussion on my article from The National Catholic Register (just finished writing another for them which I'll submit for publication soon!)

Please listen live here or on your local EWTN affiliate.

The "Inquisition" on the Son Rise Morning Show

Matt Swaim and I will be discussing the "Inquisition" this morning on the Son Rise Morning Show in our Church History Apologetics series--right after the 6:45 a.m. Central time news headlines with Anna Mitchell (7:45 a.m. Eastern).

Since nobody expects it, we will focus on the Spanish Inquisition, although the term "Inquisition" could refer to various secular government efforts to eliminate religious heresy in various countries. England had an inquisition against the Lollards, for example. In southern France, the Albigensians were the threat to unity.

Herbert Butterfield helps us acknowledge the situation when he notes that the late medieval era into the sixteenth century was “a time when any serious error concerning divine things as almost universally regarded as blasphemy,” and that “state and the secular rulers could not imagine that religious non-conformity might be consistent with public order.”

In Homiletic & Pastoral Review, I wrote about the Spanish Inquisition:

The Monty Python cohort may have said, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” but Catholics can expect it to be brought up regularly. This exaggerated version emphasizes all the depths of the Black Legend of Spain: the tyranny of the popes and the Catholic Church, torture, and the multitude of victims writhing in agony, burned alive during the auto-da-fe. The quick facts to present in response to an attack on the Church concerning the Spanish Inquisition are these:

~The government wanted the Spanish Inquisition, not the Church; the State was in charge.
~Successive popes, like Pope Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII complained to Spain about the conduct of the Inquisition.
~The Church never tortured anyone—Spanish officials may have, but no Inquisitorial friar or monk ever tortured someone accused of heresy.
~The Church did not burn anyone to death; in fact, of the approximately 2,000 condemned to death by the State, very few were actually executed—they were usually burned in effigy, having fled the country.
~Those condemned were not burned alive at the stake during the auto-da-fe.

Those are the facts to present, but the deeper issue is that in medieval and early modern (Renaissance and Reformation) eras in Europe, heresy was a serious matter for the State. Queen Elizabeth I in England wanted all her subjects to be members of the Church of England, and King Philip II of Spain wanted all his subjects to be Catholics. To them, it was a measure of unity and loyalty in their realms. We look back and think, how could the government be so concerned about what doctrine their subjects believed, what religion they practiced? Governments today around the world are just as concerned about the religious practice of their citizens. Even the United States, which has enshrined religious liberty in our Bill of Rights, is facing a crisis of religious freedom and the rights of conscience.

As I posted last year, however, after finding a BBC video about the Spanish Inquisition, I realized there was even more to the story:

The BBC's examination of the myth of the Spanish Inquisition is balanced and exact in citing the facts about the history of that effort to suppress heresy, using for what at that time was new information gained from the opening of the archives of the office of the Inquisition. There is discussion of the propaganda of the Black Legend from print media to fiction to even opera (Verdi's Don Carlo). The most disturbing aspect of this propaganda, which did come from enemies of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Empire--many of whom were Protestant, we must admit--is how it contrasts with the horrible record of witch burning in Europe, mostly in Protestant countries. The BBC notes that around 3,000 were sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition, but that 150,000 were burned alive as witches--while the Spanish Inquisition rejected the so-called "evidence" of a woman being a witch. Yet even our era accepts the imagery of Spanish cruelty while ignoring northern European horrors.

The documentary points out that the Spanish Inquisition courts were so well known for their relative fairness that prisoners accused in other civil courts would pretend to be heretics just to switch. The Inquisition courts did allow for proving the negative--that the accused was not a heretic--while other civil courts in that era supposed the guilt of the accused just because he had been accused. Think of the 17th century victims of the false Popish Plot in England. Their efforts to prove themselves not guilty were frustrated by the assumption by the court that they were guilty of conspiracy and treason because they were Catholics. Whatever evidence they offered to prove for example that they could not have been where Titus Oates said they were because they had witnesses who could testify they were somewhere else--it would be rejected because the witnesses were Catholic and thus part of the conspiracy.

St. John Ogilvie on the Son Rise Morning Show

Matt Swaim and I will discuss the execution of St. John Ogilvie, SJ on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning at 6:35 a.m. Central/7:35 a.m. Eastern--right after the bottom of the hour news broadcast by Annie Mitchell. Listen online at ewtn.com/radio/

St. John Ogilvie, SJ was executed 400 years ago today in Scotland because he was a Catholic priest and would not accept James VI/I as the supreme governor of the church in Scotland. He demonstrated tremendous fortitude during his imprisonment and a wonderfully peaceful attitude when condemned to death. And the tortures inflicted upon him would have made Richard Topcliffe of Elizabeth I's time in England embarrassed at his own lack of creativity.

More about St. John Ogilvie here--I hope to post a follow up report on the special celebrations in Glasgow of his martyrdom. A prayer in honor of St. John Ogilvie:

God our Father, fountain of all blessing, We thank you for the countless graces that come to us in answer to the prayers of your saints. With great confidence we ask you in the name of your Son and through the prayers of St John Ogilvie to help us in all our needs.

Lord Jesus, you chose your servant St John Ogilvie to be your faithful witness to the spiritual authority of the chief shepherd of your flock. Keep your people always one in mind and heart, In communion with Francis our Pope, and all the bishops of your Church.

Holy Spirit, you gave St John Ogilvie light to know your truth, wisdom to defend it, and courage to die for it. Through his prayers and example bring our country into the unity and peace of Christ’s kingdom. Amen.

Next Monday, we'll continue our Church History Apologetics series by discussing the "Inquisition", Spanish or otherwise.

Next month in our apologetics series on the third Monday of April--St. Thomas More and Wolf Hall!

As Promised, the Crusades on the Son Rise Morning Show!

Matt Swaim and I will discuss the Crusades on the Son Rise Morning Show after the 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central newsbreak--listen live here.

We were going to include the Crusades as part of our monthly Historical Apologetics Series in February, but President Obama's comments at the National Prayer Breakfast last week moved it up in the schedule:

"Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ."

Pundits, historians, and others have been discussing those comments since last Thursday. The Crusades have been cited before, by former President William Clinton after the 9-11 attacks as the cause of radical Islamic hatred of the West, and they are often brought up as though the Christian West attacked the Islamic East. The opposite is the truth. The Crusades are not just one event, but most of the Crusades were efforts of the Christian West to free the Holy Land from Muslim domination, to defend Catholic Christians in the Holy Land and to make it safe for pilgrims to visit during Holy Week for example.

Of course, the President is correct that Christians, being sinners, have committed terrible deeds; whether or not they were in the name of Christ may be debatable. The Fourth Crusade, with its despoiling of Constantinople, never even reached the Holy Land--Pope St. John Paul II apologized to the Greek Orthodox and the Patriarch of Constantinople accepted the apology, wanting to heal the wounds caused by the Fourth Crusade.

One of the most commonly cited articles this weekend on social media at least was Thomas Madden's 2009 review  in First Things of Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam published by Columbia University Press. In "Inventing the Crusades" Madden reflected on serious historians' work to correct errors about the Crusades:

It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”

Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. For on the other side is, as Riley-Smith puts it “nearly everyone else, from leading churchmen and scholars in other fields to the general public.” There is the great Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume History of the Crusades is still a brisk seller for Cambridge University Press a half century after its release. It was Runciman who called the Crusades “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.

So we continue to write our scholarly books and articles, learning more and more about the Crusades but scarcely able to be heard. And when we are heard, we are dismissed as daft. I once asked Riley-Smith if he believed popular perceptions of the Crusades would ever be changed by modern scholarship. “I’ve just about given up hope,” he answered. In his new book he notes that in the last thirty years historians have begun to reject “the long-held belief that it [the Crusade movement] was defined solely by its theaters of operation in the Levant and its hostility toward Islam—with the consequence that in their eyes the Muslims move slightly off center stage—and many of them have begun to face up to the ideas and motivation of the Crusaders. The more they do so the more they find themselves contra mundum or, at least, contra mundum Christianum.”

At least we can keep trying! UPDATE: Anna Mitchell tells me this interview will be re-aired sometime in the 6:00 a.m. Eastern/5:00 a.m. Central hour of the SRMS tomorrow. Matt mentioned that I'll be on next Tuesday to talk about Shrove Tuesday and traditions in England before the Reformation. Get your pancakes ready--next Tuesday, February 17 at 7:35 a.m. Eastern; 6:35 a.m. Central after the bottom of the hour newscast.

Next month: The Inquisition. Spanish or Albigensian?

Monday Morning: Matt Swaim and I Go on Crusade! Deus Vult!

"Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ."--President Barack Obama, National Prayer Breakfast, February 5, 2015

History by sound bite is never a good idea and President Obama has been receiving lots of criticism for this remark which some have taken to create a moral equivalence between the Crusades and current ISIS atrocities or between the Inquisition (Spanish or otherwise, I assume) and the ISIS burning the Jordanian pilot alive.

Matt Swaim and I will discuss this in our Catholic History Apologetics Series on the Son Rise Morning Show Monday morning, February 9--in my usual time slot a little after 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central.

Matt and I were going to talk about the Crusades anyway this month, but the President's remarks gave the schedule some greater urgency! Live live here.

Image above: "Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont, given a late Gothic setting in this illumination from the Livre des Passages d'Outre-mer, c. 1490."

Full disclosure: I am a former Crusader! That is, I attended Kapaun-Mt. Carmel High School and our mascot was/is The Crusader!