What if someone had said, “We don’t really care that Catholics exist, but we don not think they should engage in Catholic activity.” ?
That is utter bullshit. The act of marrying a non-Catholic is not grounds for excommunication. I’d say that the propogation of the bullshit you just put repeated by some Protestants is what’s “encouraged and abetted exclusionary attitudes from protestants” in your neck of the woods.
More bullshit. For one thing, that’s not the teaching of the RCC. For another, there are Christian “Chinamen.” Some of those “Chinamen” are even Roman Catholic.
Isn’t that essentially what Hazel said?
tomndebb said
Incorrect. The catholic church has stood in the face of scientific progress time and again. We can look at the formal accusation made against to Galileo at his trial as proof:
At his Inquisition trial, Galileo was placed under house arrest and ordered
to recant his heretical views. The accusation against him read:
"Whereas you, Galileo…aged seventy years, were denounced in 1615, to this
Holy Office, for holding as true a false doctrine taught by many, namely, that
the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and that the earth moves, and
also with a diurnal motion; also, for having pupils whom you instructed in the
same opinions; also, for maintaining a correspondence on the same with some
German mathematicians; also, for publishing certain letters on the sun-spots,
in which you developed the same doctrine as true; also, for answering the
objections which were continually produced from the Holy Scriptures, by
quoting the said Scriptures according to your own meaning; and whereas hereupon
was produced the copy of a writing, in form of a letter professedly written to
you to a person formerly your pupil, in which, following the hypothesis of
Copernicus, you include several propositions contrary to the true sense and
authority of the Holy Scriptures; therefore (this Holy Tribunal being desirous
of providing against the disorder and mischief which were thence proceeding and
increasing to the detriment of the Holy Faith) by the desire of his Holiness and
the Most Emminent Lords, Cardinals of this supreme and universal Inquisition,
the two propositions of the stability of the sun, and the motion of the earth,
were qualified by the Theological Qualifiers as follows:
-
The proposition that the sun is the center of the world and immovable
from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because
it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures. -
The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor
immovable, but that it moves, and also with a durnal action, is also absurd,
philosophically false, and theologically considered, at least erroneous in
faith.
Therefore…, invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and His
Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence: We pronounce,
judge, and declare, that you Galileo… have rendered yourself vehemently
suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held
the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures)
that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to
west, and that the earth does move, and it not the center of the world; also
that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after is has been
declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture, and consequently,
that you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated
in the sacred canons and other general and particular constituents against
delinquents of this description. From which it is Our pleasure that you be
absolved, provided that with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in Our
presence, you abjure, curse, and detest, the said error and heresies, and
every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Church of
Rome."
I think that is pretty self explanatory.
I’m no expert, but I recall a Q/A session following a SJ Gould talk a couple of years back, where he adamantly expressed his opinion that the Catholic church has gotten a bum rap, and has been unfairly portrayed as the consistent opponent of science. (Of course, I personally do not accept Gould’s position of non-overlapping magisteria.)
How many astronomical advances were spurred by such things as the desire to select Easter?
braces, feel welcome to, in some other thread, list the “time and again” examples of obstructing scientific progress. The Galileo trial was politically motivated, and the alleged doctrinal heresy in the charges was nothing but a cheap excuse. Within a century and a half of that, the RCC had done a 180 and come down on the side of experimental research.
The Big Bang theory was originated by a Catholic Abbe.
Yeah, but that was more for his beliefs in materialism and pantheism than his specific scientific beliefs.
I’ve encountered many people who don’t like the Catholic Church because of their positions on abortion, birth control, homosexuality, and the ordination of women. This does not strike me as anti-Catholocism per se; these people take issue with specific doctrinal stands the Church has taken, about which reasonable people may disagree.
However, recently, I encountered for the first time the old-style “The Catholic Church is just plain eeevill” bigotry.
Unfortunately, it came from my mother.
Here’s the background: I grew up in a family with no particular religeous tradition. As my sister once put it: “we don’t go to church, we go to the library!”
I married a “cradle Catholic”, Irish ancestry, parochial schools, the whole nine yards. However, she was (and is) not overly devout. We practiced birth control, and went to church mostly at Easter and Christmas.
After our children were born, we enrolled them in Sunday School, and started to attend church more regularly. Eventually, I went through the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation) and am now officially Catholic. A moderately believing, not overly regularly church attending, Catholic, who occasionally disagrees with the hirearchy on some issues, but who finds the spiritual leadership on other issues to be useful. (For example, I am currently reassessing my support of the death penalty in part because of the Church’s position.)
So this Christmas, we were at my mother’s for dinner with the rest of my brothers and sisters and their families. As we were sitting around the table over coffee, Mother started to speak of her recent trip to Italy – she went over to visit my sister and her husband, who were living there for a time.
She had a wonderful time, visited Tuscany and Florence, etc. She also went to Rome and, of course, the Vatican.
So, what do most people report from a trip to the Vatican? Did she talk of the wonderful art, the ceremony, the Sistene Chapel ceiling, the sheer spectacle? Nope. She poured out a Pit-worthy rant about how the Catholic church had “raped” the countries of the world to amass their wealth and robbed the little old ladies of their hard-earned pension money and on and on.
I felt like I had just walked into a Klan meeting. To be fair to her, she was probably parroting what my brother-in-law (a lapsed Catholic) must have said as they walked through the place, but even so, her rant was so out of place at a dinner table where at least five people present were known to her to be Catholic.
We left fairly shortly thereafter, as we had another committment. While we didn’t say anything, my mother may have gotten the impression that we were not amused, because she called me a couple of days later and asked if we had been offended. I told her that we had, and that set her off again, this time talking about “if we are so fond of the Church what would we think if [she] just donated our share of our (prospective) inheritance to the Catholic Church”, etc., etc.
Finally, she decided that, as a Catholic I could no longer be trusted to not to give her money to the Church, that I would no longer be specified as executor of her estate, etc. etc.
The amusing part of all this (amusing to me, at least), was that during the time it took to get her will and the trust agreements, etc., all straigtened out (I have not been disinherited, I have just been removed as executor and trustee, which is just fine with me. Let my sisters have that headache!), she could not make changes to her investments.
One paper I had to sign got buried on my desk and others got delayed in the mail, while the market took a sharp upturn. So, basically, taking me off of the will and trust agreements cost her about 10 grand. As I said to my wife, “Bigotry has its cost”.
Of course, what you are choosing to ignore (or what you are parroting from anti-Catholic sources), is that there was no Church teaching that the heliocentric theory was heretical (which is why John Paul II finally got around to reversing the decision). In fact, several of the court officers refused to sign off on the verdict as it did not conform to Catholic teaching. (And Galileo was never threatened with torture or burning. Part of the rules of trial at that period included setting out the instruments of torture as a formality, but every historian of the event has noted that Galileo was treated with courtesy throughout the trial and was never personally threatened.) His eventual sentence was to set him up in a villa with a personal servant to live out his days and to continue to publish treatises on mathematics.
One aspect of the trial that gets overlooked by the Catholic bashers is that Galileo never presented valid scientific evidence to prove his claim. He offered two sets of evidence which were already known to be in error.
Now, even ignoring the distortions that surround the descriptions of Galileo’s trial, I quite agree that it was mockery of justice. However, the specific point for this discussion is that the trial was aimed at the person, Galileo Galilei. At no time did the Church forbid the continued scientific pursuit of the truth of the heliocentric theory, and when actual proof (that Galileo had not provided) was discovered, the Church published the information without any qualms.
Giordano Bruno was another sad case of the power of the authorities* being used to harrass an individual. However, Bruno was burned, not for his scientific claims, but because he had been ordained a priest and had declared that Jesus was not Divine and for espousing the idea of a materialist pantheism. I do not agree with his execution, but it was not an attack on science.
- In this case, “the authorities” meant not the hierarchy of the RCC, but every religious and most of the political powers of Europe. Bruno had a propensity for irritating everyone, and was condemned by the Calvinists when he lived among them, expelled from the French University where he taught, refused admission to Oxford University, condemned by the Lutheran authorities, and chased out of several other countries, Protestant and Catholic.
Even with his little con job pushing his “memory training,” I consider his execution to be wrong, but there was nothing about his execution that was an attack on science.
IMO, anyone who worships a variation of Christianity shouldn’t bother grousing about religious discrimination of the U.S.; there are folks of a lot of other faiths (or no faith at all) who have to put up with far worse.
By gay rights, I meant marriage and the right to have sex with each other should they so choose. I don’t want to get into an issue of whether this is a Constitutionally-protected right, but the fact remains that the Church opposes this to a greater degree than most people do. Or perhaps it’s just a more public, identifiable face for that opposition. Who is ‘we,’ by the way? (I’m not attempting to ascribe this behavior to all Catholics; I know that’s not the case.)
I’m aware, by the way, that the Catholic Church and related bodies were once at the forefront of science. And I don’t read anti-Catholic sources. Can we not play that game?
Although one could argue that putting its main proponent on trial for his life - even if it was a formality - might put a damper on things. 
Was it not believed to be heretical, or just not on the books? The parenthetical bit, at least from a humorous perspective, might illustrate the problem. Galileo died in 1642. JP 
reversed the decision about 350 years later. The bandwagon-hopper.
Galileo was never put on trial for his life. Anti-Catholic and anti-religious writer Thomas Huxley is recorded as having noted that a review of the trial shows that the Church “had the best of it” in terms of what really went on. One could make the argument that putting Galileo on trial had dampened the enthusiasm of those pursuing the facts if there was any evidence that anyone else stopped studying the heavens or publishing their reports. However, the opposite is true. Many astronomers continued searching the stars and eventually discovered the proof that Galileo never had. (And even if one wants to limit the discussion to church actions, it must be noted that Galileo’s works received an imprimatur in 1741–late, but not 350 years late.)
The reversal of Galileo’s trial is not a reversal of the church’s position on heliocentrism, but an acknowledgement that there were irregularities in the trial, itself. There had never been a pronouncement by the church that the sun moved around the earth, so it is difficult to claim that such a position could be heresy. (In fact, the claim by the authors of the trial verdict that Galileo had engaged in heresy is one of the reasons that the trial was re-examined and reversed.)
The Arch Diocese of Philadelphia offers same sex couple counseling. Hate the sin, not the sinner?
The ones who misuse apostrophes do.
tomndebb
It seemed to put a damper on Renee:
“Doubtless you know that Galileo was recently censured by the inquisitors of the faith, and that his views about the movement of the Earth were condemned as heretical. I must tell you that all the things I explained in my treatise, which included the doctrine of the movement of the Earth, were so independent that it is enough to discover that one of them is false to know that all the arguments I was using were unsound. Though I thought they were based on very certain and evident proofs, I would not wish, for anything in the world, to maintain them against the authority of the church…I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto to live well you must live unseen.”
Renee Descartes 1634
If you are correct why were the books by Galileo and Copernicus
placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.
The Index was established with the very paternalistic (and wrong) view that the masses should not be allowed to look at texts that would sway their untutored minds. (It was always possible for a scholar to petition to have the right to study a book on the Index. I think such paternalism is foolish, but even the Church recognized that books on the Index did not immediately endanger anyone’s soul.)
Copernicus did not make the first Index (1559). At the height of the Galileo flap, his De Revolutionibus (On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies) was placed in the second category of the Index–works that needed to be edited for consistency with the faith. The changes required were quite minor and there are, indeed, Italian copies of the book from that period that contain the amendations, so it was not subject to a complete ban.
Galileo got his Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems banned, but that was the specific work in which he had ridiculed the pope and his theological opponents, claiming without evidence that the Church needed to change its teachings regarding terracentrism. Again, I think the banning of Dialogues was as stupid as the trial it spawned, but it was not his science that got Galileo in trouble.
As for Descartes, his le Monde, that he chose to suppress, was a work of philosophy, not of science. It may be that some astronomer was fearful of pursuing further investigations once the RCC followed the example of Calvin and Luther (who had condemned Copericus) by muzzling Galileo, but I have yet to see any evidence of it.
Fundamental difference is a Catholic IS what one does and believes, while a homosexual is what one is. There is also nothing unique in any way about “Catholic activity”. There is something unique about homosexual sex.
Nowadays you might be right. However, historically, Catholics had it almost as bad as blacks in some parts of the US. Do not try and tell my grandma that she “didn’t have it bad”; when she was a wee lass, the KKK would march around. They had to hide behind the sofa in case the bastards tried to bust up the house or shoot into it. Very few other groups have had the numbers to achieve such discrimination; in America, its the big groups that sees to get the worst of it.
Hell, Catholics still face discrimination and at times, harassment in Northern Ireland. Of course, so does the the other side.
Then Desmostylus said: Well, Milum might come back later to address the issue when he doesn’t have his friend Jack Daniels with him. Then again, he might not.
Then again Milum might.
Pardon me for interupting the in-depth, dusty discussions of the intriques and double dealings of the Catholic Church in the dark distance past, my only wish is to explain the subtlies and nuances of my earlier remarks. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I say that Jack Daniels did it and be done.
** “Chinaman’s Chance” of going to Heaven:* In the California Goldfields of the eighteenth century, back when you americans discriminated against chineese immigrants, chinamen were not allowed to file a claim. As in " Joe, you don’t have a chinaman’s chance of registering your claim."
Its a “saying” for goodness sake!*
** Excommunicaion for marrying outside the church.* the structure of the Catholic Chuch is such that they can excommunicate whom the hell they please, however when I married into the Catholic Church in the sixties my shy, blushing, Catholic bride was saved from the shame of excommunication when I signed over the souls all my future children to the Church by promicing to raise them Catholic. I didn’t mind. I thought the cermony and rituals would do them good. I sent them to Catholic schools and they turned out fine.
- I think that refering to the Roman Catholic Church as the “RCC” is chic-flip, and shows a lack of respect for a venerable institution.