DARK HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH!!!

 THE BOOK------DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH !

ON  THE  INSIDE  COVER  JACKET:

With  1.2  billion  members,  the  Catholic  Church  is  one  of  the  world's  oldest  institutions  and  has  played  a  crucial  part  in  the  development  of  Western  civilization.  But  in  its  rise  from  Jewish  sect  to  global  faith,  it  has  been  both  the  persecuted  and  the  persecutor;  it  has  become  powerful  but  guilty  of  corruption;  and  it  has  preached  moral  purity  but  has  been  marred  by  abuse  scandals.

From  the  persecution  of  the  early  Christians  in  ancient  Rome,  through  the  terrors  of  the  anti-heresy  witch  hunts  of  the  notorious  Grand  Inquisitor,  Torquemada,  to  papal  collaboration  with  the  Nazis  during  World  War  11,  Dark  History  of  the  Catholic  Church  tells  the  stories  of  heretics  and  pogroms,  Mother  Teresa  and  martyred  priests,  papal  purges  and  crooked  clergy,  false  prophets  and  faithless  pontiffs.

ON  THE  BACK  COVER  WE  READ:

Headed  by  the  Pope  and  administered  by  more  than  400,000  priests,  the  Catholic  Church  is  the  world's  largest  Christian  church.  But  despite  its  many  good  works,  the  Church  has  some  dark  episodes  and  scandals  staining  its  reputation.

Spanish  Inquisition

Between  1480  and  1800,  hundreds  of  thousands  were  tries  and  tortured  as  heretics,  with  confessions  extracted  by  methods  including  branding,  the  rack,  toe  crushing,  bone  breaking,  beatings,  foot  roasting,  and  blinding  by  red-hot  pokers.  If  found  guilty,  the  victims  were  then  strangled  and  burned  to  death.

Death  by  Translation

In  1536,  William  Tyndale  was  burned  at  the  stake  for  translating  and  distributing  copies  of  the  Bible  in  English.

Selling  Sin

"As  soon  as  a  coin  in  the  coffee  rings / the  soul  from  purgatory  springs."  In  the  sixteenth  century,  Catholic  preacher  Johann  Tetzel  famously  provoked  Martin  Luther  by  selling  indulgences,  or  forgiveness  of  sins,  for  the  supposed  transgressions  of  the  dead  to  their  surviving  relatives.

THE  DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  -  Schisms,  Wars,  Inquisitions,  Witch  Hunts,  Scandals,  Corruption

by  Michael  Kerrigan

TO  BE  CONTINUED  WITH  "THE  INTRODUCTION"

DARK  HISTORY  of  the    CATHOLIC CHURCH

by  Michael  Kerrigan

INTRODUCTION

When it comes to Catholicism, there's no shortage of material for a "dark

history" - some readers will wonder whether there is any other kind. An

understandable reaction, perhaps even justifiable, but it's not the business of

this book to offer some sort of divine "Last Judgment' on the Church

'See ... the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners!'

Does St Francis's Sermon to the Birds signify more than Pius IX's strictures against democracy? How would you weigh the Sistine Chapel against child abuse? Notre Dame against the crimes of the Crusaders? Which should matter more in the scheme of things: the incredible courage the Church inspired in its many martyred believers, or its wholesale torture and execution of its foes? What of those nuns and priests who played their part in saving Jewish families from destruction in the Holocaust? Can their heroism counterbalance the Vatican's reluctance to condemn? How, to take a more down-to-

Missionaries of Charity in Koikata commemorate the anniversary of their founder's death. Mother Teresa exemplified Catholicism at its best and worst. More worldly than she seemed; more selective in her love, more ruthless in her actions, she nevertheless inspired a great many to good works.

earth example from contemporary life, do you weigh the work of a nursing sister in an African hospice against the Church's refusal to countenance the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS? And what would it matter, others may ask, if Catholicism had done no end of good, if the whole historical evidence is founded on a lie?

We're never going to agree. Mother Teresa has become a case in point, fast-tracked for sainthood by the Church to the bemusement of liberal sceptics for whom she's been exposed - emphatically and repeatedly - as a charlatan. Even if all the criticisms against her are true, it might be argued that the inspiration she's given others more than offsets any harm she's done - or good she's failed to do. At the very least she was a walking, talking feel-good factor: in a famous 1988 study, Harvard students shown movie-footage of Mother Teresa ministering to the sick registered a measurable rise in IgA (Immunoglobulin A) levels. In other words, she did something beautiful for their immune systems - a miracle of the psychological placebo effect, if not of God.

A Catholic Cosmos

The Church is too big and complex to be characterized as any one thing: the dogmatism with which it speaks is in this sense misleading. 'Roma locate est, causa finita est' said St Augustine, simply - 'Rome has spoken, the case is closed' - but Rome itself is much more ambiguous than it seems. Its sheer size precludes straightforwardness. When they called it the Catholic (or 'universal') Church, they may have been exaggerating, but not by much. It's hard to think of any historic institution that can compare. The hegemony of Egypt's pharaohs may have lasted several times longer, but it extended over only a relatively tiny patch of Earth. The U.S. presidency might surpass it now both in influence and reach, but the United States has been a world power for only a matter of decades, and a 'full-spectrum dominance' for only a few years.

While in some ways it may seem absurd to judge a religion by the same standards as a secular state, Catholicism isn't just any religion; isn't just any world religion even. 'How many divisions has the Pope?' asked a scornful Stalin. And he had a point - well into the nineteenth century the Papal States had been a temporal realm, with a real army. Even since that time, through a century or so in which its authority has been 'merely' spiritual, it's had a major - sometimes decisive - role in world affairs.

And, as the Church is quick to remind us, its power isn't limited to this world. 'Whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in heaven,' Christ told St Peter (Matthew 18: 18). Protestants may dispute the Church's interpretation of the verse - as carte blanche for world religious domination - and atheists dispute the very premise on which it's founded, but there is really no doubt that Catholicism is conceived on an unimaginably awe-inspiring scale. If its structures transcend our Earthly existence (or are at least supposed to), it claims as a community of souls to bring together not just the living but the righteous dead. Alongside the 'Church Militant', fighting the good fight in this world, there's the 'Church Suffering'

Christ sits in judgment, as imagined by an artist of the fourteenth-century School of Rimini. How would the Saviour think His Church has done? 'Feed my sheep,' said Jesus (John 21:17), but has the Catholic Church been a Good Shepherd - or a self-serving institution?

St Theresa of Lisieux, the 'Little Flower', has inspired and cheered millions with her simple faith and her down-to-earth approach to Christian life. But her childlike ingenuousness isn't an adequate basis for the building of a world religion: how is Catholicism to keep its innocence?

in purgatory, awaiting our prayers for their salvation, and the 'ChurchTriumphant' with God and the saints in heaven. Covering an infinity of space and an eternity of time, and bringing together billions in its congregation, the Catholic Church is the vastest of institutions.

The Inner Life

And yet, at the same time, it's one that has touched the most intimate lives of its believers, for better and for worse, occupying their innermost psychic space with its spiritual assumptions and moral laws. While this has meant mystic ecstasy for some, for others it's spelled

IN  THE  BOX

GUILTY AS CHARGED?

The view that Catholics have to carry round with them a crippling sense of guilt is a relatively new one. British travellers in Italy, from Byron and Shelley to E.M. Forster, came away enraptured at the carefree attitudes they found. While some attributed this to sunshine, warm-bloodedness and an essentially childlike ingenuousness, others identified a religious cause. As Catholics, the reasoning went, Italians could basically get up to anything they liked all week, then confess on Saturday and have their sins wiped clean. Since Italianness and Catholicism were equally alien to these visitors, we don't know how far they distinguished between the two. The 'carefree Catholic' stereotype may be rooted in that same condescending view of the ethnic 'Other' that was to produce the grinning black minstrel figure a little later.

The Irish haven't escaped such stereotyping - that excruciating 'top o' the morning' cheeriness - but where religion's concerned, they have been taken more seriously. Irish Catholicism (and what are taken to be its derived forms in Britain, Australasia and North America) is assumed to bring with it a well-nigh unbearable burden of guilt. Some have attributed this to Jansenism. The theology of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) took from the works of St Augustine the conviction that man was born all but irredeemably steeped in sin. Without direct divine intervention, he was damned. Jansenism was taken up with morose enthusiasm in seventeenth-century France. So close did it come to complete despair, though, that it was condemned as heresy and suppressed. The suggestion is that it didn't disappear completely but - taken back by young seminarians - endured in Ireland.

A persuasive theory - or it would be if it were actually supported by any historical evidence. Then again, there's only the sketchiest evidence that Irish (or any other) 'Catholic Guilt' exists at all. A UC Berkeley/Notre Dame survey of U.S. teenagers could find no evidence that the Catholics were abnormally tormented. The issue remains unresolved.

Lord Byron in nineteenth-century Rome, for him a playground of pleasure - the perfect antidote to an uptight England. Such differences, if they exist at all, are likely to be cultural and contextual - there's little evidence that Catholics feel more or less guilty than other people.

Sexual repression and an all but paralyzing sense of sinfulness. The idea of 'Catholic Guilt' may be a cliche, but can we be sure it's without foundation? Any more than we can understand the (equally glib) contention that Catholicism can see women only as 'virgins' or as 'whores'? That one who's 'born a Catholic' is 'scarred for life', his or her identity determined - regardless of conscious theological (dis)beliefs - may be an exaggeration, but is it really so completely devoid of truth?

This book can do no more than hint at that darker dimension of Catholic history which has acted itself out in the tormented consciences of unhappy individuals over centuries. That the same set of values has buoyed up the spirits of St Theresa of Lisieux, fortified the courage of St Joan and transported St John of the Cross to religious rapture, perhaps only underlines a deep ambivalence at the heart of the Catholic Church and faith.

John Paul II is welcomed by joyous crowds on his visit to Ireland in 1979: this 'rock-star pope' gave the Church a new and friendly face. Behind the scenes, though, Catholicism was as austere as ever in its moral teachings; and often, as hypocritical as ever in its own affairs.

Successions, Failures

Our main preoccupation here has to be the Church's changing role in a changing world - and this is an enormous subject in itself. Dip into Catholicism's history and you'll find what's supposed to be a story of seamless continuity - of 'apostolic succession' - a narrative of rifts and crises, of fits and starts. At the outset, a tiny Jewish sect; then a minority-cult in imperial Rome; and in medieval Europe the keeper of an unquestioned world-view. From this time on, the apostolic succession was beset by a series of opposing forces, from rival Christianities through secular scepticism to twentieth-century totalitarianism - and finally to consumerism in our own time. Even at its strongest, the Catholic Church has shown itself again and again to be all too flawed. No Catholic would seriously suggest taking the life of Alexander VI as a model; few would dispute that the first 'infallible' Pope, Pius IX, was personally to prove very fallible indeed. Conversely, it's often been in its times of greatest apparent weakness that the Church has shown most integrity, all the way through from the Roman catacombs to Communist Poland.

Changing Times, Changing Church

Perspective is all, of course: one commentator's 'inconsistency' is another one's 'flexibility'; what seems 'monolithic' to one man may be admirably 'coherent' for another. Down the centuries, in fact, the Catholic

Sister Marie Benedict tends a patient in a hospital run by the French Fraternite de Notre Dame in Mongolia. All around the world, men and women are devoting their lives to others with single-minded heroism, inspired to do so by their Catholic faith.

Church has proven much more adaptable than might be imagined - or, as one might see it, much more willing to trim and tack to the prevailing wind. What sound like they should be fundamental 'truths' have simply been dropped into the religious mix at intervals - the idea of Purgatory in the sixth century and that of Papal Infallibility not until the nineteenth century. 'Heretics' went to the stake in the sixteenth century for introducing the sort of vernacular scripture that Catholicism would introduce itself in the twentieth. Much more constant, a cynic might say, has been the

IN  THE  BOX

SACRED SECRETS

There are over 50 miles of shelving in the Vatican's Secret Archives; 35,000 volumes in the catalogue alone. Much remains unavailable - a 75-year quarantine rule means that scholars have only recently had access to documents dating from World War 1I. As for earlier material, nothing will convince the determined conspiracy theorist that the Church isn't covering up the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalen and lord knows what else, but the reality is mostly more mundane. In a post-Da Vinci Code spasm of transparency, though, the Archive has released a range of items. A petition from England's nobles asking Clement VII for the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon; the proceedings of the trial of Galileo; Leo X's decree excommunicating Martin Luther... There's nothing here we didn't know about, but this is the real stuff of history, more intriguing than any fantasy could be.

Church's tendency to speak flatteringly to power and to take the side of wealth and rank in any struggle with the people.

The criticism is by no means wholly fair, but it comes a great deal too close for comfort: many within the Church would admit as much. A more charitable view would acknowledge the difficulties facing any movement that hopes to make a difference in the real world without at the same time compromising its ideals. Again, it's a matter of point-of-view: do we focus on the dedication and courage of so many ordinary priests and nuns and members of the laity in the face of hardship and danger down the centuries or on the excesses and hypocrisies of the hierarchy?

In the end, perhaps, it all comes down to a conclusion that the Church would recognize itself: in so far as its domain is in this world, it's human -flawed, and susceptible to sin. And how, we might marvel, thinking of all those cruel Inquisitors, those promiscuous Popes, those stampers-out of science and culture, those defenders of dictators, those abusers of children and exploiters of the poor. Yet it has to be admitted that there's another side to the Church as well. Whether or not we accept its claims to have a truly transcendent, heavenly dimension, there's no doubt that many of its members have done much good.

Archivist Monsignor Martino Giusti shows Princeton's Professor Kenneth M. Setton a fifteenth-century treaty between the Roman and the Byzantine Churches. Catholicism has had a long and rich - and uniquely well-documented - history. Yet it has by no means been exclusively a force for good.

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TO  BE  CONTINUED

DARK  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  HISTORY - chapter 2

GROWING PAINS

A minor cult had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, but

success brought serious problems of its own. Moreower, Arab armies

would be building their own vast new Empire at bewildering speed,

triumphing under the banner of Islam.

"We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times!" — St Augustine

The meek, it seemed, had inherited the Earth: from persecuted sect to established religion, the Church's fortunes had been utterly transformed. Constantine's miracle-working touch had brought into being a great and powerful institution, the mighty Roman Empire's religious arm. Believers who had cowered in catacombs now gathered in great basilicas in the world's most important cities. Their clergy had the ear of the world's rulers.

Although Christianity's fortunes were now closely tied to the strength and power of the Roman Empire, alliance was also a source of vulnerability. As of

Roman power buckles before barbarian aggression: the sack of Rome in 410 sent a Shockwave through the entire ancient world. But Alaric and his Goths were just one threat to a Church which, nog finally attained imperial acceptance, feared it might find itself beleaguered as before.

AD 312, though, the potential pitfalls must have seemed extremely theoretical alongside the real and present benefits flowing from an association with the Roman state. In historical hindsight, it's clear that Constantine's own struggle to attain his throne (the fight which had in fact precipitated his Christian conversion) was a sign that all might not be well in the Empire. But this kind of 'trouble at the top' was by no means unprecedented in imperial Rome. It had never really affected the everyday administration of the Empire, nor obviously indicated any deeper instability in the state.

Barbarians at the Gate

As the fourth century went on, however, so did the divisions and the difficulties - even if the ship of state seemed able to weather any storm. The causes of the 'Decline and Fall' of the Roman Empire are notoriously elusive, of course: historians have blamed everything from imperial 'overstretch' to multiculturalism, from bureaucracy to sexual permissiveness. Christianity itself hasn't escaped censure, whether because its rise eroded the religious unity of the Empire or because its turn-the-other-cheek morality (supposedly) produced a generation unfit for soldiering.

The most obvious and immediate cause, however, was already unfolding far out on the Central Asian steppe, where the ferocious Huns - nomadic horsemen - were on the prowl. Pushing westward, they dislodged the people settled there, causing the irruption of the Visigoths into the Empire's eastern margins. The invaded now invaders, the Goths roamed and raided ever further westward until they defeated the Roman army at Adrianople in 378, killing the Emperor Valens.

[A  NEW  BOOK  MENTIONED  IN  THIS  SECTION  BRINGS  MUCH  NEW  LIGHT  ON  WHY  THE  FALL  OF  ROME;  IT  REALLY  HAD  NOTHING  TO  DO  WITH  THE  IDEAS  GIVEN  BY  GIBBON  IN  HIS  SOME-WHAT  FAMOUS  "THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL  OF  THE  ROMAN  EMPIRE."  IT  HAD  MUCH  MORE  TO  DO  WITH  THE  TRIBES  AND  NATIONS  INSIDE  AND  OUTSIDE  THE  ROMAN  EMPIRE,  SIMPLY  AMASSING  ARMIES  AND  CAUSING  WAR,  WHEREBY  THE  ARMIES  OF  ROME  WERE  DEFEATED  -  Keith Hunt]

A Tale of Two Cities

Still the pressure in the east continued. Further waves of barbarians spilled across into the Empire -

……

Defeated at Adrianople, the wounded Emperor Valens rested up, but burrned to death when unwitting Goths set the shelter he was hiding in on fire. So at least the story went: is this a hint that Christians were focusing more on the fiery sufferings awaiting sinners in the life beyond?

The eyeglasses are anachronistic, but this study of St Augustine by the Master of Grossgmain (c. 1498) does suggest the colossal learning and uncompromising intellect of the man. Augustine's importance in the development of Catholic doctrine can't be overstated - nor, arguably, can the damage he has done.

……

the Germanic Alans and the Vandals and the Huns themselves. Again, the 'knock-on' effect was crucial: although a peace of sorts had been made with the Goths after Adrianople, in 410 they invaded Italy and laid siege to Rome. After months of slow starvation, the city yielded: in a spree of destruction the Goths sacked the Empire's capital.

If the human and material costs were cataclysmic, the symbolic damage was in some ways even worse: Rome's humiliation was just about complete. The Church was badly shaken too, its treasures plundered and its clergy killed - again, the psychological trauma was profound.

It seemed a whole civilization was at stake. St Augustine certainly saw the danger. It was in the aftermath of Rome's destruction that he started writing his masterwork, The City of God. What the barbarians were to Rome, he reasoned, religious heretics were to the Church, whose spiritual integrity had to be secured at any cost.

The Price of Debate

Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in what is now Algeria, knew all too well the risks of disunity. Across North Africa the Church was in real disarray. Since Christian worship had once been more allowed, a group known as 'Donatists' (after their movement's founder, Bishop Donatus Magnus) had been refusing to accept those members of the clergy who were seen to have

……

Hell, which is also called a lake of

fire and brimstone will be material

fire, and will torment the bodies of

the damned.

[WE  SEE  THE  RISING  OF  THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  IMMORTAL  SOUL,  AND  SO  IF  NOT  "GOOD"  OR  "CATHOLIC"  YOU  BURN  IN  AN  EVER  BURNING  HELL  FIRE  -  Keith Hunt]

……

capitulated under the earlier persecution. The Traditores, or traitors - so-called because they had 'handed over' their holy books and trappings to the authorities when threatened - had formally been forgiven by the Church. But Donatus' followers, hardline perfectionists, saw their surrender as unpardonable: such apostates could have no place in the true Church. The result had been that two supposedly Catholic churches had been coexisting rancorously side by side - it simply wasn't sustainable, Augustine thought.

Looking beyond his own diocese to the wider Church, Augustine could see other forces for disunity: there were the Arians (followers of Arius), who disputed the doctrine of the Trinity, arguing that, as the 'Son of God', Christ was a separate entity from his Father. Another group, following Pelagius, believed that Adam's Sin hadn't of itself been finally damning for the individual soul: if you conducted yourself well enough in life, you could save yourself without the necessity of God's help. Today, in a secular age, such disputes may seem nit-pickingly petty, but theologically

……

Dunked by demons in pools of fire, souls suffer an eternity of torment:

this picture of Hell comes, fittingly, from a French edition

Dei ('The City of God'). It was here that St Augustine

scetched out the sort of punishments awaiting the unrepentant sinner.

[INDEED  THE  DOCTRINE  OF  SUFFERING  IN  AN  ETERNAL  HELL  BEINGS  TO  BE  PROMULGATED  AND  TAKE  ROOT  IN  THE  THEOLOGY  OF  ROME.  THE  TRINITY  DOCTRINE  IS  TAKING  SHAPE  ALSO;  AND  TODAY  IT  IS  TAUGHT  AS  EITHER  THREE  SEPARATE  BEINGS  IN  HEAVEN [THE  FATHER,  SON,  AND  HOLY  SPIRIT]  OR  AS  SOME  KIND  OF  ONE  BEING  THAT  CAN  BECOME  TWO,  OR  THREE  AT  ANY  POINT  IN  TIME,  THEN  MOVE  BACK  TO  BEING  ONE  BEING  -  A  STRANGE  AND  WEIRED  IDEA.  THEN  YOU  HAVE  SOME  TEACHING  GOD  IS  A  HUGE  NOTHINGNESS,  AND  CAN  NOT  BE  UNDERSTOOD  NOR  SHOULD  WE  TRY  TO  UNDERSTAND  -  ALL  ARE  VERY WRONG  THEOLOGICAL  IDEAS  -  Keith Hunt]

…….

the disagreements were profound. More to the point, in practical terms, Augustine's concerns were understandable: these differences had the potential to tear the Church of Christ apart.

A Punitive Faith

Augustine was humane by nature, but his fears for the Church seem to have driven him to fanaticism. In reaction to Pelagius' optimism, he offered a brutally pessimistic survey of the human spiritual condition. Not only was he the first to formulate the central doctrine of 'Original Sin', he did more than anyone else to shape the idea of hell.

While warning of the 'wages of sin', the scriptures had been surprisingly vague about what these might be beyond a few poetic hints about 'pools of fire' and banishment to the 'outer darkness'. Augustine spelled things out more clearly - there was no room for misunderstanding his assertion that:

'Hell, which is also called a lake of fire and brimstone, will be material fire, and will torment the bodies of the damned.'

By 'material fire', of course, Augustine meant real, flaming fire that literally burned the body's physical flesh - it was anything but metaphorical, in other words.

Here began what for many modern theologians was an unwarranted - and even un-Christian - obsession with the intimate details of damnation and a sadistic interest in the terrible topography of hell. And, in Augustine's doctrine of 'Original Sin', a profoundly internalized self-hatred extended into every corner of the Catholic's emotional and sexual life. Only in very recent times has the Church begun to allow its adherents to make some sort of peace with themselves psychologically, and started to shake off one of the very darkest aspects of its history.

A Rival Religion

Augustine's vision of Catholicism as a city under siege was frighteningly convincing but perhaps unduly pessimistic: the Church was to survive - however uncomfortably - the Fall of Rome. The barbarians who in 476 deposed the unfortunate boy-Emperor Romulus Augustulus were at the very least loosely allied with the Christian cause.

Within just over a century, however, a still more serious threat to the Church would arise 2000 miles to the east in Arabia. Muhammad's first divine

……

IN  THE  BOX

'JUST PERSECUTION'

In his rage for orthodoxy, Augustine eventually came to feel that there was a place for the punishment of heretics not only in the afterlife but in this life, by officials of the Church.

Having earlier spoken out against torture as an instrument of oppression, he later started to distinguish between the persecutions of the old Pagan state and that 'just persecution which the Church of Christ inflicts upon the wicked'. Citing the example of St Paul, he pointed out that his being struck down by violent force on the Road to Damascus had enabled him to find a truer faith founded in doctrine and in love:

'It is wonderful how he who entered the gospel in the first instance under the compulsion of bodily punishment, afterwards laboured more in the gospel than all they who were called by word only; and he who was compelled by the greater influence of fear to love, displayed that perfect love which casts out fear.'

'Why, therefore,' Augustine asked, 'should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return?' Tragically, he asked the question rhetorically.

……

visions date from ad 610. At the time a middle-aged businessman in Mecca, the Prophet received a series of visits from the Archangel Gabriel who dictated to him the word of Allah - God. A new religion was brought into being: Islam - the name meant 'submission', in the sense of yielding to the divine will. Like Judaism and Christianity (for whose scriptures and traditions Muhammad had much respect) it was a monotheism - recognizing only a single deity. As such, inevitably, it affronted the Pagan beliefs of the Arabs at large, and life became uncomfortable for Muhammad and his handful of converts who came into conflict with the Quraysh, Mecca's wealthy elite. In 622 the Muslims left for the neighbouring city of Medina. Relations with the city's three tribes of Jews were good, at least to begin with. As hostilities with Mecca continued, though, suspicions between the two groups grew, Muhammad and his followers fearing that the Jews might make alliance with their Arab enemies.

Holy War

In time the Muslims prevailed, though, and their victory marked the start of one of the most astonishing campaigns of conquest the world has ever seen. By the time the Prophet died in 632, to be succeeded by his father-in-law, the first Caliph Abu Bakhr, the Arabs had already carried the word by force of arms - and inspiration - through much of the Middle East.

Although their warlike nature had always been recognized, the Arabs had hitherto been dismissed as raiders, a mere nuisance: now, however, their aggression was channelled by a passionate faith. Christianity was in retreat, with the destruction of three of Catholicism's five patriarchal sees: Jerusalem, Antioch (Syria) and Alexandria, in Egypt. Across North Africa - the Maghreb - they continued: any dissensions among Augustine's spiritual descendants were rendered academic as the forces of Islam spilled across the region in an advancing tide.

In the early years of the eighth century, Arab armies pushed west from Libya across the entire length of the Maghreb. In the east, in 717-18 a determined siege of Constantinople was successfully resisted, but no one was under any illusion that Europe was safe from Islamic conquest. By this time Spain was already largely under Muslim occupation. The first raiding party of Arabs and Islamicized Berbers had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 711: Tariq ibn-Ziyad's warriors crushed the defenders sent against them. By 718, Iberia's Catholic Visigoth rulers had been defeated by these 'Moors' and almost the entire peninsula was under Islamic rule. Only in the far north, in Asturias, did the Muslims suffer a setback: in these mountains, a little pocket of Christendom remained.

Turned at Tours

On into France they advanced: this time, though, the Catholic Princes managed to come together to repel the invaders. In 732, at the Battle of Tours, near Poitiers, under the command of Charles Martel ('Charles the Hammer'), 30,000 Franks lined up to face a force of 80,000 Muslim men. The Moorish cavalry came at them in waves but, a Christian witness reports, the Franks stood firm, 'as motionless as a wall'. Their shields locked together, all in line, they presented a seamless barrier, 'like a belt of ice frozen solid, and not to be dissolved'.

In the decades and centuries that followed, the Muslims were pushed slowly southward, although their kingdom of al-Andalus still covered most of Spain and Portugal. Only in the second millennium was it to be confined to that southern region, which is still known

……

On the side of the angels now, the Visigoths had established a Catholic kingdom in Iberia. In the early eighth century, however, it was overrun by Islamic invaders from North Africa. 

…….

as Andalucia. The Caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty had made it their base, holing up here after the rest of the Empire fell under Abbasid rule in 750, their capital at Cordoba a match even for Baghdad in its astonishing mosques and palaces, its gardens, its crafts, its culture and its learning.

Back to the Margins

It was an age of magnificence, of creativity and - for the most part - tolerance. There had been - and would in the future be - many much darker times for the Catholic Church. The Caliphs were easy-going about the presence of the dhimmi - the community of non-believers, such as Christians and Jews - in their midst. There's an element of wishful thinking in the recently-fashionable suggestion that al-Andalus was some sort of multicultural Utopia: the Islamic rulers seem to

have disdained the Christians' creed and milked them cynically for tax. In the annals of persecution, though, such low-level harassment scarcely registered: Catholics had little to complain of in Islamic Spain.

The real offence was to Christian self-esteem. The Church and Christendom seemed completely to have lost the initiative: they were on the defensive, responding to events. As the Muslims made strides in science, philosophy, art and literature, moreover, Christian culture was coming to seem backward, crude: who had the 'civilization' and who were the 'barbarians' now? What had appeared to be the religion of the future had been brushed aside, apparently without effort, over much of its territory and there was little confidence that further advances could be resisted. Christ had promised eternal life, but could his Church really deliver? Had history already passed it by?

[OF  COURSE  IT  WAS  NOT  CHRIST'S  CHURCH,  HE  HAD  NEVER  HAD  ANYTHING  TO  DO  WITH  IT;  HIS  TRUE  CHURCH  HE  STILL  HEADED,  WAS  IN  THE  WILDERNESS,  SMALL  BUT  ALIVE,  AND  STILL  HOLDING  TO  THE  FAITH  ONCE  DELIVERED  TO  THE  SAINTS  -  Keith Hunt]

IN  THE  BOX

OMAN   RAMPAGE

The  desert-dwelling Arabs were traditionally fighters on dry land, but they'd established  an important tradition of seafaring as well. Arab vessels carried trade goods - and the Islamic word - from the Red Sea and the Gulf down much of the side of Africa; Arab raiders attacked Christian centres in the Mediterranean. In the early eighth century, they established an important base at Messina, Sicily, from where further attacks were mounted around the coasts of southern Italy. In 846, helpless defenders looked on as Arab raiders rampaged through Rome and the Vatican: even St Peter's Basilica was not spared.

Chaos ensued when, in 846, Arab attackers raided Rome, burning and looting in the very sanctuary of the Catholic faith. The confrontation between Christianity and Islam was to shape the history of both great religions over the next few centuries.

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THAT’S  A  LITTLE  FROM  A  BOOK  THAT  TELLS  ALL  ABOUT  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH - Keith Hunt