DARK HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH---PART ONE

 DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH !

THE BOOK---

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

CATHOLIC  CHURCH

VIA  DOLOROSA: EARLY  PERSECUTIONS

"I am the way, the truth and the life" Jesus promised his disciples - but the

cruelty of his Passion was to bring them a clear warnings the Christian faithful

could expect to endure groat suffering and loss

'Take this cup of suffering from me!'

- Mark, 14:26

The rich young man instructed to give away all his possessions to the poor; the outraged citizens told to think of their own sins before they attacked the adulteress; the victim of violence ordered to 'turn the other cheek' ... Christ's first followers were left in little doubt that, although their faith would ultimately bring them to Everlasting Life, it would cost them - perhaps very considerably - in the here and now. Indeed, whatever joy it brought, the road to Salvation was inevitably going to lead

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Aelbert Bouts' fifteenth-century altarpiece suggests the brutal violence behind a faith which was founded in the sufferings of its Saviour. Christ's disciples, in the early centuries, knew that their awn fate was unpredictable; that they themselves might easily come to grisly ends.

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them through deep and difficult vales of darkness and death. The story of the early Church was to be no different. By 312, Christianity would be basking in the backing of the state, the official religion of the Roman world. First, though, there were terrible persecutions to be endured.

The First Martyrs

The radiance of the Resurrection fading, Christ's Ascension quickly coming to seem more like an abandonment, the darkness wasn't long in falling for the followers of Christ. The first known martyrdom - the stoning to death of St Stephen in Jerusalem around ad 35 - was witnessed by the future St Paul. Then still known as Saul, a young man from Tarsus in the province of Cilicia (southern Turkey), he was as proud of his Roman citizenship as of his Jewish background. Stephen's stand appeared an affront to both. So much so that, far from objecting to what amounted to a religious lynching, Saul stood by and minded the cloaks of the killers as they hurled their stones at Stephen. Later, of course, his attitudes were to be transformed by the extraordinary experience he underwent on the Road to Damascus. Now named Paul, he became co-founder with St Peter of what we now know as the creed of Christianity. And while Peter may have been Christ's anointed Pope, Paul was arguably more important in building the Catholic Church: it was under his influence that it transcended its origins as a Jewish sect.

Nero fastened the guilt and

inflicted the most exquisite

tortures on a class hated for their

abominations, called Christians by

the populace 

Both St Peter and St Paul were to die in Rome, the centre of the civilized world in the first century ad. Both were martyred, according to the Christian tradition. While St Paul was beheaded, St Peter was crucified just as his mentor had been - but upside-down, it's said, at his own request. His death by crucifixion might have been ordered in sneering allusion to his Saviour's, but to St Peter it was an honour of which he was unworthy. Hence, the story has it, his desire to be executed the wrong way up. A great basilica was later raised up above his grave.

Fire and Sword

We view these events today as the beginnings of a great religious, historical and cultural tradition. For the Roman Empire, though, they were very much a minor, local thing. Most Romans were barely conscious of Christianity's existence. If they were, they saw it as the obscure offshoot of an obscure Middle-Eastern sect - one of innumerable little cults to be found in the most cosmopolitan city the world had ever seen. That it came to widespread attention at all was down to the opportunism of an Emperor in need of a convenient scapegoat for his political difficulties.

A wild paranoiac in the most powerful position in the world, Nero was a public menace, nothing less. His reign, which lasted from ad 54 till his deposition by a desperate Senate 14 years later, was characterized by madness, murder and repression on a monstrous scale. Further disaster struck when fire ravaged Rome in ad 64. The impact of the conflagration was immense. According to the historian Tacitus, writing just a few years later:

'Rome, indeed, is divided into fourteen districts, four of which remained uninjured, three were levelled to the ground, while in the other seven were left only a few shattered, half-burnt relics of houses.'

Nero wasn't just the man in charge, it seems: some suggested that he had contrived the disaster deliberately, wishing to clear the site for a spectacular new palace he had in mind. As the Roman writer Suetonius says:

'... pretending to be disgusted with the old buildings, and the streets, he set the city on fire so openly, that many of consular rank caught his own household servants on their property with tow, and torches in their hands, but durst not meddle with them. There being near his Golden House some granaries, the site of which he exceedingly coveted, they were battered as if with machines of war, and set on fire, the walls being built of stone.'

In need of someone else to blame, writes Tacitus,

'Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace ... Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.'

This seems to have been the context in which, along with so many others, St Peter was arrested and put to death - just another minor move in the wider game of Roman politics.

Ups and Downs

The sense that it was a religion tried in the fire was to be central to the developing consciousness of Christianity, but it's clear that there was 'nothing personal' as far as Roman Emperors were concerned.

 St Stephen's ugly death - he was stoned by an angry mob (the young Saul - later St Paul - was a bystander) - takes on an extraordinary beauty in Pieter Paul Rubens' representation (c.1617). Its ability to transmute mortal pain into something more blessed was part of Christianity's appeal.

Nero's clampdown, horrifying as it may have been, was nakedly opportunistic. Time and time again through the second and third centuries, we find Christianity being attacked - or tolerated - with the same disregard. In between dreadful persecutions in the reigns of the Emperors Domitian, Trajan, Septimius Severus and Decius, came lengthy periods of easy-going acceptance: the mood typically turned ugly when economic times were hard.

Many priests and bishops were martyred in the reign of Valerian (253-60), including St Lawrence, reputedly burned on an iron grill. ('Turn me over, I'm done on this side...', he told his tormentors, tradition has it.) A few years later St Sebastian was forced to face a squad of archers. Such deaths were to take their

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St Paul was proud of being both a Jew and a Roman citizen: it is largely thanks to him that the Catholic Church was based in Rome. It was to his citizenship that he owed his good fortune in being beheaded - death by crucifixion was reserved for non-Romans.

St Peter, it is said, on hearing that he was to be crucified, begged that he be hung up upside-down so as not to seem sacrilegiously to imitate his saviour. He was killed in Rome, and St Peter's Basilica built over his tomb.

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places in a tradition of martyrology that was to be essential to the early Church's identity - like that of St Catherine of Alexandria, sentenced to have her body broken on a wagon wheel.

The Great Persecution

The Emperor Diocletian was tolerant by nature. By the end of the third century, however, the Empire was coming under strain. Financial mismanagement had resulted in economic difficulties in what was already so vast and unwieldy an Empire as to be effectively ungovernable - Diocletian had felt compelled to appoint four sub-emperors to reign across the regions on his behalf. It made sense at the same time to underline the 'Romanness' of the Roman world by

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IN  THE  BOX

GETTING NERO'S NUMBER

Driven underground by Nero's persecution, the Christians had to communicate with one another secretly. Given that most shared Jewish backgrounds, they were familiar with the traditional numerology known as gematria. This ancient mystic system associated specific properties to different numbers in relation to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Gematria was a vast and erudite subject in itself: you could spend a lifetime exploring its infinite subtleties. At its most basic level it offered a ready-made code for initiates. For the name Nero, the figures came to 666: notoriously, the 'Number of the Beast' in the Book of Revelation. For the early Christians, the Emperor was indeed the 'Antichrist'.

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reaffirming its cultural values - none of course loomed larger than the old religion and its rituals. In 303, therefore, the Emperor issued his 'Edict Against the Christians'. As the contemporary Christian scholar Eusebius put it, officials were 'to tear down the churches to their foundations and destroy the sacred scriptures by fire'. Those 'in honourable stations' were to be 'degraded' (reduced to slavery, in other words) if they refused to abjure their faith. Thus began the 'Great Persecution'. Contemporary sources claim that 10,000 martyrs were crucified side by side on the first day. And while this is surely an exaggeration, there's little doubt that many thousands must have died in a reign of religious terror that was to continue unabated for the next eight years.

IT  WAS  ACTUALLY [AS  MOST  HISTORY  BOOKS  AFFIRM]  A  10  YEAR  PERSECUTION,  AND  IS  MENTIONED  IN  CHAPTERS  2 AND  3  OF  THE  BOOK  OF  REVELATION,  CONCERNING  THE  7  CHURCHES,  AS  A  10  DAY  PERSECUTION  -  FROM  303  TO  313  AD  -  Keith Hunt

'A Certain Religion of Lust'

These were dark times for the Church indeed. But there was no shortage of contemporary commentators ready to suggest that the Christians had brought their sufferings on themselves with dark deeds of their own.

It's a tribute to Jesus' radicalism that his central tenets seemed so hard for so many to take on board:

Diocletian was responsible for the deaths of thousands in the

'Great Persecution' he launched in 303. Christians were tolerated for

decades on end, but could never feel secure - in times of

economic hardship they made the ideal scapegoats

for all the Empire's ills.

'They love one another almost before they know one another', one scribe complained. Understandably, perhaps, Pagan contemporaries were cynical about the whole 'Love thy neighbour' message and found it hard to recognize the distinction being made between affectionate goodwill and sex. 'There is mingled among them a certain religion of lust', one said. 'They call one another promiscuously brothers and sisters'. The word 'promiscuously' here, of course, isn't used in a sexual sense, but it's easy to see how suspicious all this 'love' and siblinghood must have seemed. Suffice it to say that the suspicion of incest was never far away.

Feared and distrusted minority groups are just about invariably accused of sexual deviance, of course: 'Some say that they worship the genitals of their pontiff and priest', one critic said. The same source revealed: 'I hear that they adore the head of an ass, that basest

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I hear that they adore the head of

an ass, that basest of creatures,

consecrated by I know not what

silly persuasion.

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of creatures, consecrated by I know not what silly persuasion.' Such reports were - it goes without saying - entirely wild.

Worse than these absurd accusations, though, were the darker suspicions accruing around the Church, suspicions only encouraged by the desperate discretion of a beleaguered group. All too often down the ages, persecution has produced a vicious circle: an already mistrusted minority, in trying to lie low and avoid attention, creates an air of 'secrecy' and intensifies

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 'The Christian Martyr's Last Prayer' was famously imagined by French artist dean-Leon Gerome in 1883. There's surprisingly little evidence for the tradition that Christians were 'thrown to the lions' in ancient Rome, but no doubt that in times of persecution many suffered torture and cruel death.

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mistrust. The harder the Christians strove to avoid detection, the more feverish the speculation about their 'secret and nocturnal rites'. 'They know one another by secret signs and insignia', it was claimed.

Light in the Darkness

When the Roman persecutions were at their most intense, the Church was driven underground - quite literally: worship was conducted in the catacombs that lay beneath the streets of Rome.

As it happens, these catacombs had for the most part been constructed by the Christians themselves.

IN  THE  BOX

BLOOD SACRIFICE

There's a wearisomely familiar ring about some of the charges levelled at the early Christians, especially given that - to begin with, at any rate - they were mostly Jews. Around the end of the second century, the scholar Minucius Felix (himself a Christian) recorded some of the more lurid claims.

Of particular interest were the supposed 'initiation rites' of this evil creed. An infant having been concealed within a sack or pile of flour, the novice Christian was given a knife and told to stab the flour repeatedly, it was said, urged on by his sponsors to administer ever quicker and harder - although apparently harmless -blows. Only as the blood began to stain the flour did he realize that he had murdered an innocent young victim - but he'd join in the feast, bonding with his companions as they made their gory meal.

'Thirstily - O horror! - they lick up its blood; eagerly they divide its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together; with this consciousness of wickedness they are covenanted to mutual silence.'

If the story hazily recalls the idea of the Eucharist (the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of the crucified Christ), it also looks forward to one of the darkest Christian myths of medieval times. This attributed to Jews the custom of kidnapping and sacrificing Christian children so that their blood could be stirred into the mixture being prepared for their unleavened bread. The whole Jewish nation had to suffer the stigma of this 'Blood Libel' for centuries, and many Jews were to pay for such imaginary 'crimes' with their own lives.

The ritual killing and bleeding of a Christian boy is essential to the celebration of the feast of Passover, as understood by the illustrator of the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. Anti-Semitism was an inseparable aspect of Catholicism in medieval times.

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Where Pagan Romans had become happy to have their remains cremated, and just the ashes kept in an urn, they looked forward to the resurrection of the body - so, as far as was practicable, the body had to be kept intact. Hence the construction of these galleries, dug out of the soft and spongy volcanic tufa beneath the city: Christians came here to inter their dead and tend their tombs. Increasingly, though, as their troubles deepened, they came here to conduct their rites in secret: in some cases, icons were painted on the walls and impromptu churches took shape, deep underground.

Practical considerations may have brought them here - the catacombs offered the only obvious place of safety in a hostile city - but those who ventured down among the dead to pray for eternal life must surely have been fully conscious of the powerful symbolism too.

Angelic reinforcements flock to Constantine's standard at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, on 28 October 312. The victorious ruler made Christianity the official religion of his Empire. An unusual take on the Gospel message, but Constantine's patronage transformed the fortunes of what was now the Church of Rome.

The thought of their forebears huddled here, praying to the Lord by flickering lamplight, has inspired Catholic believers ever since.

Unwilling Apostates

Not all were to prove as strong, of course. 'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,' as Jesus Christ observes in Matthew's Gospel. He himself was to ask (in the Garden of Gethsemane) that the cup of suffering should be taken from him. Even before the Passion proper, his right-hand-man St Peter had denied him

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IN  THE  BOX

A  DUBIOUS  DONATION

Constantine was to prove a generous and influential backer to his adoptive creed. He does not, however, appear to have issued that decree on the basis of which Pope Sylvester I and his successors asserted not just spiritual but temporal authority over the City of Rome and its environs (not to mention other lands scattered across Europe and North Africa). This so-- called 'Donation of Constantine' justified the Church's worldly dominion over vast territories, and while many were to be lost over the centuries, the Popes held on to power in central Italy into modern times. Even today, the Vatican remains sovereign territory, its status sanctioned by custom, if not by legal title. In fact, the 'Donation of Constantine' was shown up as a forgery as early as 1440; it is thought to have been created in the eighth century.

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three times. So it's hard to blame those believers who, in the face of daily harassment, torture and terror, ended up renouncing their Christian beliefs and at least going through the motions of resuming Pagan worship. Even so, those who held firm felt misgivings about the commitment of these lapsi (from the Latin for 'lapsed' or 'slipped') and acts of penitence were required before they were later readmitted to the Church.

A Place in the Sun

Diocletian died at the end of 311, by which time it was clear that his Great Persecution had failed - cruel and comprehensive as it had been. Many Christians were clearly continuing to worship in secret, while even those who had resumed the rites of the Pagan past had evidently done so only grudgingly out of fear. His successor in the east, Galerius, issued his own Edict of Toleration, ending the Persecution: the Empire stood to gain more by bringing the Christians back into the fold, he reasoned.

The Church was no longer illegal then, even if Christianity was still anything but mainstream. But things were now to move with bewildering speed. Challenging Galerius for rule over the Empire as a whole, his rival in the west, Constantius, died. His son Constantine asserted his claims over the entire Roman Empire. As the two Emperors and their armies

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No longer skulking in corners and catacombs, the Church was a great institution, its pontiff the equal of any worldly king. Sylvester I (represented here by Raphael) was said to have been offered Constantine's crown - but to have seen imperial power as superfluous to what he already had.

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prepared to do battle by the Milvian Bridge, just north of Rome, Constantine underwent the most significant Christian conversion since St Paul.

A less spiritual character than Constantine it is difficult to imagine. Even so, like many a mystic before and since, he saw a vision. A good, old-fashioned Roman, true to traditional ways, he was a worshipper of Sol Invictus (the Unconquerable Sun). On the eve of the battle he looked up to see his blazing orb slowly sinking down the western sky. Suddenly, overlain across that burning disc, he saw the shape of a cross - and, beneath, an inscription: In Hoc Signo Vinces ('In this sign may you prevail'). Constantine embraced the new religion on the spot: having defeated Galerius he made Christianity the official religion of his Empire and the rest is ecclesiastical history.

Constantine's conversion could hardly have been more obviously opportunistic. Was this what Christ had meant when he warned: 'I bring not peace but the sword' (Matthew 10: 34)? Was this what Mary had meant in her Magnificat - 'He has toppled the mighty from their thrones' (Luke 1: 52)? Were God and Caesar really supposed to be quite so closely allied? After so many years of persecution, the leaders of the Church weren't in the mood to look a gift-horse in the mouth - the good that might be done in a Christian world was potentially limitless, after all. Despite this, some have inevitably felt that this was the first, fatal compromise by which the Church established its longstanding alliance with worldly authority, with privilege and power. At a stroke, Constantine had turned Christianity from a marginal cult into a great religion: Catholicism had triumphed - but had it also sold its soul?

………………..

YES  WE  SEE  UPON  DEEPER  HISTORICAL  AND  CHURCH  HISTORY  STUDIES, THAT  THE  NEW  "ROMAN"  CHRISTIANITY,  COMING  FROM  ROME,  STARTING  IN  THE  2ND  CENTURY  AD,  WAS  A  CHRISTIANITY  MOVING  AWAY  FROM  THE  ORIGINAL  APOSTOLIC  CHRISTIANITY.  ALL  THIS  I  HAVE  COVERED  IN-DEPTH  IN  MANY  STUDIES  ON  THIS  WEBSITE.  WE  SEE  CLEARLY  IN  THE  APOSTLE'S  WRITINGS  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT,  THAT  BEFORE  THE  END  OF  THE  FIRST  CENTURY  AD,  MANY  HAD  DEPARTED  FROM  THE  FAITH  ONCE  DELIVERED  TO  THE  SAINTS.

BUT,  THE  NEW  FAITH  COMING  OUT  OF  ROME,  WAS  TO  THE  FOLLOWERS  OF  ROMAN  CHRISTIAN  THEOLOGY,  THE  "REAL  DEAL"  AS  WE  SAY,  AND  YES,  WAS  TAKEN  VERY SERIOUSLY….. EVEN  TO  DIE  FOR.  

IN  THE  PERSECUTIONS  UP  TO  313  AD  AND  CONSTANTINE'S  EMBRACE  OF  ROMAN  THEOLOGY,  THOUSANDS  OF  THOSE  HOLDING  ROMAN  CHRISTIANITY  AND  THOSE  HOLDING  THE  FAITH  ONCE  DELIVERED  TO  THE  SAINTS,  WERE  PUT  TO  DEATH.

Keith Hunt   

DARK  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  HISTORY 

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

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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.

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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 -

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

………………..

SACRED SLAUGHTER: THE CRUSADES

Massacre thy neighbour? The medieval Church had a strange way of showing Christian love. Muslims, Jews and 'heretics' were all on the receiving end as clerics and kings shored up their authority and power by orchestrating

attacks on other groups.

^"He that doth not take up his cross and follow me is unworthy of me?"

'Deus vult!' - 'God wills it!' - came the cry from the crowd as Pope Urban II made his heartfelt call to Christian arms. What God willed, it seemed, was that they march off to the Middle East and make war with the Muslims there. The Church's claim to comprehend the will of God was to inspire a long and bloody series of atrocities from the end of the eleventh century through to the fourteenth. Urban's speech was certainly arresting. The Saracens, he said, his voice trembling with emotion, had been

......

 Urban II, caller of the First Crusade, seems to have envisaged only a very limited local action to assist the eastern churches. In the event, the campaign he set in motion was to catch the imagination of western Europe, dominating religion and politics for several centuries.

......

'penetrating deeper and deeper into Christian lands' to Europe's east. They had defeated the Christians seven times in battle, had 'killed or taken prisoner a great many, destroyed fine churches and laid waste to extensive areas of land.' Having captured Anatolia, they had pitched their camp on the banks of the Bosporus - on the very threshold of Christian Europe, in other words. Scarcely able to continue with his peroration, apparently on the point of breaking down completely, he pleaded with those clerics, knights and nobles who had gathered at the Council of Clermont for their support.

The Red Cross

'This is why I beg you and urge you - no, not just I: the Lord Himself begs and implores you, as heralds of Christ, whether poor or wealthy, to rush off and expel this rabble from your brothers' territories, and to bring rapid relief to those who worship Christ.'

First prostrating themselves on the floor before the papal throne, they rose and went spilling out on to the streets in a shoutings cheering throng. To the outside observer, they may have looked no more than a well-dressed mob: they themselves, though, felt seized with sacred emotion. Enlisted by their Pope in what amounted to a militarized pilgrimage, they pinned on their clothes a red fabric cross - in French, croisade.

The Holy City

Pope Urban I1's summons, in 1095, came in response to a request from the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I. Informing His Holiness of the invasion of Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks, he requested his help in defending Christian Constantinople. At this stage, neither Alexius nor Urban envisaged anything more than a small

This is why I beg you and urge you

... whether poor or wealthy, to rush

off and expel this rabble from your

brothers' territories ...

French force to be sent in support of Constantinople's defenders, under Byzantine leadership. But Constantinople, with all its glories, did not haunt the Western imagination the way Jerusalem did: medieval maps often placed Jesus' city at the centre of the world. The streets along which Christ had walked, the scenes of his passion and death - Jerusalem was a uniquely special city. The thought of a pilgrimage here had inspired Christians for generations. A surprising number of people had indeed made the journey to see the land they'd read about in scripture or been told of in church - an undertaking which could take them many years.

They'd succeeded in doing so despite the fact that, for some four centuries, these 'Holy Places' had been held by Muslims: they'd been fleeced by traders and tax-gatherers and pushed around by officials, but never seriously abused. Still less had they been prevented from pursuing a pilgrimage that the Muslims looked on more with mild amusement than hostility. Now, however, all of a sudden Western rulers decided to feel outraged: how could Christianity's holiest shrines not be in Christian hands?

Fighting for Salvation

Those who answered Urban's summons, he subsequently clarified, would automatically receive an 'indulgence' - time off from the years of suffering they might otherwise expect in purgatory when they died. Some modern historians have attributed mercenary motives to the Crusaders, arguing that they marched eastward only in search of power and plunder. They have underestimated the part played by the fear of death - and, more particularly, of damnation - in the medieval mind. There was nothing fake about the fervour the Crusade evoked, although arguably much of that was superficial - even cynical - to the extent that a sort of spiritual self-interest appears to have prevailed.

It took Europe's kings a year to mobilize for the First Crusade: ordinary people were a great deal quicker off the mark. Within weeks of Urban's appeal, a rag-tag army of beggars, peasants, artisans and lowly knights was already on the march. Women and children flocked along on this great adventure. Most came from southern Germany and Northern France. There, itinerant preachers were whipping up a fever of expectation that the end of the world was coming, and that people should secure their salvation in a final battle with Satan and his Pagan forces. The most famous of these preachers, Peter the Hermit, roamed the towns and cities of France and Flanders, calling all to join what was to become known as the People's Crusade, and he marshalled many thousands in that cause.

The People's Pogrom

Impatient with a history of kings and queens, modern historians have inevitably been drawn to the story of the People's Crusade - aptly named, for it was truly a democratic phenomenon. For better and for worse the poor of medieval Europe appear to have been every bit as capable of cruelty and greed as their betters. The Crusade was wildly anarchic in its organization (if it can even be called that) and utterly undiscriminating in its violence.

Muslims or Jews, what was the difference? Why travel hundreds of miles to face an unknown and

......

The Council of Clermont, 1095, became a rallying point for a western Christendom which saw itself as being threatened by the Islamic danger from the east. Pope Urban's impassioned speech moved all who heard it - and echoed across Europe - soon great armies were marching in a military pilgrimage for Christ.

IN  THE  BOX

KILLERS OF CHRIST'

The concept of 'race' is a comparatively recent one, a product (ironically) of the 'Enlightenment' that transformed the fields of philosophy and science from the seventeenth century. It's accordingly anachronistic to talk of 'racism' in the pre-modern period. That doesn't of course mean that equality and easy-going tolerance reigned, just that prejudices were articulated and justified differently.

Hatred of the Jews in medieval Europe was virulent: they were despised and feared by the wider populace for their supposed role in killing Christ. Their economic function in an age before banking was also profoundly unpopular - even as it was obviously necessary. The lending of money at interest was banned by the Church, who saw it as amounting to the buying and selling of time - God's property, not a commodity in which mortal men had any business trading.

Then, as in so many centuries since, the Jews were the scapegoat of first resort in Christian communities when crops failed, plague struck or times were otherwise hard. The greater the persecution, the more marginalized the Jews became, the more unknowable and 'alien' they came to seem - and the deeper the fear and suspicion with which they were viewed.

Anti-Semitism was by no means confined to the lower orders: Godfrey de Bouillon, leader of the French in the 'official' First Crusade, vowed at one point that he wouldn't even begin his journey to the Holy Land till he'd 'avenged the blood of the crucified one with Jewish blood' and completely destroyed anybody who 'bore the name of Jew'.

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frightening foe when Christ's killers were to be found in the ghettoes here at home? More and more people travelled through Lorraine towards the Rhine - in almost the opposite direction from Jerusalem. There they forced their way into the cities of Aachen and Cologne, where local hooligans were emboldened to attack those who, not content with crucifying Our Blessed Saviour, now tortured honest Christian men with the usurious interest on their loans.

'This slaughter of Jews was done first by citizens of Cologne,' a Christian eyewitness, Albert of Aix, reports:

'These suddenly fell upon a small band of Jews and severely wounded and killed many; they destroyed the houses and synagogues of the Jews and divided among themselves a very large amount of money. When the Jews saw this cruelty, about two hundred in the silence of the night began flight by boat to Neuss. The pilgrims and crusaders discovered them, and after taking away

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Left: The noble crusader of nineteenth-century stereotype gave way in modern times to a more cynically-imagined opportunist, bent on plunder. Neither image is adequate: the Crusaders seem to have been swept up in something real - a rush of sincere (if borderline-hysterical) piety.

God willed it - apparently. Here, less of the Holy Places, a crusading rampages through a European ghetto. Confused,  ill-informed and badly led, the were a menace to the societies they were sworn to protect, leaving trails of devastation across the Continent.

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all their possessions, inflicted on them similar slaughter, leaving not even one alive.'

Further massacres and attacks on synagogues took place in Speyer and Mainx. In the latter, seeing the cruel ferocity with which the Christians were attacking their neighbours, Jewish men murdered their wives, and mothers killed their children, as an act of mercy.

No mercy was shown in the town of Worms. Here over 800 Jews were murdered in response, it appears, yo a rumour that some of their co-religionists had murdered a man and thrown his body a well. Allowing him to rot down there a while, they had then tried to use the contaminated water to poison the supply of the city as a whole. Many Jews, fleeing the fury of the mob, had sought sanctuary with the local bishop in his palace. Unimpressed by his ecclesiastical authority, the 'Crusaders' simply smashed down the gates, stormed in and massacred those they discovered hiding.

Mayhem on the March

At last, the Crusade began making its way southeastward, out of French and German lands.

Robbing, murdering and raping as they went, they moved on through Hungary and the Balkans: Alexius I was appalled at the ragged, hungry shower that turned up outside the walls of Constantinople in the summer 1096. Rather than have them admitted - even for a moment - into his city, he had these motley 'Crusaders' across the Bosporus to Asia Minor without further ado. There they were simply swatted aside by the army of the Seljuk ruler, Kilij Arslan. They had come an awfully long way for such an ignominious defeat.

The First Crusade proper got off to a more promising start. The Crusaders quickly captured the Seljuk capital, Nicaea, in what is now northwestern Turkey. But as they fought their way over the Anatolian mountains into northern Syria, triumph turned inexorably into disaster. Despite the months of preparation that had gone before, serious logistical

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IN  THE  BOX

BLESSED BEASTS

The more sober Christian commentators viewed the ^'People's Crusade' askance, to put it mildly. Albert of Aix was completely horrified. This distinguished    chronicler did all he could to distance himself (and his faith) from what he seems to have seen as a hideously parodic pilgrimage, a savage satire on human stupidity and greed. The 'Crusaders', he claimed, 'asserted that a certain goose was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that a she goat was not less filled by the same Spirit. These they made their guides on this holy journey to Jerusalem. They worshipped these animals excessively; and most of the people following them - like beasts themselves - believed with their whole minds that this was the true course. May the hearts of the faithful be free from the thought that the Lord Jesus wished the Sepulchre of His most sacred body to be visited by brutish and insensate animals, or that He wished these to become the guides of Christian souls, which by the price of His own blood He deigned to redeem from the filth of idols!'

Yet such critiques ring hollow given the bestial cruelty of the First Crusade as it unfolded the following year: would 'Lord Jesus' have found the attitudes and conduct of his 'noble' followers so much more appealing?

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inadequacies became apparent: thousands died during the relatively short - but desperately demanding - march to Palestine. A vast army - not just men (and women and children) but horses and beasts of burden - had to make their way across arid terrain in a time of scorching heat. Feeding and, especially, watering them all was an impossibility. Many thousands expired agony: of the 100,000 who had set out, only 40,000 arrived exhausted at the gates of Antioch.

The Agony of Antioch

Met became the strategic centre of Syria, the city was iy fortified: undaunted, the Crusaders settled l for a lengthy siege. Beset by hunger, and harried %m fighters foraying out from the city in nighttime aids, the Christians had an extremely unpleasant time, i seven died of starvation, Matthew of Edessa i (the figure was almost certainly much higher ; the common soldiery). After seven long, hard , Bohemund of Tarent talked the city's Christian its into betraying their fellow-citizens and ; the gates. On 3 June 1098, Antioch was taken I thousands of its inhabitants were slaughtered. They

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: The Crusaders took their first great prize, the Syrian city in June of 1098. Starting as it seemed they meant to go on, they fell upon a defenceless populace in a vengeful rage. Thousands were slaughtered in the bloodletting - including Christians.

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included a great many Christians, but the Crusaders didn't distinguish, falling on all in a vengeful rage.

... Even Dogs

Buoyed up by this success, the Crusaders were able to hold their prize against a Turkish relief force led by Kerbogha of Mosul. Mopping up resistance in the area around, they attacked the city of Ma'ara. They were winning their war, it seemed, but they were no

......

... to relate that many on our

side, driven mad by the pains of

starvation, cut chunks of meat

from the buttocks of Saracen 

corpses they found in the field.

......

nearer to being able to feed themselves: both sides lacked supplies after so many months of fighting back and forth. At Ma'ara, it was claimed, the Crusaders fell upon the vanquished defenders and the terrified citizenry and - not content with killing them - tore at their bodies for flesh to eat.

Truth is the first casualty in war, it is said, and horror-stories are never lacking when there's an enemy to be smeared, but the reports of cannibalism at Ma'ara don't come mainly from Muslim sources. Rather, it was in the testimony of shocked Christian chroniclers like Radulph of Caen that those at home read of children roasted over fires on spits and adults being boiled in macabre stews. 'I shudder', wrote Fulcher of Chartres, 'to relate that many on our side, driven mad by the pains of starvation, cut chunks of meat from the buttocks of Saracen corpses they found in the field. Having set out to cook them over their fires, they couldn't even wait till they were properly done, but fell upon them, gorging like wild beasts.'

Albert of Aix confirmed the incident, although his report is as remarkable for the sliding scale of atrocity he seems to see in the fact that the Crusaders 'didn't just eat Turks and Saracens but even dogs'. Their army now numbering only 20,000, the Crusaders advanced

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A French tapestry of the seventeenth century shows the heroic light in which the capture of Jerusalem (1099) was later to be cast. The reality was a senseless spree of killing, the Crusaders killing Muslims, Jews - and Christians - alike; 'neither women nor children were spared,' one chronicler recorded.

Bernard of Clairvaux proclaimed the Second Crusade at the request of Pope Eugene III, calling kings and commoners alike to the red-cross banner. St Bernard seems to have been horrified when he saw the anarchy he had unleashed, personally intervening to try to prevent several German pogroms.

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on Jerusalem, arriving outside its gates on 7 June 1099. After another siege, a party led by Godfrey of Bouillon breached the walls on 13 July. They celebrated with a spree of killing. 'No one had ever heard of such a bloodbath among Pagan peoples as this one,' wrote Archbishop William of Tyre. Thousands of men, women and children were put to the sword: no distinction was made between Muslims and Jews. 'If you had been there,' wrote Fulcher of Chartres, 'you would have seen our feet stained to our ankles in the blood of the slain ... none of them was left alive; neither women nor children were spared.'

Diminishing Returns

It would be an exaggeration to say that it was all for nothing. Four 'Crusader States' were established in the Middle East: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli (in northern Lebanon) became important centres for commercial and cultural commerce between East and West. From the modern perspective, it's tempting to see these states as what we would call 'colonies'. Except that the overwhelming superiority in wealth, technology and military strength the European powers were to enjoy over their subject nations in the nineteenth century was to be entirely absent here. If anything, it was the other way round. By the standards of an Islamic world that was way ahead in science and learning, the 'Franks' really were the rude 'barbarians' the Muslims saw them as. They were easily to be dislodged by a united and organized Islamic force. In 1144 Imad ad-Din Zengi reconquered Edessa, in northern Syria, with his Seljuk army, prompting alarm in Europe and an unsuccessful Second Crusade (1145-49).

The First Crusade had established a depressing template: the Crusaders proved more adept at massacring Jews in Germany during their muster for the wars than they were at dealing with well-armed and well-commanded Muslim armies. Again, the ghettoes of Cologne, Mainz, Speyer and Worms were to bear the brunt. The campaign in the Middle East was ineffective. It was only thanks to continuing disunity among the Muslims that the Crusaders were able to maintain some sort of hold in the Holy Land. When the Muslims found a strong and capable leader in the shape of Salah ad-Din ('Saladin', as the westerners called him), they retook Jerusalem easily in 1187.

The Brutality of Richard I

For all the chivalric myths about Richard the Lionheart the Third Crusade he led was, at very best, a qualified success. Except in atrocity, where it was well up to the mark. An old-fashioned English historiography rooted in public-school values of sportsmanship and fair play has bequeathed to us an idealized view of the relationship between England's Richard I and Saladin - one of elaborate courtesy based on mutual respect.

 The Second Crusade (1145) began with this solemn scene in the Basilica of Saint-Denis (now in northern Paris), Louis VII vowing to fight for Christ. Subsequent events proved anticlimactic: both French and German contingents were ignominiously defeated, the Holy Places left more firmly than ever in Muslim hands.

Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or 'Saladin', a warrior of Kurdish birth, led Islamic forces with daring and with flair. Despite the 'Lionhearted' courage of England's Richard I, the Third Crusade was another failure, Saladin strengthening his hold on the 'Holy Places'.

In fact, relations between them were ill-tempered and vindictive. Having taken the Syrian city of Acre in 1191, Richard opened negotiations by having 2700 Muslim prisoners put to death. Saladin responded with mass-executions of Christian captives. By 1192, the Crusade had secured visiting rights for Christian pilgrims, but nothing else.

The Holy City certainly lay more firmly than ever in Muslim hands.

Sack and Sacrilege

Would it be fourth time lucky? It depends upon your point of view. The Crusaders of 1202-04 did return home as conquerors. Not of Jerusalem, though, but of Constantinople, a Christian city. Short of money, the force sent out by Pope Innocent 111 diverted to the Byzantine capital to shake down the Emperor Alexius III for funds. Finding him uncooperative, they ended up laying a long and cruel siege.

Crusading on the Home Front 

The whole crusading ideal was looking a little tarnished by now, it might be thought, but that didn't stop churchmen and rulers from devising ever more 'Crusades'. In Iberia, the centuries-long drive to take back Spain and Portugal from the 'Saracens' came to be seen as not just a campaign of conquest but a holy war. And then, in 1209, crusading came home with a vengeance to the south of France, when Pope Innocent III proclaimed a war against Carhars.

Waylaid by Mesud I's Seljuk Turks, the German crusading army was defeated at Dorylaeum in 1147. King Conrad III escaped with a handful of survivors, but they could do little to help a French force which was to be badly mauled itself at Damascus the following year.

These simple, largely uneducated and yet earnestly idealistic men and women had never done anybody any harm - paradoxically, this very innocence increased the threat they posed. The greed and cynicism of the Church was particularly apparent to the poorest in society: like many others the length and breadth of Europe, those of southern France felt they had seen through the hypocrisy of those who were supposed to be their spiritual guides. Unlike disillusioned souls elsewhere, though, they had found comfort in another creed. Catharism conceived of the cosmos as essentially dualistic, a system in which God and Satan warred with one another and body and soul were locked in eternal opposition. The soul was eternal and belonged in heaven, the realm of God and of light. All that was material and mortal belonged to this world - that of Satan - and was dark and bad. Since Christ, according to the scriptures, was 'the Word made flesh', it followed that he and his teachings must be evil too. The worldliness of the Church was all too obvious. Far from being the 'Bride of Christ', preached Cathar Arnald Hot, it was 'espoused of the Devil and its doctrine diabolical'. Such teachings drew on a deep well of frustrated idealism, and many flocked to follow what seemed to be a purer path. King Philippe II was concerned at what he saw as a threat to the social order. As far as Pope Innocent III was concerned, Catharism could not be ignored. The heretics were like

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In the killing fields of Languedoc, poor peasant families were slaughtered in their thousands, but towns like Beziers certainly weren't spared. Anything up to 20,000 may have been killed here; afterwards, in the words of the Pope's legate Arnaud Amalric, 'the whole city was despoiled and burned'.

'Our men spared no one,' crowed papal legate Arnaud Amalric after the taking of Beziers in 1209. Many good Catholics must have been in the southern French city along with the Cathar 'heretics'. 'Never mind. Kill them all, and let God sort them out,' Abbot Amalric said.

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the 'Saracens', he said, and in 1209 he proclaimed a crusade against this enemy within.

Massacred in God's Name 

From the military point of view, the 'Albigensian Crusade' was a grotesquely one-sided affair: it took its name from the town of Albi, a hotbed of heresy. Although local magnates like Count Raymond of Toulouse were involved (covetousness of his lands and power was an unacknowledged cause of the Crusade, as far as the northern French barons were concerned), for the most part the 'enemy' were defenceless peasants. All the panoply of medieval war-making - mounted knights with retinues of foot soldiers, including archers and crossbowmen, as well as companies of mercenaries - were deployed against unarmed civilians. Siege-engines smashed through the walls of country towns.

No mercy was shown towards the defeated - the crushing of heresy was sacred work. At Beziers, the Papal Legate boasted, 20,000 men, women and children were put to the sword. Over a thousand were burned alive after seeking sanctuary inside a church. Although Pope Innocent tried to rein in the carnage from about 1213, it had acquired an unstoppable momentum. All told, as many as a million may have died.

Foreshadowing the Yellow Star

Elsewhere in western Europe, Catharism had never gained ground the way it had in France's Languedoc

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 Innocent III proclaimed a Fifth Crusade in 1215 at the same Lateran Council at which he announced his hostile measures against the Jews.

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- but there were was always that old, reliable scapegoat-group, the Jews. Hostility towards 'Christ's Killers' had never entirely gone away but it had flared up recurrently in times of economic and social stress. In York, in 1190, for instance, word of a pogrom prompted local Jews to seek refuge in the tower of the city's castle. Anti-Semitic feeling had been whipped up by Richard Mabelys and other nobles who seem to have been motivated mainly by the consciousness that they owed large sums of money to the Jews and didn't want to pay it back. But the Church's representatives were ready and willing to cast a cloak of piety over this persecution: while the Jews cowered inside the tower, a priest celebrated mass outside and urged on his congregants against the Jews. So it continued for six days, at which point their despairing captives - fearing 

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IN  THE  BOX

BLOOD LIBEL

The Jews, rather than the Romans, had always borne the blame as the killers of Christ: a grim mythology had grown up around this 'fact'. In 1144, rumours erupted in Norwich, England, that a little boy named William who had gone missing had been abducted and ritually crucified by the city's Jews. Drawing off young William's blood, they had mixed this in with meal to make their matzos, or unleavened bread. The story was taken up internationally, sparking off a wave of persecution, with similar kidnappings and killings reported across much of Europe. This despite the strict prohibition on the eating of blood-derivatives insisted on by the Jewish Torah - and the expansion of the original story in an investigation ordered by Pope Innocent IV in 1247.

The Church's own ambivalence can't have helped: although investigation after investigation formally refuted the 'Blood Libel' officially, priests at local level shared the prejudices of the masses. And the cult of 'Saint William of Norwich' received at least tacit recognition from the Church after a series of miraculous cures were allegedly worked at the supposed 'martyr's' shrine. When, in 1255, the body of a nine-year-old boy was found at the bottom of a well in Lincoln, he too was said to have been ritually murdered. Again, the 'Blood Libel' was repeated and again attacks on Jewish communities in Lincoln and abroad were unleashed. And again, the Church was ambivalent in its reaction. On the one hand, officially, it scoffed at the stories and deprecated the attacks on Jews; on the other, it was only too happy to recognize the miracles that were supposedly worked by 'Little St Hugh of Lincoln' and cash in on the pious pilgrims who flocked from far and wide to see his shrine.

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death or, still worse, forced baptism - committed collective suicide: 150 died.

In 1215, anti-Semitism was given the official imprimatur of the Catholic Church, whose Fourth Lateran Council issued a series of decrees against the Jews. To begin with, Jews were prohibited from employing Christians as servants - no Jew should have authority over any Christian, in other words. Notoriously, it further stipulated that Jews (and Muslims) had to wear distinctive garb so that their 'perfidious' presence should always be evident to the Christian communities among which they lived. The brutal enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy in the reconquered kingdoms of Spain had forced loyal Jews and Muslims underground, giving rise to a whole new bogeyman: that of the sinisterly secretive crypto-alien, preying on innocent Christians. It was an aspect of the Jews' malicious cunning that they could conceal

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Desperate Jews in York in 1190 were reduced to killing their wives and families to pre-empt the threat of murder conversion. Never exactly in short supply, Christian hypocrisy special depths in the hatred felt for Jewish 'usurers' on services so many relied.

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themselves in plain sight. The Lateran Council's orders were supposed to drive this hidden menace out into the open - there should be no way for the Jews to conceal their secret  'shame'.

The Northern Crusades

The Christians of medieval Europe knew (or thought they did) about the Jews from their sacred scriptures. By and large, though, they had only the vaguest idea of what Islam was. In records of the fighting in Iberia and the Middle East, the enemy is generally referred to in ethnic terms as 'Saracens' or 'Moors'. Where their beliefs are concerned, they tend to be described as

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Overlooking Latvia's Gauja Valley, Sigulda Castle was built by the Brothers of the Sword in the thirteenth century. As their name suggests, the Brothers had a rough and ready way of making converts. (They were later absorbed into the Order of Teutonic Knights.)

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'Pagans'. In truth, of course, Islam is one of the three 'Religions of the Book', sharing the Old Testament both with Judaism and Christianity. All three faiths revere Abraham as a founding patriarch and prophet; all share fundamental values and beliefs.

In Christian Europe's remoter northern fringes, however, real 'Pagans' did still exist. Around the Baltic, in Lithuania, Latvia and northern Prussia, people still followed age-old religious practices, worshipping the deities they saw in the sun, moon and stars, and in streams and trees.

As so often, Christ and Caesar - Catholicism and colonial rule - went hand in glove: these kingdoms were at least nominally Christianized and were supposed to be under the rule of the Polish kings. After repeated invasions, however, they still didn't accept anybody's overlordship - nor had they wavered in their commitment to the Pagan gods.

Again, accordingly, the call went up for a crusade. It found a response in the Teutonic Knights. This military order had an impressive (if, to modern eyes, perverse) record of 'real' crusading, having been founded in Acre at the time of the Third Crusade. Like the Knights Hospitallers, these German priests had started out tending the sick, but they had come to interpret their brief of 'care' a great deal more widely. By 1198, their role as fighting clerics had been acknowledged by the Church.

Their function in the 'Prussian Crusade' was quite clear: from about 1230 onwards they made a series of sweeps through Prussia and beyond into what are now the countries of Latvia and Lithuania. The Pope

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Not content with persecuting paganism, the Teutonic went after Russian Orthodoxy, which led to dramatic defeat at 'Battle of the Ice', 1242. Alexander Nevsky's tactical retreat enticed them out on to the treacherous surface of Lake Peipus where they were cut to pieces by Alexander's infantry.

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had granted Prussia to the order as a 'monastic state' - in theory, at least, they were the country's rulers. In practice, this was untamed territory and they struggled to make their way against determined guerrilla opposition. Allowing themselves to be surrounded by the Samogitians at the Battle of Durbe in northwestern Lithuania in 1260, they suffered a damaging defeat that triggered an uprising across the whole of Prussia. They fought back, however, slowly and painfully restoring some semblance of order and at least the appearance of Christian observance in the region. At one raid in Sokma, Lithuania, in 1275, the chronicler Nicholas von Jeroschin reported, the Teutonic Knights 'killed so many of the unbaptized that many drowned in their own blood'.

In 1377, John Wycliffe was summoned to appear before Courtenay, Bishop of London, in Old St Paul's, to defend his 'heretical' views. Uncomfortable as he clearly was with a great deal of what Wycliffe said, Courtenay made no move to stop the wayward priest from preaching.

Reformers or Heretics?

The wealth and corruption of the medieval Church was evident to anyone with eyes to see: inevitably, impatience was going to grow. In 1177, Peter Waldo, a prosperous merchant from Lyon, France, underwent a spiritual crisis, giving away all his possessions and going on the road as a mendicant preacher. St Francis of Assisi was to do much the same thing a few years laser, but he and his Franciscans went out of their way to be tactful to their superiors in the Church, managing to remain loyal - even obedient - Catholic clerks to the last. The 'Waldensians' scorned such compromise. They were openly confrontational,  attacking Church leaders as representatives of the rich and powerful. Ultimately, they rejected the authority of its priests.

John Wycliffe (1320-84) was an English priest and scholar, but his words struck a chord with many of his country's less educated people, who came to hear him preach at his parish church in Lutterworth, Leicestershire. Like Waldo, Wycliffe argued that the Church had no business being rich or involving itself with the concerns of temporal government. Even in religious affairs, he argued, it had made too much of its own importance. The whole elaborate hierarchy should be scaled down, he said, and translations should be made of the Bible so that ordinary people could come to their own understanding of the Word of God and what it meant. It's easy to see why the Church might regard Wycliffe as a heretic. He denied the doctrine of 'transubstantiation': the bread and wine were not substantively changed, he said, they remained bread and wine, even as they took on the nature of Christ's body and blood. But his followers, known as 'Lollards', were seen as a threat more to secular than religious authority. The Church itself seemed extraordinarily unperturbed. News travelled slowly in the fourteenth century, and the workings of the Church ever ground slowly. By the time the authorities in Rome had fully digested what Wycliffe was saying, he had been dead for over 20 years (seized by a stroke as he said mass in his church in Lutterworth). Not to be cheated of their punishment, they pronounced him a heretic, had his body dug up and burned and the ashes thrown into a nearby river: better late than never, they must have thought.

Peter Waldo sits in pensive pose - though the Church's chief concern was that this French heretic might prove more a doer than a thinker. The 'Waldensian' line was frankly revolutionary, calling on followers to disregard the orders of a hierarchy who served 'two masters', God and Mammon (money).

IN  THE  BOX

HUSSITE  HOSTILITIES

Today, the teachings of Jan Hus are seen as paving the way for Luther and the Reformation. In his day, the Czech reformer was condemned as a heretic, even though he denied having said most of the things his clerical accusers claimed. He seems in fact to have been exercised more by the corruption he saw in the Bohemian Church. Despite this, in 1415, he was burned at the stake. His followers, outraged, rose up against the Bohemian Crown and the Holy Roman Empire, which had the backing of Pope Martin VI. Inevitably, he proclaimed crusades - a series of them, in 1420, 1421 and 1424. Thanks to the rebels' resourcefulness and courage, these failed to make much headway. The Hussites were helped by the hand-held cannons they used - a great leveller in the field of battle, these early firearms made infantrymen a match for the most heavily armoured knights.

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A Tale of Two Trials

The Catholic Church has always shown an unholy readiness to turn a blind eye to monstrous sins committed by its political allies while upbraiding its enemies' merest faults as enormities. One example, ironically, came with the trial and execution of the 'Maid of Orleans', Joan of Arc - later, of course, to be numbered among the greatest saints. Joan, just 19 when she was executed by the English, had donned man's clothing to lead the French to a series of victories against the armies of Henry VI. Finally, though, she was defeated and captured at Compiegne.

Asked if she knew she was in God's

grace, she answered: 'If I am not,

may God put me there; and if I am,

may God so keep me.'

The initial intention of the English was to try her as a witch, but this proved impossible when a physical examination proved her a virgin (the conventional wisdom was that witches copulated with demons). Backed by the Bishop of Beauvais, a supporter of Henry's claims to France's throne, she was instead accused of heresy - and when this charge in its turn could not be proved, of 'insubordination and heterodoxy'. That the height of her heterodoxy appears to have been the wearing of man's clothing did nothing to assuage her guilt in the eyes of the English court.

She was burned at the stake in the town square in Rouen in 1431. Does it make it better or worse that a quarter of a century later, its fences mended with the monarchy of France, an embarrassed Catholic Church ordered a retrial of this 'heterodox' heroine? Pope Callixtus III had her case reconsidered and her original conviction was thrown out. Even so, it was not until 1920 that she was made a saint.

WELL….. MADE  A  SAINT  BY  A  FALSE  AND  CORRUPT  CHURCH;  SHE  WAS  ALREADY  A  SAINT  IN  GOD'S  EYES;  MAYBE  INDEED  MISLED  BY  USING  FORCE  OF  ARMS,  BUT  SHE  SMELT  CORRUPTION  AND  STOOD  UP  AGAINST  IT  -  Keith Hunt

The War on Witchcraft

Joan of Arc was an extraordinary young woman, and virtually nothing about her case is unremarkable. One of its most unusual aspects is the attempt to brand her as a witch. This can seem surprising, given modern assumptions about 'medieval superstition'. In fact, few in the Church at this time took the idea of witchcraft seriously. The uneducated did of course swap stories of witches, warlocks, spells and curses, but clerics don't for the most part seem to have been much bothered by such notions. The idea that 'magical' powers might exist ran contrary to Catholic ideas that only God and his goodness reigned: there could be no such thing as a real 'witch' or 'wizard', so there was nothing to be feared. 

The great European witchhunts were to take place in the seventeenth century, a post-Reformation phenomenon, and they were invariably driven by Protestant kings and lords.

The execution of Jan Hus in 1415 was intended to make an example of the Czech reformer. It did, but it was an example of the wrong kind. His cruel killing confirmed for his followers the outright evil of a Church he had criticized only for its worldly ways.

Joan of Arc was motivated as much by her religious faith as by her French patriotism, yet the local hierarchy connived with the English over her trial. The attempt to convict her of witchcraft failing, she was sent to the stake for 'insubordination'.

Has the Catholic Church been the victim of a witch hunt, then? Not quite. Admittedly, the feeling that the modern Church has been at best sexist and arguably misogynistic in many of its attitudes has helped foster a widespread assumption that it would have been well to the fore when there were defenceless old women with cats to be persecuted. As it happens, that isn't actually how it was. 

Yet the Church is not to be absolved so easily.

There are clear indications that it was moving in this general direction itself in the years coming up to the Reformation. The book which was to become the manual of the Protestant witchfinders, the Malleus Maleficarum: ('The Hammer of Wrongdoers') was written by two German Dominican priests, Henricus Institoris and Jakob Sprenger. Published with the blessing of Pope Innocent V111 in 1487, it turned centuries of Carholic orthodoxy on its head by arguing for the reality of witchcraft as a practice and insisting on the need to prosecute.

Modern feminist critics of Catholicism won't be too surprised to learn that the Dominicans saw the roots of witchcraft as lying deep in the horrifying abyss of female sexuality. 'All witchcraft stems from fleshly lust, which in women is insatiable', they wrote. Witches were confirmed in their evil beliefs and their magic powers by their couplings with the Devil. Men might have relations with him too, Henricus and Sprenger acknowledged, but women were much more highly sexed - so there were far more witches than there were wizards. Nor does it come as too much of a shock to find that witches were to be identified by breaches of feminine propriety - boldness, assertiveness, argumentativeness - even a failure to cry in the face of a prosecutor's attack.

So much Catholic doctrine was unceremoniously ditched by the reformers, it's a tragic irony that they should have held on to Malleus Maleficarum. Though written by Dominican friars, this witchfinder's manual, the 'Hammer of Wrongdoers', was more or less ignored till taken up in post-Reformation times.

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IT  SHOULD  BE  MORE  THAN  OBVIOUS  TO  A  SOUND  MIND,  THAT  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  HAS  NEVER  BEEN  GOD'S  TRUE  CHURCH;  WELL  MAYBE  FOR  A  SHORT  WHILE  IN  ROME,  UNDER  THE  APOSTLES  TEACHING  AND  GUIDING.  BUT  BEFORE  THE  END  OF  THE  FIRST  CENTURY  AD,  THE  ROMAN  CHURCH  MOVED  INTO  ERROR,  WITH  FIRST  SUNDAY  OBSERVANCE,  THEN  EASTER  OBSERVANCE.  AS  THE  SECOND  CENTURY  AND  THIRD  CENTURY  CAME,  SO  CAME  MORE  AND  MORE  ERRORS,  PRACTICES,  AND  FALSE  DOCTRINAL TEACHINGS.  JUST  LOOK  AT  THE  OUTSIDE  DRESS  OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.  DID  THE  FANCY  CHURCHES,  ROBES,  HATS,  CEREMONY,  RITUALS,  AND  ALL  THE  PHYSICAL  TRAPPINGS  THAT  CHURCH [AND  THE  ANGLICAN/CHURCH  OF  ENGLAND]  HAS,  EVER  COME  FROM  JESUS  OR  THE  FIRST  CENTURY  APOSTLES.

NO  OF  COURSE  NOT!

THEN  AS  WE  HAVE  SEEN  IN  THIS  CHAPTER….. ALL  THE  WARS  AND  BRUTAL,  GHASTLY,  HORRIFIC,  CARNAL  KILLING  THAT  HAPPENED  UNDER  THE  NAME  OF  CHRIST  -  THIS  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  COULD  HARDLY  BE  GOD'S  TRUE  CHURCH.  THE  AMOUNT  OF  MEMBERS  IT  HAS  [1. 2  BILLION ABOUT]  AROUND  THE WORLD,  ALSO  DISQUALIFIES  IT  FROM  BEING  CHRIST'S  CHURCH.  JESUS  SAID  TO  HIS  TRUE  DISCIPLES,  "YOU  ARE THE  SALT  OF  THE  EARTH"  AND  HE  CALLED  HIS  CHURCH  THE  "LITTLE  FLOCK"  -  IN  THE  GREEK  IT  IS  A  DOUBLE  DIMINUTIVE  -  MEANING  VERY  LITTLE  FLOCK.  NEVER  WAS  JESUS'  CHURCH  TO EVER  BE  HUGE;  CERTAINLY  NEVER  TO  BE  THE  LARGEST  CHRISTIAN  CHURCH  IN  THE WORLD.

WHAT  WE  HAVE  READ  IN  THIS  CHAPTER,  AS  TO  WHAT  HISTORY  RECORDS  ABOUT  THE  DARK  SIDE  OF  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH,  IT  SHOULD  SEND  A  COLD,  VERY  COLD,  SHIVER  DOWN  YOUR  BACK.  AND  WE  YET  HAVE  MORE  TO  DISCOVER  -  Keith Hunt

DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC CHURCH

SQUABBLES AND SCHISMS

The word 'Catholic' means 'universal' -  and so the Church of Rome would like

to be considered. But these claims have been disputed since early on. Quarrels

have been frequent; wholesale splits have divided a Church that's never been

more militant than in its frequent internal feuds.

'If a kingdom is divided within itself, that kingdom cannot stand.'

'One holy, Catholic and apostolic Church,' says the Creed. If only it could be so simple. Every one of those words has caused controversy at one time or another. The first word, 'one', which sounds self-evidently true, has arguably been the most hotly contested, so many have been the divisions and the splits.

Jews vs Gentiles

Scarcely, in fact, had Jesus left this Earth than his followers were bickering over the actual shape that 'Christianity' should take. The Church was to invest a great deal in the figure of St Peter - Petrus, the punning

St Paul preaches in an image from a sixteenth-century edition of his own 'Epistle to the Romans'. Whilst his insistence on reaching out to the Gentiles caused real controversy, it arguably made Catholicism - and Christianity in general - what it is today.

NO  IT  DID  NOT;  PAUL  HAS  BEEN  VERY  MISUNDERSTOOD;  HE  TAUGHT  ONE  FAITH  FOR  BOTH  JEW  AND  GENTILE.  TODAYS  POPULAR  CHRISTIANITY  IS  NO  WHERE  CLOSE  TO  THE  THEOLOGY  OF  PAUL  -  Keith Hunt

'rock' on which Christ had promised to build his Church. If the head of the Apostles had had his way, however, Christ's religion might have remained a minor sect of Judaism. It had been St Paul, the 'Apostle of the Gentiles', who had argued for the Christian duty to 'go and teach all nations' and promoted Catholicism as a creed for all humankind. As a result, a great many scholars see Paul - not Peter - as Christianity's real founder after Christ himself. It was certainly he who, as proud of his Roman citizenship as he was of his Jewish identity, led the drive to centre the Church on what was then the central city of the world.

AGAIN  NOTHING  COULD  BE  FURTHER  FROM  THE  TRUTH;  PAUL  AND  PETER  HAD  THE  SAME  THEOLOGY;  THE  SAME  AS  ALL  THE  APOSTLES  OF  THE  ONE  TRUE  FAITH,  ONCE  DELIVERED  TO  THE  SAINTS.  TODAYS  POPULAR  CHRISTIANITY  DID  NOT  COME  FROM  PETER  OR  PAUL,  IT  CAME  FROM  A  FALSE  THEOLOGY  FROM  ROME,  AFTER  THE  DEATH  OF  PETER  AND  PAUL  AND  ALL  THE  ORIGINAL  APOSTLES,  JOHN  BEING  WITNESS  TO  THE  CORRUPTIONS  TAKING  PLACE [AS  HE  LIVED  TO  NEAR THE  END  OF  THE  FIRST  CENTURY  AD],  AND  SO  WRITING  ABOUT  THEM  IN  HIS  LETTERS  AND  THE  BOOK  OF  REVELATION  -  Keith Hunt

Popes and Anti-Popes

The degree to which differences of opinion and emphasis between Paul and Peter actually tipped over into outright conflict is far from clear - scholars dispute the matter to this day. One thing is for sure, though: factionalism flared up early and recurred with frequency thereafter - whether over doctrine or ritual or simply the will to power. Fighting over the papacy dates back just about to the very start of that

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PETER  AND  PAUL HAD  NO  DIFFERENCES  ON  THEOLOGY;  ALL  THE  ORIGINAL  APOSTLES  OF  JESUS  WERE  ONE  IN  UNITY  OF  THEOLOGY  -  Keith Hunt

Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, was criticized for readmitting into his congregation those lapsi who'd literally 'lapsed' in the face of fierce persecution under the Emperor Decius in the early 250s. He himself stood firm, and was indeed to be martyred when the next crackdown came along in 258.

 A liberal avantla lettre, Pope Callixtus I was considered too easy-going and forgiving in his attitudes by many in the third-century Church. His critics went so far as to elect an anti-pope in opposition 

to his reign.

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institution's history in the third century. (Despite the Gospel story, few serious historians of the Roman Catholic Church believe that St Peter was 'Pope' in anything remotely like the later sense.) The anointment of Callixtus I in 217 provoked a storm among those who saw his forgiving attitude to adulterers and remarried clergy as over-lax, and prompted the election of an 'anti-Pope' in the person of Hippolytus.

THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  BY  THE  MIDDLE  OF  THE  SECOND  CENTURY  AD  HAD  BECOME  SO  DIFFERENT  FROM  THE  APOSTOLIC  CHURCH,  BOTH  POLYCRATES  AND  POLYCARP  OF  THE  TRUE  CHURCHES  IN  ASIA  MINOR [NOW  TURKEY]  NEEDED  TO  GO  TO  ROME  TO  DEBATE  THEOLOGY  WITH  THE  BISHOP  OF  ROME  -  TO  NO  AVAIL;  ROME  WENT  ON  ITS  OWN  PATHWAY  WITH  ITS  OWN  DIFFERENT  CHRISTIAN  THEOLOGY  -  Keith Hunt

Many commentators, impatient with what they see as the hypocrisy and cynicism of the modern Church, point to the 'purity' and 'idealism' of the early Christians. Fair enough, perhaps, and yet in justice it should be noted that the supporters of these rival Popes fought deeply unedifying battles with one another in the streets of Rome. Many were killed and wounded before the quarrelling was brutally cut short by a renewed round of persecution on the part of a still-hostile Roman state. Undignified although their squabbling may have been, both presumptive pontiffs found a degree of nobility in death, each ending up as a martyr for his faith.

TRUE;  THE  ROMAN  THEOLOGIANS  WERE  WILLING  TO  STICK  TO  THEIR  THEOLOGY  EVEN  UNTO  DEATH.  THEY  DID  I'M  SURE  BELIEVE  GOD  HAD  GIVEN  THEM  THIS  THEOLOGY;  HENCE  DECEIVED  EVEN  TO  DEATH  -  Keith Hunt

Not long after, in 251, the election of Pope Cornelius sparked another bitter conflict: some considered that their new leader had been craven in keeping his head down during the Emperor Trajan's Decius persecution. Novatian, elected in opposition to Cornelius' authority, was the first in a little line of anti-Popes representing this purist faction.

Doctrinal Dogfights

Later 'heresies' were often really reformist movements brought about by impatience with the bureaucracy or the corruption of what had become a big and unaccountable institution. In the early days of the Church's history, however, important points of doctrine had yet to be ironed out and there was a feeling that key ideas were up for grabs. Arianism is a good example. Its proponents argued - with Arius, an Egyptian monk - that Christ, although an inspiration, had not in fact been divine. St Ambrose led the fight against this heresy as Bishop of Milan in the fourth century, but it continued to flourish, being taken up by many within Europe's ruling class. It was finally halted in its tracks in 381 by the Emperor Theodosius' condemnation at the Constantinople Conference. That same year the Nicene Creed clearly rejected Arianism's claims. But its influence persisted in outlying regions of the West.

The fifth century brought the Nestorian Schism. An Archbishop of Constantinople, Nestorius claimed that Christ as God and Christ as Man were not two different aspects of the same being but actually two distinct persons. This heresy was taken up especially in the east, leading to the breaking-away of the so-called Assyrian Church. Monophysitism, by contrast, held that Christ had only one aspect, the divine. Its supporters were fiercely at odds with the Nestorians in the East. And on the streets of Rome itself, where what may sound like the most exquisitely rarefied of theological discussions, were all too often pursued with sticks and knives leaving hundreds killed and wounded.

YES  AS  THE  FALSE  DECEIVED  THEOLOGIANS  HAGGLED  OVER DOCTRINES,  THE  TRUE  APOSTOLIC  FIRST  CENTURY  MEN,  AFTER  SETTLING  THE  "CIRCUMCISION"  QUESTION [ACTS 15] WENT  ON  IN  HARMONY  AS  TO  THE  TRUE  PRACTICES  AND DOCTRINES  OF  GOD  -  Keith Hunt

IN  THE  BOX

POPE JOAN

In 853, on the death of Leo IV, a female impostor is said to have ascended St Peter's throne. At first undetected in her male garb, she was finally discovered two years later, her gender revealed in the most public way possible. Suddenly, writes Jean de Mailly, during a papal procession through the streets of Rome, she gave birth to a baby before the eyes of an astonished crowd. Astounded and indignant, seeing II Papa so spectacularly exposed as a mama, the post-partum pontiff was dragged off behind a horse and stoned to death. Legend had it that from that time for several centuries successive Popes were enthroned for coronation in a chair with a hole in the seat through which a groping attendant could ascertain the existence of testicles beneath their robes. The story of Tope Joan' was to grow in the telling, becoming a staple of anti-clerical satire in the Reformation period - and it's an intriguing little parenthesis in papal history, true or not.

It's easy to see the appeal of the Pope Joan story, however questionable the evidence. Could this most patriarchal of institutions have been a matriarchy - however briefly? Protestants may have sneered, but many Catholics have wondered wistfully whether women might have a place in the hierarchy of the Church.

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The East-West Schism

Like the Roman Empire with which by now it had become so closely identified, the Church divided naturally to some extent between East and West. And just as the 'Roman' Empire had come to be led economically and politically by its eastern outpost at Constantinople, the Western Church had played 'poor

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St Ambrose, then the Bishop of Milan, bars his cathedral door to Theodosius I in protest against a massacre he has ordered. So impressed was the Emperor at this display of quiet courage that he became the bishop's ally in his struggle against the Arian heresy.

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relation' to the institution in the East. All this changed with Charlemagne's coronation in 774. 'Carolus Magnus', or Charles the Great, was King of the Franks but, expanding his influence along an axis spanning the Alps from France and Germany through Italy, he created what became known as the 'Holy Roman Empire'. As the influence of this new superstate grew, so did that of the papacy in Rome, which increasingly challenged the authority of the Eastern Church.

In the centuries that followed, the fortunes of both regions fluctuated, up and down. More and more, though, they thrived or failed independently of each other. Theology followed politics and economics: by the beginning of the eleventh century, the two spheres were starting to go their separate ways. The differences concerned everything from the distribution of divinity among the 'Holy Trinity' and the right of the clergy to marry, to (quite seriously) the pros and cons of leavened versus unleavened bread in the Eucharist. It was indeed this last question that pushed Pope Leo IX to breaking point. In 1054, a legate from Rome laid a papal bull or decree on the altar of Constantinople's Hagia Sophia church, denouncing the actions and pronouncements of the Eastern Patriarch, Michael Kerullarios. The latter, unimpressed, immediately issued his own attack on the papacy: what has come to be known as the East-West Schism was under way.

It was to continue until 1965, at least in ecclesiastical theory, when a resolution was reached by the Patriarch and Pope Paul. To most people, though - even to believers on either side - the Catholic and Orthodox Churches had long since come to seem established as completely separate things.

The coronation of Carolus Magnus - 'Charlemagne' - in 774 wasn't just a magnificent occasion in itself: it tipped the whole political balance of Europe sharply westward. The Holy Roman Empire, a unique coalition between Church and imperial state, was to dominate European affairs for centuries.

The sacred altar, fashioned from every sort of precious material and

beheld as a wonder by the entire world, was broken up into bits and 

shared out among the soldiers - as were the other holy treasures of 

this splendid shrine ...

IN  THE  BOX

The  Crusade  Against  Christians

How do we do God's work without the wherewithal? Take it by force from the more vulnerable, if we are to follow the example of the Fourth Crusade. Long resented as an economic threat by rival trading centres in the West, such as Genoa and Venice, Constantinople was diven by dynastic struggles at the start of the thirteenth century. So it was that it seemed a natural next step for the leaders of the Fourth Crusade, when they found themselves short of funds to feed and pay their men, to divert to Constantinople and subject the city to a lengthy siege.

Finding a pretext in the ousting of Emperor Isaac II Angelos by his brother Alexios, they attacked the Christian capital with ferocious force. When they finally succeeded in penetrating its defences, they ran amok, embarking on an orgy of destruction. For three full days and nights they roamed the city's streets, ransacking palaces, churches and houses, looting, raping and killing as they went. Many thousands must have died: it isn't inhumanity that makes the contemporary witnesses focus on the sacrilegious damage to the city's holy places but their sense of symbolism, of a civilization and its sanctity raped and murdered.

'How', asked the Byzantine scholar Nicetas Choniates, having seen this spree of blasphemy, 'am I even to begin to describe the deeds of these wicked men? Alas, the sacred images, instead of being adored, were stamped underfoot! Alas, the holy martyrs' relics were cast down into unclean places! Then finally - one shudders even to hear such things - the consecrated body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ were casually pilled upon the ground or thrown about.' Even Hagia Sophia, that great central shrine of Eastern Christianity, was subjected to vandalism and humiliation of the vilest sort.

'The sacred altar, fashioned from every sort of precious material and beheld as a wonder by the entire world, was broken up into bits and shared out among the soldiers - as were the other holy treasures of this splendid shrine ...

'Mules and horses were led into the innermost sanctuary of the shrine to carry away the treasure. Some, which couldn't keep their footing on the glasslike flooring, fell - and had to be stabbed and killed, so the sacred pavement ended up befouled with blood and gore.'

But the crowning insult was administered by 'a certain harlot', a companion of the victors, who 'sat in the seat of the Patriarch, singing obscenety and dancing shamelessly'. Outside in the city at large, meanwhile,

'... in the alleys, in the streets, in the churches, cries of complaint, sobbing, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the screams of women, wounds, rape, abductions, the forcible parting of the closest families. Nobles wandered ignominiously; the respectable elderly walked weeping, the wealthy in poverty - their riches stolen. So it was in the streets, on the corners, in the greatest church, in the lowest dives - no corner of the city was left unattacked; there was no sanctuary. Every place in every part of the city was filled with every type of crime. Oh, immortal God, how fearful men's afflictions, how terrible the distress!'

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A Pocket Pope

The greater the Church's wealth and spiritual authority, the more significant its political power - paradoxically, this was a source of vulnerability. Determined to annex the Church's influence to their own, Europe's kings and princes tried to push Popes

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Nicholas IV might have been remembered for being the first Franciscan pope: instead he's the pontiff who let his Church be drawn into the Italian politics of his time. A genuinely unworldly man, he doesn't deserve the stigma of cynicism - a more ruthless player might have managed to steer clear.

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around, intimidate and influence them. The Popes were forced into playing politics themselves.

It was a dangerous game. In 1288, Pope Nicholas IV started seeking the support of Italy's powerful Colonna family. To them, a Pope was just another pawn. In pursuance of their longstanding rivalry with the rulers of Aragon, they persuaded Nicholas to back their allies in France's House of Anjou. He accordingly crowned Prince Charles of Anjou King of Sicily and Naples. The Colonnas saw no need to surrender their special status under Nicholas' successor, Celestine V He even moved his papal court to Naples out of deference to Charles.

Obviously, ignominiously, out of his depth, Celestine abdicated only five months into his papacy, in 1295.

Had he jumped or was he pushed? Baptized Benedetto Caetani, his successor Boniface III was a seriously intimidating figure. Celestine didn't just step down from his papal throne. He actually fled for his life and Boniface had him hunted down. He imprisoned him in a castle, where he died the following year.

Boniface was uncowed by the Colonnas, unfazed by France and unperturbed by the power of Charles II of Sicily and Naples, but his confrontational manner only ended up hastening a crisis that had arguably always been coming. Years of harassment culminated in an abduction and assassination attempt organized by Duke Sciarra Colonna and the Anjoually Guillaume de Nogaret in 1303 - Boniface survived what was to become known in the annals of the Church as the 'Outrage', but died of natural causes a few weeks later.

On the Move

The precedent Celestine had set by resigning from the papacy while in office wasn't to be repeated till the twenty-first century with the controversial abdication of Pope Benedict XVI (see below). But in relocating his court to Naples, it turned out he was establishing something of a trend: the 'Roman' Catholic Church became all but nomadic in the years that followed. While Boniface had restored the papal seat to Rome and his successor Benedict XI remained there, despite the pressure, the French won out after Benedict's death. As Bertrand de Got, the new Pope Clement V had been Archbishop of Bordeaux. He never so much as visited Rome and, four years into his reign in 1309, formally transferred the seat of papal power to Avignon in southern France. On behalf of France's Philip IV, he quickly moved to reinforce French domination in

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Seen here in the simple habit of a monk, Celestine V found the pomp and power of the papacy utterly bewildering. Bullied alike by Italy's noblemen and his supposed supporters in the Church, he quit his office in confusion and despair after just five months.

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the wider Church by creating no fewer than 19 new cardinals from the country.

Clement V also created a splendid court - so splendid as to make many wonder what all the opulence could have to do with the Christian religion. 'Here', wrote the poet Petrarch, visiting Avignon in 1340, 'reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strangely forgotten their origin. I am astounded, recalling their ancestors, to see these men weighed down by gold and dressed in purple, vaunting the spoils of princes and of nations; seeing luxurious palaces and battlemented walls, rather than a boat turned upside-down for shelter...

'Instead of sacred solitude, we get a criminal gang, with crowds of cronies; in place of sobriety, we find wild banquets...'

One such banquet, contemporary chroniclers report, had 3000 guests - although even for that number over 120 cattle, 100 calves, 900 kids, 60 pigs, 10,000 chickens, 1400 geese, 300 pike and 200 barrels of wine sounds a bit excessive.

'These are but the prelude to

their orgies. I will not count the

number of wives stolen or virgins

deflowered.^'

More specifically, fleshly sins were by no means absent. 'Prostitutes swarm on the papal beds', said Petrarch, and he went on:

'I will not speak of adultery, seduction, rape, incest: these are but the prelude to their orgies. I will not count the number of wives stolen or virgins deflowered. I will not tell of how they pressure the outraged husbands and fathers into silence, nor of the wickedness of those who willingly sell their women for gold.'

'Avignon', he summed up, was 'the foundation of anguish, the dwelling-place of wrath, the school of errors, the temple of heresy ... the false guilt-laden Babylon, the forge of lies, the horrible prison, the hell on Earth.'

EVEN  BACK  THEN,  THOSE  WITH  ANY  SENSE  OF  MIND,  ANY  NORMALCY  OF  MNIND,  COULD  SEE  THE  ROMAN  CHURCH  WAS  ANYTHING  BUT  CHRIST'S  TRUE  CHURCH.  IT  WAS,  AND  ALWAYS  HAS  BEEN,  "BABYLON,  MYSTERY  RELIGION"  -  Keith Hunt

Avignon provided the papacy with a secure base away from the politicking and intriguing of Italy. The protection - and the lavish support - of France was to come at a very high price, however: the Church faced losing all autonomy.

IN  THE  BOX

TEMPLAR TRAVESTY

Oxymoronic as it may be to modern eyes, the idea of the 'military priest' seemed sensible enough in the topsy-turvy Christian thinking of the Crusading era. The 'right' of the pilgrim to visit the Holy Places of the Middle East had to be defended; with all its talk of 'turning the other cheek' and loving one's enemies, Christianity had to be upheld, if necessary, at the point of a sword. Hence the establishment of several orders of armed priests in the Holy Land (not to mention the Teutonic Knights of Christendom's northern frontier). Perhaps the most famous of these were the Knights Templar. So called on account of their founding priory on Jerusalem's Temple Mount (in fact a corner of the confiscated Al-Aqsa Mosque), the Knights Templar were tasked with providing support for pilgrims visiting Christ's City.

Given the manifold dangers of the journey - not just in the Middle East, but all the way, whether by land or sea, it made sense for one aspect of this support to involve a form of banking so that travellers didn't have to carry quantities of gold. On the back of what became a thriving business, the Templars grew extremely rich, their fortune soon attracting envious glances from Europe's monarchies. Philip IV, heavily in hock to the order, began briefing against them assiduously in the 1300s, cooking up claims of everything from financial malfeasance to sodomy.

Clement V obediently ordered a crackdown and the Knights were suppressed: 15,000 priests were arrested and many of them tortured on the rack. Highly-coloured testimony about blasphemous rituals, homosexual orgies, idol-worship and grand-scale corruption was wrung out under extreme duress. Ironically, if unsurprisingly, the main financial beneficiary was Philip IV who won twice over, writing off his debts and securing much of the Templars' wealth.

THERE  IS  A  FULL  STUDY  IN  THIS  SECTION  OF  MY  WEBSITE,  DEVOTED  TO  THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  KNIGHT'S  TEMPLAR.  YOU  WILL  NOTE:  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  AGAINST  ROMAN  CATHOLIC,  EVEN  TO  TORTURE  AND  DEATH,  WAS  JUST  PART  OF  LIVING  IN  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  WORLD  OF  THAT  TIME  -  AGAIN  CLEARLY  SHOWING  WE  ARE  HERE  NOT  TALKING  ABOUT  THE  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  CHRIST,  BUT  A  CHURCH  INFLUENCED  BY,  OR  DIRECTLY  CONTROLLED  BY  SATAN THE  DEVIL  AND  HIS  DEMONS  -  Keith Hunt

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A Faith Without Foundation

Did any of this matter? Strange as it may seem today to think of the 'Roman' Catholic Church being administered from southern France, there was arguably nothing wrong with a relocation of this kind. 'My kingdom is not of this world', Jesus had said in scripture: if the Church's realms were essentially spiritual, did it matter where its Earthly headquarters were? Initial indications were that it didn't. The Church appeared to be flourishing in France, growing steadily in splendour and in wealth - if this had brought with it some questionable moral behaviour - pace Petrarch, that was by no means entirely new.

Philip IV of France was responsible for suppressing both the Knights Templar and the Jews. His motives in the two cases were much the same. Fearing both groups as brotherhoods at work within his state, he also coveted their money - both had accumulated great wealth in the banking business.

There were grounds, then, for arguing that the move to Avignon hadn't actually done the papacy too much harm - even that it had done it a degree of good. After Clement's death in 1314, six successive Popes reigned from Avignon.

This surely represented stability of a sort? Granted, it was a stability founded in immorality and decadence (Gregory XI, who reigned from 1370 to 1378, was widely believed to have been Clement VI's son). But it was still stability. The real cost - and it was to be considerable - was to the Church's autonomy. Behind the scenes, the French Crown was wielding unprecedented - and ever-growing - power.

Ultimately, indeed, it came to threaten the Church's very existence. The move to France had left the Church in Italy bereft. Rome in particular had become a city without a purpose, its role of so many centuries lost. The population had plummeted: something like 25,000 people rattled round in a vast and yet increasingly decrepit city-shell that had housed a million and a half in the early days of Christianity at the Empire's height. It was scarcely a city, more a strange and lonely

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Under Urban VI, the Church reasserted its independence of the French Crown - much to the vexation of Charles V. Not to be outdone, the King created his own pope and set him up in Avignon: the Church was once again divided by this 'Western Schism'.

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wilderness where packs of wolves wandered along its deserted streets. Rome wasn't the only victim here. The wider Church was feeling ruined as well. Queen Bridget of Sweden had joined St Catherine of Siena in lobbying for a return to Rome. Across Christian Europe, believers were coming to feel that if the Church could be ruled from Avignon as well as it might be from Rome, it wasn't the Catholic Church to which they felt they belonged.

HOW  MANY  KNOW  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  WAS  NOT  ALWAYS  HEADQUARTERED  IN  ROME?  MOST  CATHOLICS  WOULD  NEVER  GUESS  THIS  WAS  THE  CASE  IN  THE  HISTORY  OF  THEIR  CHURCH  -  Keith Hunt

A Proliferation of Popes

Typically, the return to Rome when it came was not to be dictated by religious reasons but by the Church's mounting fear that it might lose its lands in Italy. Instability in the country encouraged Pope Gregory XI to intervene before one of the warring aristocrats decided to help himself to the Papal States - those territories supposedly gifted to the Church under the 'Donation of Constantine' (see above). His move with key courtiers from Avignon to Rome in 1377 seems to have been more a diplomatic mission than a wholesale restoration of a Roman papacy, but in 1378 his death of a bladder problem left his retinue marooned in Rome. There, the people rose up, and it was really in response to the pressure of the mob that the cardinals held a hasty election and anointed a new - and Italian - pontiff, Pope Urban VI.

The clerics got more than they had bargained for: Urban was an exacting chief and a zealous reformer. Many in the Church's own hierarchy found themselves increasingly in sympathy with an indignant Charles V of France. The French Crown had by no means finished with a papacy it had come to look on as its own possession. Charles accordingly endowed his own 'Pope', Clement VII. Three centuries on from the great East-West Schism, the Church had been divided once again: this new 'Western Schism' carved western Christendom in two.

In the decades that followed, the split was to continue: four further 'anti-Popes' were to be elected as French counters to the Popes of Rome. Called to arbitrate in the dispute, the Council of Pisa (1408) made matters even worse - for a time the Church boasted not just two Popes but three. Finally, reason prevailed and in 1417 Pope Martin V received the recognition of the entire Catholic Church.

A Spanish Splinter-Church

Arguably the last of the Avignon Popes (although even that title isn't undisputed), Benedict XIII was well-meaning enough, as far as it went. He'd impressed his

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IN  THE  BOX

THE PIRATE PONTIFF

The last of the anti-Popes, John XXIII is very definitely not to be confused with the 'Blessed' Pope John XXIIII, famous as the great reformer of the modern Church. Born Baldassare Cossa on the Isle of Ischia, 'John' seems to have worked in mysterious ways to reach his clerical vocation, serving first as a pirate (two of his brothers were executed for their crimes) and then - worse, it might be argued - as a lawyer. He was in his 30s before he became a priest, and appears to have relied heavily on his old connections in Ischia's pirate bands as he bullied, schemed and possibly murdered his way up the rankings of the alternative papacy. In 1413 he was forced to flee to Florence, but was caught and compelled to appear at the Council of Constance - he again escaped and fled, but was captured, deposed and put on trial. As the English historian Edward Gibbon was to put it wryly, 'The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.' Apparently, the charge sheet might have included the seduction of over 200 matrons, widows and virgins - 'to say nothing of an alarming number of nuns'.

 The anti-Pope John XXIII arrives at Constance after his arrest in 1413. He had briefly been one of three popes in the world. Reluctant to give up his place, he fled with his patron, Frederick IV of Austria, but was finally recaptured and forced to yield.

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contemporaries by his intellect, his piety and his simple life. But, while he had commitment to his Church, he had none at all to Rome. As Pedro de Luna, he had been born in 1328 into an Aragonese nobility that had always sided with France's House of Anjou and its Avignon papacy. So he had no hesitation in accepting the succession to Clement VII as King Charles's Pope.

And all the indications are that he was a confident, capable and tolerant administrator of 'his' Church. As time went on, however, and the whole idea of the Avignon papacy became more controversial, Benedict appears to have grown defensive - and desperate to justify his reign. This, it has been suggested, was what motivated his campaign for the conversion of Spain's Jews - and his vindictive rage when his efforts abjectly failed. For centuries, believers had looked to the mass recruitment of the Jews to the cause of Christ as a sort of benignly apocalyptic turning-point in religious history. By winning what would have been an enormous coup, Benedict hoped to cast a halo around a papacy he knew had little remaining credibility in the wider Catholic Church.

Outlawing the Jewish Faith

Benedict addressed Spain's Jewish leaders in person, preaching eloquently; they heard him politely, but remained unmoved. He reacted reinstating the strictures of the Fourth Lateran Council (see above) and then going further by banning the possession and study of the Talmud altogether. Synagogues were shut

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The Western Schism wasn't to end until, at the Council of Constance in 1417, anti-Pope Benedict XIII was sent packing from his 'papacy' and excommunicated. Even then, in denial, he didn't accept what had happened, and continued with his 'reign' for several years.

Not a monster - or even a mediocrity - Benedict XIII might have made a decent Pope: instead he was anti-Pope at a time when the title had lost all credibility. The less tenable his position, the more tyrannical his rule; the more wayward his measures against vulnerable targets like the Jews.

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down, Jewish crafts and medical traditions were outlawed and trade between Jews and Gentiles became illegal. Attendance at Christian services three times a year was compelled. In what might be seen as a rare progressive measure, the 'official' Church rescinded all these measures in 1418.

By then the Church had rescinded his papacy too, but Benedict continued to play at being Pope, in deep denial - he even named a successor, Clement VIII. When Benedict died in 1422, he took up his title - ignored by the wider Church; he even appointed a village priest in Roden, Zaragoza, to follow him - but of this putative 'Pope Benedict XIV' nothing else is known.

Lost Sheep

Church historians of this time too easily forget the wider impact of the Western Schism: if things were confused at the top, what must they have been like at national and parish level? With two or even three Popes to choose from at any given time, which was a secular ruler to acknowledge, the Roman pontiff or the French-backed Avignon Pope? Since both appointed his own bishops - and each excommunicated the others - how were priests to know if they were serving the 'true' Church? And how were ordinary men and women to be certain that the sacraments they were receiving were truly valid - were they properly married, had their babies truly been baptized and were their departed loved ones correctly laid to rest?

………………..

WHAT  A  COMPLETE  MESS-UP!!  HOW  COULD  SUCH  A  CHURCH  BE  THOUGHT  OF  AS  CHRIST'S  TRUE  CHURCH?  YOUR  MIND  WOULD  HAVE  TO  BE  ALL  MUSH,  MINDLESS  GOOBLOG,  TO  EVER  THINK  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  WAS  EVER  THE  TRUE  NEW  TESTAMENT  CHURCH  OF  GOD,  FOUNDED  BY  THE  APOSTLES  OF  THE  LORD  JESUS.

NO  IT  WAS  ACTING  LIKE  IT  ALWAYS  WAS,  FROM  THE  MIDDLE  OF  THE  FIRST  CENTURY  AD,  THE  FALSE  HERECY  CHURCH,  THAT  HAD  COME  INTO  THE  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  GOD,  AND  THEN  LIKE  THE  APOSTLE  JOHN  WAS  TO  WRITE,  "WENT  OUT  OF  US"  TO  FORM  ITS  OWN  FALSE  THEOLOGICAL  IDEAS,  PRACTICES,  GOVERNMENT,  SCHISMS,  AND  PERSECUTIONS  WITHIN  ITSELF,  AND  TOWARDS  OTHERS  OUTSIDE  OF  ITSELF  -  Keith Hunt

THE POWER AND THE MONEY

As dispenser of the sacraments, the Church could claim control over the eternal destiny of its believers. Such enormous power brought enormous potential for

abuse, The temptations proved too great for an institution that ultimately came to see divine salvation as something to be bought and sold.

'Those who seek riches fall into ... many foolish and harmful desires!'

Some would say that there's a contradiction at the very core of Catholicism: how can Christ's revolutionary message be embodied in so vast and centralized an institution as the Church? Yet how, comes the counter-question, are Christ's modern-day disciples to reach out to the world at large without considerable organization and infrastructural support? Both questions are good ones, and both have been asked repeatedly over the 2000 years of the Church's history, without ever having been satisfactorily resolved. Catholicism's critics would object that, historically, the Church has been too ready to take the institutional route, accumulating bureaucratic complexity and amassing power and wealth - with all the corruption and complacency these things seem to bring. The Christ who drove the moneychangers from the Temple, they say, would react with fury to a 'Christianity' so firmly founded in the considerations of this world.

That's the world we have to live in, though. What's the point of a counsel of perfection in what is only too patently an imperfect reality? Who can contend with human nature (or Original Sin) without ever making the slightest stumble?

St Helena looks on serenely as the touch of the True Cross resurrects a woman from the dead. Constantine's mother had spent years searching for this prize. Relics such as this were to become big business in a medieval Church which was growing steadily in power and wealth.

TODAY  GOD  HAS  OPENED  THE  WORLDWIDE  DOOR  OF  THE  INTERNET,  YOUTUBE,  WEBSITES,  BLOGS,  TO  PROCLAIM  THE  TRUE  GOSPEL  MESSAGE.  MY  WEBSITE  IS  HUGE [TEXT  ONLY  WHICH  ALLOWS  IT  TO  BE  HUGE],  AND  COVERS  PRETTY  WELL  EVERYTHING  A  TRUE  CHRISTIAN  NEEDS  TO  KNOW,  OR  WANTS  TO  KNOW,  ABOUT  THE  BIBLE,  SALVATION,  FUTURE  EVENTS,  AND  THE  AGE  TO  COME  -  Keith Hunt

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Burning Question

Despite its reputation for inflexibility, Catholicism has been too accommodating by half in some respects, it might be suggested. It's also been less dogmatic in its teachings, over time, than is generally assumed. Through much of the first millennium, for example, doctrines in key areas were pretty much a 'work in progress', continually being reassessed and overhauled. Even in what for most believers was the central area: Salvation, what it was and how it was to be achieved. Superficially, it was all straightforward enough: those who had led good lives would go on to eternal bliss; those who were lost in sin would be abandoned to the inferno in perpetuity. But what of those - and this was almost everybody, let's face it - who, while by no means diabolical in sinfulness, were at the same time less than saintly? It was clear and understandable that there could be no place in the presence of Almighty God for imperfection - but did this mean that anyone who'd fallen short in anything was going to have to burn in hell?

Tintoretto's take on Purgatory (1560), a non-scriptural innovation of the early Church with far-reaching implications for the spiritual - and material - economies. Medieval Christianity became a commerce: endless traffic of prayers, deeds and contributions in this life in return for a remission of punishment in the next.

A detail from The Last Judgement(1506-08), by Hieronymus Bosch, not to be confused with his earlier triptych on the same subject. Divine judgment and punishment (or reward) was a very real idea to medieval Christians, and imagined here in the most graphic terms by the artist.

Clement VI was Pope in Avignon at the time of the Black Death (1347-50), but he had arguably introduced another pestilence of his own. His papal bull Unigenitus (1343) had underlined the Church's right to issue (and, implicitly, to sell) indulgences.

A theological question it may have been, but it could hardly have been less empty or academic: every striving mortal faced a final judgment - and almost all did so with trepidation. The more conscientious the Christian, the harder he or she struggled to lead the virtuous life - yet the more aware they were of any falling-short. Surely, scholars started to suggest, there had to be some sort of intermediate state, for those whose lives had essentially been virtuous, even if they had faltered from time to time? By the fifth century, some were already talking of a place of temporary chastisement, in which the soul would be purged or purified by the fire, but from which it would finally be freed to dwell in heaven, for eternity.

A Place for Hope

Pope Gregory the Great had taken up the idea in the sixth century. He argued that prayerful observance or good deeds in this life could bring 'indulgence' - a remission of punishment in purgatory. It was a radical step, and it re-energized Christianity, giving good but less-than-saintly men and women new grounds for hope. Few could hope to attain perfection, but all could strive to do better in their daily lives, to throw themselves into their regimes of prayer and charitable works. The other great thing about the system was that, since people could earn 'indulgence' not just for themselves but for their departed loved ones, it fostered a sense of solidarity between the living and the dead.

A Contractual Arrangement

What had started out as an inspirational idea was soon a fully-articulated system, with set periods of indulgence appointed for particular observances or

......

Few could hope to attain

perfection but all could strive to

do better in their daily lives to

throw themselves into their regimes

of prayer and charitable works

......

acts. So many years off for a series of masses; so many for a pilgrimage to Rome or Canterbury; so many for a donation to the poor. In very special circumstances, a 'plenary indulgence' might be granted: if the receiver died in that moment, his or her soul would pass instantaneously to heaven.

The idea of a carefully worked-out sliding scale of remissions strikes us as strangely mechanistic now, maybe, but there was nothing intrinsically wrong or wicked about it, it must be said. Quite clearly, it gave ordinary believers a real spiritual incentive to which they could respond: it was good for them, good for the Church and good for the poor and the sick they were inspired to help. At the same time, though, the system was only too clearly open to abuse: the temptation was always there for the Church to harness it to worldly ends. When Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed a jubilee for 1300, for example, he promised a plenary indulgence to those who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that year. Two million people heeded his call. The benefit his jubilee did in reinvigorating the wider Church must be set against the suspicion that he was exploiting the (good) faith of his flock and staging a show of strength for his political enemies in Rome. At the same time he could be viewed as promoting his own personality-cult: by all accounts Boniface dressed himself in the traditional garb of the Roman Caesars, insisting that he was an Emperor just as much as he was Pope.

IN  THE  BOX

A  MOVEABLE  FEAST

The idea of the 'jubilee' harked back to Biblical times, when the 49th year (the last of seven seven-year cycles) was held to mark the cancelling of debts and the curtailment of terms of slavery. Boniface's reintroduction of the tradition appears to have been more or less entirely opportunistic.

It certainly paid off: pilgrims flocked to Rome and, according to one contemporary observer, were so generous with their donations 'that two clerics stood day and night by the altar of St Peter's, gathering up the coins with rakes'. Although Boniface had announced that these 'new' jubilees were to be once-in-a-century events, his successors couldn't bear to wait that long: a second was held by Clement VI in 1350.

The gaps grew even shorter: another jubilee followed in 1390, after which the gap was changed to 33 years to reflect the span of Jesus' life. Finally, after further adjustment up and down, the term was set at 25 years in 1450, and so it has continued ever since.

Pope Boniface VIII presides over a council of cardinals. He did much to increase the Church's wealth and power. Asserting the primacy of papal authority over that of temporal rulers, he staged an impressive show of strength in the first ever Jubilee (1300).

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Salvation for Sale

More problematic was the financial note, which may have been innocent enough to start with but was insidiously - and perhaps completely - corrupting over time. It began with the payment of fees for masses offered up for the souls of the dead. This was another way of gaining them remission, and the token sums paid were a welcome supplement to the incomes of poor parish priests. Gradually the practice spread, however, as the Church came first to rely on the contributions it gained this way and then to start exploiting its' people's piety. The poor were bullied into paying for prayers, the wealthy effectively bribed with offers of an easy afterlife. Soon high prelates and great religious houses were growing rich on the proceeds of what amounted to an indulgence industry.

And an 'industry' it was - so much so that it can be seen as a major branch of the medieval economy. The 'Church Suffering' (as the souls in purgatory were called) can be seen as having formed an economic community with the living. The endowment of monasteries, churches, almshouses, gifts of land: these were gifts bequeathed by the dying to those who followed after. Golden chalices, jewelled reliquaries, stained-glass windows, woodcarvings - all the splendour of the medieval Church was underwritten by the dead. We have this system to thank for Cologne Cathedral, Notre Dame and all the other glories of the Gothic period - but it's some way removed from what most of us would regard as spirituality or religious faith. The Church was altogether unabashed about the relationship between the payment of money and the buying of salvation: in 1245, when England's King Henry III proposed rebuilding Westminster Abbey, he won the approval of Pope Innocent IV. More than this, he won a papal promise that anyone making a

......

Forgiveness for sale - priests and Church officials at a medieval market sell indulgences. Whilst Protestant propagandists undoubtedly talked up the crassness of the commerce, it can't be claimed that the criticism was in its essentials wrong.

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contribution to the project would receive 20 days' indulgence from the sufferings of purgatory.

By the fourteenth century, indulgences were being openly bought and sold. In 1344, Clement VI issued 200 plenary indulgences in England alone, 'earned' entirely by financial endowments to the papacy. Among the various shysters and charlatans mingling with the more pious pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a professional 'Pardoner'. In his saddlebag he carried a sheaf of printed 'pardons ... hot from Rome', ready for signing and distributing to anyone who will pay his price.

Macabre Mementoes

Chaucer's Pardoner is also furnished with a grotesque range of 'relics'. These were basically souvenirs of the saints, or of the life of Christ himself. They were a great deal more than keepsakes, though. The whole Canterbury Pilgrimage was a testament to the power such

......

Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400) painted a

vivid poetic picture of a medieval scene in 

which the Church was as much a part of 

economic as of religious life. His Canterbury Tales 

underlines the importance of pilgrimage as

not just a spiritual but a social and commercial 

enterprise.

......

items were believed to have. Six days after St Thomas Beckett had been savagely struck down by King Henry II's men in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, it was said a blind woman had touched his bloodstained garment and promptly had her sight restored.

Beckett's tomb immediately became a place of pilgrimage: people flocked to Canterbury throughout the Middle Ages; just as they did to the supposed burial sites of Saint James at Compostela, in Galicia, Spain, and of St Andrew in the cathedral of St Andrew's, Scotland. Pilgrimage became big business - and monasteries and churches that housed prestigious tombs raked in huge sums in offerings and mass-fees.

You didn't have to have a whole tomb to have a sacred shrine, however: a 'holy relic' could be as small as a scrap of cloth or a fingernail. Many were held by religious houses, which could become important places of pilgrimage in their own right as a result. Others might be bought by individuals. It was, of course, impossible to have any real certainty as to provenance. Swindlers flourished in these most credulous of times. So, for example, 'in his bag', Chaucer's Pardoner:

IN  THE  BOX

A  SETTLING  OF  ACCOUNTS

Considering the life of John Baret, a fifteenth-century merchant from Bury St Edmunds, and going through the (astonishingly detailed) provisions of his will, historian Carl Watkins in his book, The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead, shows how systematic - even businesslike - he was in approaching his eternity. In exactly the same spirit as that in which he settled Earthly debts, he approached the obligations he assumed he had to God and to his own immortal soul, allocating money for monuments, and buying masses in advance to ensure the salvation in the life to come. In just this spirit, others gave gifts of land, contributed carvings, stained-glass windows or helped towards the construction of new chapels.

... had a pillow-case,

He claimed was Our Lady's veil;

He said he had a strip of the very sail

Saint Peter had, when he went

Upon the sea - before Christ called him.

He had a latten cross all set with stones,

And in a glass reliquary he had some pig's bones.

But, with these Relics', when he found

Some poor peasant living on the land,

He could make more money in a single day

Than that poor wretch might make in two

whole months...

......

Passing off the pig's bones as belonging to some important saint - or even, perhaps, to Christ himself - he would have been able to charge an uncritical customer a small fortune for the privilege of touching or kissing this sacred 'relic'.

Chaucer's Pardoner is of course a satirical creation, but it would be wrong to assume that he was outlandishly exaggerated. Hairs of John the Baptist; foreskins of the infant Christ; vials of the Virgin's milk; her girdle; Mary Magdalen's comb; some of St Peter's beard; an arm of the Apostle James - all these things and countless more were in circulation in medieval Europe's relics-market, in good faith. And it wasn't just the poor and uneducated who kept the commerce going. Especially when especially important relics (fragments of the 'True Cross', for example) could command such astronomical prices. King Louis IX of France (St Louis) spent 40,000 livres building his spectacular gothic Saint Chapelle on the lie de la Cite in Paris - but he'd paid more than three times that amount for the holy relics (including the Crown of Thorns from the Crucifixion) the chapel had been designed to house.

We shouldn't underestimate the hold of faith over the medieval mind. The arrogant Emperor Henry IV bullied Pope Gregory VII shamelessly - but crumpled under threat of excommunication. After a penitential walk in the winter cold to the papal castle at Canossa, he fasted outside for three days, begging for forgiveness.

IN  THE  BOX

THE INVESTITURE CONTEST

In setting a financial value on religious offices, corruption couldn't help but jeopardize the independence of the Church, for, unsurprisingly, secular rulers wanted their share of the spoils. With money and power alike at stake, the tussle between Popes and Kings was bound to be a long and bitter one, although it reached its height in the 'Investiture Contest' of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The controversy was over who got to 'invest' or appoint a country's bishops and senior clergy, with all that meant in access to income and influence. Kings and princes argued, not unreasonably, that these officials were being appointed to serve the people of their kingdoms; Popes pointed out - again not unreasonably - that they were to be officers of the Church. In 1076, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, having goaded Pope Gregory VII too far, was excommunicated - expelled from the Church. He had to make the penitential 'Walk to Canossa' to beg the Pope's forgiveness.

The Concordat of Worms (1122) gave monarchs the right to invest the bishops they chose within their kingdoms, on condition that they acknowledged the supreme spiritual authority of the papacy. But a real and enduring peace between Popes and Emperors was to prove elusive.

Once the precedent was established

that a religious office was a prize

all pretense of it being a position to

be earned was quickly lost.

......

Ecclesiastical Enterprise

An important church or monastery was a major moneymaking concern: cash donations, large and small, were just the start. Lands bequeathed by the dying might be rented out - or farmed by monks on behalf of the community; and there was income from local taxes and peasants' tithes. Senior positions in the Church were eminently covetable for this reason, and there was brisk competition for the most lucrative 'livings' - for, then as now, some parishes, dioceses or monasteries were much more profitable than others.

The result was a flourishing trade in church offices - this was considered a sin in its own right, that of 'simony', with its own special circle of damnation in Dante's Hell. (It took its name from Simon Magus, or 'Simon the Magician', the Samaritan sorcerer who, in the Acts of the Apostles 8: 9-24, tried to buy the ability to summon up the Holy Ghost - which he imagined to be some sort of magic 'spell' - from Saints John and Peter.) Despite regular denunciations, simony had a way of being self-perpetuating and of spreading itself through the whole Church structure, since, having paid out for their own positions, senior prelates felt the need to take bribes from those seeking situations further down the ladder.

One kind of corruption let in another. Once the precedent was established that a religious office was a gift or prize, all pretense of it being a position to be earned, and then upheld with responsibility, was quickly lost. It was no coincidence that Pope Nicholas III, denounced by Dante as the chief of the simonists, was also guilty of nepotism on an all but heroic scale, making three of his closest relations into cardinals.

The sin of simony - selling Church offices - inverted true religious values, prioritizing material over spiritual gain. Hence the punishment envisaged for the simoniacs in Dante's great poem, the Divine Comedy, in which offenders have to spend eternity upside-down in holes, writhing and flailing in endless fire.

………………..

AND  SO  THE  OLD  BUT  WELL  FORMED  SIN  OF  "MONEY  HUNGRY"  MINDED  PEOPLE  ROSE  UP.  AND  THIS  MONEY  PROBLEM  CAN  HIT  EVEN  THE  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  GOD;  IT  HAS  DONE  INDEED,  I'VE  SEEN  IT  IN  MY  LIFETIME.

ONCE  MORE  FOR  THIS  SIN  TO  MANIFEST  ITSELF  TO  THE  POINT  OF  BUYING  A  BETTER  LIFE  HERE  AFTER,  FOR  YOU  OR  SOME  DEAD  LOVED  ONE,  IS  TAKING  THE  SIN  TO  ITS  EXTREME.

IT  IS  JUST  ONE  MORE  ITEM  FOR  THE  CLEAR  OF  MIND,  TO  ADD  TO  OTHERS,  AS  TO  WHY  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  CANNOT  POSSIBLY  BE  THE  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  JESUS  CHRIST  -  Keith Hunt

DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH

ENFORCING ORTHODOXY: THE INQUISITION

Can any real religious faith he imposed by force and through fear of torture

and execution? Faced will a threefold threat from crypto-lslam, secret

Judaism and - most of all - new Christian 'heresies, the Catholic Church

determined to do its best to try,

Judge not, that you be not judged!

— Matthew 7:1

One day in 1620, a certain William Lithgow, a Scottish travel writer in search of colourful material, got more than he bargained for when he was arrested as a spy in Malaga. As a foreigner - and a Protestant - he was automatically suspicious in a Spain that for several centuries now had been in the grip of the 'Holy Office' - better known now as the 'Inquisition'. Lithgow's story is unusual only in having happened to an English-speaking writer with the contacts to get the facts out to the outside world.

It's worth setting out here at some length, as a sort of case study in the cruelty of which the Inquisition was capable - just as a matter of routine:

'About midnight, the sergeant and two Turkish slaves released Mr. Lithgow from his then confinement, but it was to introduce him to one much more horrible. They conducted him through several passages, to a chamber in a remote part of the palace, towards the garden, where they loaded him with irons, and extended his legs by means of an iron bar above a yard long, the weight of which was so great that he could neither stand nor sit, but was obliged to lie continually on his back. They left him in this condition for some time.'

The 'Turks' in this story were almost certainly North African Moors, prisoners-of-war enslaved by Spain. It is ironic that the only kindness Lithgow was to receive in his time in the Spanish gaol would be from African prisoners of this kind.

'The next day he received a visit from the governor, who promised him his liberty, with many other advantages, if he would confess being a spy; but on his protesting that he was entirely innocent, the governor left him in a rage, saying, "He should see him no more until further torments constrained him to confess"; commanding the keeper, to whose care he was committed, that he should permit no person whatever to have access to, or commune with him; that his sustenance should not exceed three ounces of musty bread, and a pint of water every second day; that he shall be allowed neither bed, pillow, nor coverlid. "Close up (said he) this window in his room with lime and stone, stop up the holes of the door with double mats: let him have nothing that bears any likeness to comfort." ... In this wretched and melancholy state did poor Lithgow continue without seeing any person for several days...'

... he lay on the rack for above

five hours during which time

he received above sixty different

tortures of the most hellish

nature ...

Taken to another place for further interrogation, Lithgow was freed from his shackles ('which put him to very great pains, the bolts being so closely riveted that the sledge hammer tore away half an inch of his heel') only to be 'stripped naked, and fixed upon the rack'.

'It is impossible to describe all the various tortures inflicted upon him. Suffice it to say that he lay on the rack for above five hours, during which time he received above sixty different tortures of the most hellish nature; and had they continued them a few minutes longer, he must have inevitably perished.

'These cruel persecutors being satisfied for the present, the prisoner was taken from the rack, and his irons being again put on, he was conducted to his former dungeon, having received no other nourishment than a little warm wine, which was given him rather to prevent his dying, and reserve him for future punishments, than from any principle of charity or compassion. As a confirmation of this, orders were given for a coach to pass every morning before day by the prison, that the noise made by it might give fresh terrors and alarms to the unhappy prisoner, and deprive him of all possibility of obtaining the least repose.

'In this loathsome prison was poor Mr. Lithgow kept until he was almost devoured by vermin. They crawled about his beard, lips, eyebrows, etc., so that he could scarce open his eyes; and his mortification was increased by not having the use of his hands or legs to defend himself, from his being so miserably maimed by the tortures. So cruel was the governor, that he even ordered the vermin to be swept on him twice in every eight days.'

The idea of the Inquisition casts almost as disturbing a shadow now, in the mythic imagination, as it did in its fearful heyday - albeit then as a grim reality. There is something uniquely terrifying about an organization that sets out so coldly and deliberately to torture, maim and kill in the cause of 'God'.

From Black Legend to Whitewash

The first Inquisition had been set up in southern France in the thirteenth century, in hopes of stemming the rising tide of Catharism in the years before the Albigensian Crusade. An anti-Waldensian Inquisition followed in Italy, but thereafter the 'Holy Office' waned in importance, to be revived in Spain and Portugal (and their overseas colonies) from the late fifteenth century. More of these ecclesiastical courts for suppressing heresy were constituted in France and Italy during the Reformation.

Modern historians have been quick to point to the Leyenda Negra, or 'Black Legend' - the stream of anti-Spanish and anti-Papist propaganda put out by the Protestant nations of northern Europe in early modern times. They're right. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sectarian suspicions ran as deep as ideological mistrust was to in the Cold War decades of the twentieth century. And there's no real doubt that this was indeed the case - that highly-coloured conspiracy theories were rampant, along with lurid accounts of colonial atrocities, and prisoners subjected

......

Lanark-born William Lithgow, the 'Wonderful Traveller', had indeed roamed extraordinary distances in his time. He had walked the length and breadth of Europe - making further forays into the Middle East and North Africa - before he famously fell foul of the Inquisition in southern Spain.

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to terrible tortures. Yet there's no real doubt either that the Cold War decades saw CIA 'dirty tricks' and NATO spy-rings - not to mention Soviet human-rights abuses on a colossal scale. This or that example may have been exaggerated - even dreamed up from nowhere by a Protestant pamphleteer in Britain or the Netherlands - but the Inquisition existed every bit as surely as the GULAG did.

The 'Rules of Torture'

But the image we have of it is a caricature, revisionist historians have objected - and of course they have been right, up to a point. Modern researchers point to the painstaking documentation kept by the Holy Office; the elaborate procedures that had to be followed before violent methods might be applied. Strict rules governed the Inquisition and its workings: those accused of heresy were to be given several weeks warning and a chance to recant before being subjected to any sort of questioning - still less any sort of torture. The danger of malicious denunciation was recognized and safeguards in place to prevent mischievous prosecutions. The inquisitors themselves were priests in orders, sworn on their honour to carry out their work in the cause of God and not for any personal pleasure or advantage.

Scholars have also underlined the fact that, although administered by the Church, the Inquisition worked with the temporal authorities. In many cases, indeed, it seems to have been the state that took the lead. Monarchs always had an interest in enforcing conformity and were happy enough to claim divine

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Stretched to sinew-shredding, joint-cracking agony on an ever-tightening cranking wheel, a man suspected of harbouring heretical views is quizzed by the Inquisition. Almost literally 'grilled', he has flames applied to his feet to encourage cooperation.

Heretics are led out to face the flames having been convicted at an auto-da-fe or 'act of faith'. Such ceremonies were conducted across the Spanish-speaking world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This one was conducted at Cordoba, in southern Spain.

 St Francis of Assisi receives the blessing of Innocent IV for his 'rule' - the code for his new order of mendicant friars. But the very same pope had sanctioned another rule - that allowing the Inquisition to extract the 'truth' by torture; thousands were to suffer unspeakable agonies in consequence.

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sanction for doing so. After the Reformation, moreover, religion took on a political aspect. A Protestant was no longer just a heretic but a dangerous subversive - potentially, the agent of a foreign state.

This hardly counts as an excuse, of course. That the Church had allowed itself to get so close to the Earthly authorities of the time, identifying their interests so completely with its own, is something of an indictment in itself. It's certainly hard to see what in Christ's Gospels - even the notorious admonition to 'Render to Caesar what is due to Caesar' - could have justified the application of rack and pinions to prisoners, however 'heretical' their views. Torture wasn't an abuse of inquisitorial procedure, it was its very basis - it had been ever since its explicit approval by Pope Innocent IV in 1252.

'Banality of Evil'

As for the bureaucratic scrupulousness of the Holy Office, this aspect of the Inquisition is only underlined by the meticulously itemized invoices sent to many grieving families, which demanded payment for interrogation, imprisonment, transportation and execution costs.

The reality, in any case, seems to be that such as they were these procedures were widely disregarded. Equipped with all the powers of judges, juries and executioners, and more or less completely free of any outside supervision or any need for transparency, the Inquisitors did what men in such a privileged position have invariably done throughout history - took the utmost advantage of the cruel powers they had. Take Inquisitor Diego Rodriguez Lucero of Cordoba who, in 1506, was accused of having denounced and executed one of the city's leading citizens to gain access to his wife. She was forced to remain with him as his mistress - along, it was said, with another girl, whose parents had been branded 'heretics' for resisting his designs.

Some 20 years later, Granada's city councillors wrote an official letter to King Charles V objecting that inquisitors were using their powers over husbands and fathers to force wives and daughters into sexual submission on a systematic basis. This sort of collective response was rare enough: few were rash enough to make individual complaints. One man who did, in

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IN  THE  BOX

SHOW,   TELL   AND   TORTURE

There's good reason for the Inquisition's mythic role as the archetypal example for all subsequent programmes of repression: it went about its work in a cold, calculating and organized way. It also understood, as others didn't quite yet, the value of psychological terror and trauma: arguably, the torture began with the first serving on the suspect of a summons to appear. The weeks of delay and the fear they instilled were enough to break the nerve of waverers - many recanted 'heretical' beliefs before they'd even been brought before the court. (On the basis of what might seem relatively trivial admissions, new areas of enquiry might easily be opened up, and the names of new suspects brought before inquisitors.) Others cracked at the point when - as was routinely done at a preliminary session - they were given a 'tour' of the torture chamber and shown the instruments that might be used.

The most important of these - the central mechanism of the inquisitorial process, it might be said - was the potro (literally 'colt' or 'horse'):

the rack. Basically a long trestle table on which the prisoner was laid out flat, his ankles shackled, it had a ratcheting mechanism at the other end so the victim could be stretched out by his (or her) arms - to a bone-breaking point and well beyond. It was typically supplemented by the application of a cloth gag on to which water was poured to simulate drowning (the modern 'waterboard'). Alternatively (or additionally) a standing prisoner might have his arms chained behind his back and then be hoisted up into the air. This excruciating position (the 'hanging aeroplane', to modern torturers) left the dangling body fully exposed to attack by beating or by flogging, or to a cruel succession of bone-jarring, muscle-tearing drops.

Torture wasn't just a punishment for the Holy Office, it was an integral part of the process, as Alessandro Magnasco's painting A Court of the Inquisition (c.1710) makes clear. The whole system was hideously paradoxical in its workings, an incongruous combination of bureaucracy and brutality.

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Murcia in 1560., seeing an inquisitor openly consorting with the widow of a man he'd sent to the stake, was himself promptly denounced as a Jew and executed.

A Ferocious 'Faith'

If the Inquisition's abuses had ended at torture they would have been bad enough, but the Holy Office claimed the right of life and death. And not just of death but of divine judgement: the public show-trial and execution it staged for the confirmed heretic, the auto-da-fe (or 'Act of Faith') was a ritualized enactment of the Last Judgment. The actual fire in which the unfortunate prisoner was burned at the stake only too obviously symbolized the flames of hell - the inquisitors were quite literally pre-judging the eternal destiny of those they killed. Or, rather, those the executioners killed, because as clerics they were ever-mindful of God's commandments - far be it from any churchman to take a life.

Most prisoners weren't actually

killed by fire but by garrotting at

the stake - their consumption by

the flames was more symbolic.

At the last moment, then, the prisoner was released (the Spanish word, literally, meant 'relaxed') to lay-executioners who actually carried out the dirty work. Most prisoners weren't actually killed by fire but by garrotting at the stake - their consumption by the flames was more symbolic. In some cases, though, where heretics had held out against their torturers with obstinacy (or courage), they might indeed have to endure the first flames alive.

Large crowds came to see what where by any standards grand and carefully choreographed spectacles (300,000 attended one in Valladolid in 1559).They were drawn no doubt by vulgar curiosity and the desire for a sadistic frisson, but also by the implicit underlining the event gave of the reassuringly rigid

......

The auto-da-fe became an essential aspect of Iberian (and Latin American) culture. Held in public squares, it played a part in cementing civic and social life. Vast crowds came out to see what was at once a lurid spectacle and a solemn, sacred ceremony.

IN  THE  BOX

WORTHY OF THE NAME

The Spanish Inquisition had first been established in Aragon in the thirteenth century, but it came into its own in the fifteenth under Ferdinand and Isabella, the 'Catholic Monarchs'. They bore that title because by their marriage they had brought the realms of Navarra, Aragon and Castile together into a single 'Spain'. (The word 'Catholic' originally meant 'universal', 'all-embracing' - hence indeed its use for the Church of Rome.) But Ferdinand and Isabella were also 'Catholic' in the now more obvious sense of supporting the Catholic Church in all its beliefs and values - including its ugliest ones. They welcomed the Holy Office to their kingdom, granting it far-reaching powers and privileges, using ecclesiastical structures as the basis for what we would now consider a 'police state'.

Torquemada, the Inquisition's torturer-in-chief, had a special rapport with Spain's 'Catholic Monarchs', Ferdinand and Isabella. 

......

orderliness of the moral universe. The 'achievement' of the Inquisition was the sense of security it created for the credulous and the conformist in a time when all the certainties of life and belief were being questioned.

It's not for nothing that the 'Spanish Inquisition' has come to have more of a mythic aura than its equivalents in Italy and France. Only in Spain did the Holy Office make common cause quite so completely with a state so resolutely bent on a near-totalitarian programme of centralization and social and cultural policing.

Unmingling the Melting Pot

The Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus had been a beacon of civilization, style and culture in a Western Europe that had still been very backward in many ways. Science, scholarship, literature and art had flourished in an atmosphere of enlightenment and tolerance in which all sections of the community had felt free to live and worship in their own very different ways. In recent years, radical historians have suggested that al-Andalus was some sort of Utopia, a paradigm for what the

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Ferdinand and Isabella receive the surrender of Granada's Muhammad II or Boabdil (from 'Abu Abdullah') after the fall of Spain's last sultanate in 1492. Coinciding with the expulsion of the Jews - and, of course, Columbus' discoveries - the event opened a new chapter in the history of Spain.

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modern multicultural society might be. This is perhaps an over-optimistic view: Christians and Jews in Muslim Spain might have begged to differ, disdained as they were by Islamic authorities who were quick to subject them to petty harassment, and saw them as a 'soft' population always ready to be milked for taxes.

Yet it's true that, basically, by the standards of this and later times, al-Andalus did enjoy comparatively easy-going community relations. The authorities certainly never mounted anything remotely resembling a general persecution of Jews or Christians, nor did they try to prevent their living and worshipping as they liked. Intermarriage, while not encouraged, wasn't stopped; commercial and cultural relations spanned the divides; 'live and let live' was the order of the day.

 Like her friend St John of the Cross, the mystic Teresa of Avila was partly of Jewish descent. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish spirituality was a psychodrama, its intensity deriving both from the country's hybrid heritage and from official attempts to suppress its legacy.

So when, in the fifteenth century, Ferdinand and Isabella came along and tried to carve out a Catholic monoculture in Spain, they found themselves facing a very challenging task indeed. While Muslim Spain officially came to an end with the Siege of Granada in 1492 - the same year in which the last of the country's openly-observant Jews were expelled - the new Spain still found itself with major Muslim and Jewish 'problems'. Only by force and by the fear of pain and death could members of these groups be compelled to convert. And even when they did, their good faith was always to be suspect - with good reason, because, naturally enough, many did make a show of obedience to save their own lives and their families' without actually experiencing any real shift in religious loyalties.

Crypto-Jews and Muslims undoubtedly did exist, going through the motions of Catholic observance while secretly continuing with their old ancestral ways. At the same time, though, there were a great many genuinely pious Christians of Jewish or Islamic heritage who never could find full acceptance. A rumour about a grandparent or great-uncle might easily be enough to guarantee a life dogged by suspicion from busybody neighbours or officious local priests. Such was the paranoia abroad in Spain that even the holiest of Christians came under suspicion - including such celebrated figures as Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. Both had been born into converso ('convert') families, although both had been brought up in - and had taken passionately to - the creed of Christ. But the more apparently blameless people were, paradoxically, the more suspicion they risked arousing in a paranoid nation in which the quest for religious and cultural purity became obsessive.

Racial Hygiene

Limpieza - 'cleanness' - it was called, and it was regarded as residing in the blood, a more unusual association than might be imagined in the fifteenth century. The sort of pseudo-scientific 'race theory' that was to foreshadow the emergence of Nazism in the modern age was more or less entirely alien to earlier times. In Spain, however, the Inquisition introduced a code of limpieza de sangre - pure-bloodedness - that looked forward to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. At a stroke, the legislation created a sort of second-class citizenship: the 'New Christians', it was reasoned, weren't quite Christian after all. Anybody seeking public office, a place in the priesthood or even a matrimonial alliance with an 'Old Christian' family could expect to have to swear an oath of limpieza - and

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Spanish anxieties about contaminating strands of Jewish and Muslim ancestry transferred 'naturally' to a New World in which relations with native populations (and African slaves) were inevitable. The result was a blood-based hierarchy in which 'pure'- white criollos (Creoles) clearly outranked 'mixed' mestizos.

IN  THE  BOX

THE GRAND INQUISITOR

Spain's most important inquisitor, and to this day a byword for all that's fanatical and cruel in intellectual and political repression, Tomas de Torquemada was born in Valladolid in 1420. From boyhood he saw his vocation as a religious one - although he quickly came to see that religious orthodoxy had political aspects too. He met the future Queen Isabella when he was in his forties and she was just a teenage princess, but became her mentor pretty much from that time on. (It even seems to have been his idea that she should marry Prince Ferdinand of Aragon, creating a powerful - and super-Catholic - kingdom in the heart of Spain.)

The Grand Inquisitor from 1483, he literally 'wrote

the book' on inquisitorial practice - the Compilation of Instructions for the Office of the Holy Inquisition - although it wasn't actually to be published till the end of the sixteenth century. No matter, its strictures governed procedures on everything from sorcery to sodomy - whatever the charge, torture was to be at the heart of Inquisitorial practice. Although known as the 'Hammer of Heretics', Torquemada showed particular zeal and ruthlessness in rooting out crypto-Muslims and Marranos. Was this fanaticism founded in self-hatred? Some scholars have certainly suspected as much, pointing to the presence of known Jews among the Inquisitor's ancestral connections.

Torquemada's tome, the Compilation of Instructions for the Office of the Holy Inquisition didn't just provide tips for torturers. By codifying practices, setting down procedures for interrogation in elaborate detail, it lent an air of legitimacy to what was at bottom a brutal system.

Damned by the Inquisition, by nineteenth-century painter Eugenio Lucas Velazquez. The Inquisition cast a long shadow over the collective consciousness of Catholic Spain, providing material for painters for many centuries after its end.

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to have his or her antecedents carefully researched. It wasn't racism, technically - or even actually, indeed, given that the very idea of 'race' hadn't yet been formulated. A Jewish or Muslim ancestry was suspect because it suggested the risk of a secret loyalty to an alien religion, not because it made an individual different in some more essential way. At the same time, though, the location of this limpieza in the blood did obviously imply some intrinsic, physiological difference between 'Old' and 'New' Christians of the sort that in later centuries would have been rationalized as 'race'. The ease with which the doctrine was afterwards able to be transferred to the American colonies to distinguish between criollos or 'creoles' of pure Spanish blood and those mestizos (mixed-race Spanish and Indian) or mulatos (Spanish and African) suggests that it was already a sort of racism-in-waiting.

Coming Out in the Wash

In Spain itself, though, the emphasis was always upon religious backsliding. Even if a converse was faithful now, that didn't mean he or she could be relied on to remain so. Hence, the conscientious Spanish servant would always be on the lookout for some sign that her employer was avoiding pork chorizo; or a master might note if a servant was mumbling during household prayers. Just as those who were pursuing a forbidden faith in secret learned to hide their ritual practices with the utmost subtlety, conventional Catholics grew hugely sophisticated in detecting (real or imaginary) lapses, like that of Maria de Mendoza, a young morisca woman from Cuenca in central Spain. She was seen by a witness to draw a jar of water from a well then take it home where, kneeling naked, she washed her hair and body down. Given that Islamic observance does

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 Heretics convicted by the Inquisition process to their place of public execution in Lisbon in this engraving. The crimes of the Portuguese Inquisition have been overshadowed by those of Spain's but they were every bit as grave - and as integral to the state    

    

Just as those who pursued a

forbidden faith in secret learned to

hide their practices, conventional

Catholics grew hugely sophisticated

in detecting lapses.

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prescribe ritual ablutions prior to praying or reading in the Quran, it's perhaps not surprising that washing should have been viewed askance, suggests historian

Toby Green. In an age when mass-produced soap still lay several centuries in the future, and standards of personal hygiene were necessarily rough and ready, washing was not something most people generally did.

A New World of Persecution

Its work in attacking Catharism done - or, rather superseded by a policy of virtual genocide - the French Inquisition dropped from sight. It was never to rival the

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Christopher Columbus arrives in America - a heroic scene, but one overflowing with historical ironies. The 'benefits' of the European civilization he brought with him were to include conquest and enslavement, deadly epidemics and, of course, the plague of Christian piety, cruelly enforced.

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scale of the Spanish or Portuguese Inquisitions in the early-modern period. Or their reach, because of course this was a time in which Spain and Portugal were opening up new territories in the Americas. They took the Inquisition with them wherever they went. More important than the desire to strike fear into (already well and truly terrorized) native populations in the New World was the fear that, far from home, Europeans would stray from the straight and narrow. How was the Church to stop the spread of Protestantism among an independent-minded community of settlers across the ocean? What was to stop 'New Christians' from reverting to Muslim or Marrano type? Mexico City, the capital of 'New Spain', became its capital of cruelty, with regular round-ups of 'heretics' and spectacular public autos-da-fe. The same was true, although to a lesser extent, in the Portuguese colonies of Brazil.

The Roman Inquisition

Italy, the Church's home country, was no more immune than anywhere else to the plague of heresy, and here too the Holy Office did its work. But it never managed to make common cause with the secular authorities in Italy in the same way as it had in Spain and Portugal, and its scope for action was much more limited as a result.

It did nevertheless make a considerable contribution to Catholicism's history - and a disproportionate one to its 'dark history', it might be said. For the Church's unique role in defending superstition, in fighting a rearguard action against the advance of scientific understanding and rational intelligence, was spearheaded by the Roman Inquisition.

Take the example of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) - himself a Catholic cleric, and a naive believer in the official line that the Church saw no incompatibility between religious faith and scientific reason. His book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ('On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres', 1543) was a revolution in itself. Rejecting the ancient assumption that the cosmos was 'geocentric' - centred around the Earth - it proposed that the Earth and planets orbited the sun in a 'heliocentric' system. Copernicus was slapped down by the Inquisition for his pains.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) took Copernicus' findings further, his observations of Venus and of Jupiter (with its 'Galilean Moons') all tending to confirm the earlier scientist's work. Notoriously, the 'Father of Modern Physics' was hauled up before the Inquisition in 1632 and forced to recant his 'heretical' theories under threat of torture. Having admitted that the Earth stood still, he reputedly muttered 'And yet it moves'.

Despite his show of obedience, Galileo was placed under house arrest - where he'd stay for the next ten years; it went without saying that his books were banned. Not just those he'd actually written, but any he might conceivably think about writing at some point in the future - the Inquisition seemed resolved to cast the Church in as ludicrous a light as possible.

IN  THE  BOX

MORISCOS  AND  MARRANOS

Everyone in sixteenth-century Spain paid at least lip service to Catholic orthodoxy. It was more than one's life was worth to do otherwise. Paradoxically, rather than reassuring the Catholic authorities - or the respectable majority of Spanish people - this show of conformity only fostered greater fear. Spanish society was haunted by the spectre of a secret enemy, following alien practices underground. Hence the constant anxiety about the presence of Moriscos in society's midst. These were people of Moorish origin who had (themselves or their forebears) been converted by force to Catholicism but whose loyalties

lay with Islam underneath. The same went for Spain's Marranos. The word marrano (ironically, an Arabic one) had literally meant 'dirty' or 'unclean', in the ritual sense of being 'taboo' and so it came to mean a pig, which was forbidden both to Muslims and Jews. In early-modern Spain, it was used to refer to those Jews who (or whose ancestors), despite having officially converted to Catholicism, still followed Jewish practice secretly. The word was of course a deeply unpleasant swipe at the 'dirty', forbidden status of such Jews, but it was also a jibe at their own careful avoidance of pigs and pork.

IN  THE  BOX

THE  INDEX

The Catholic Church has always been at pains to stress its deep commitment to the cause of reason. It has always claimed that there's no incompatibility between science and religion. And in truth, in our own time, while American Protestant churches bang the drum for fundamentalism, successive Popes have expressed their belief in evolution. Oddly, it might be thought, Charles Darwin's 'The Descent of Man' has never fallen foul of the Church's censors - even in the nineteenth century, when it first appeared.

This stance is still more surprising given the historical readiness of Catholic prelates to slap wholesale bans on books or authors. Their repressiveness is recorded in a handy checklist. The Index - or, to give it its full title, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Tindex of Prohibited Books') - is a veritable catalogue of Catholic intolerance, and to most modern eyes a collective act of utter folly.

It's unsurprising, if perhaps a little unenlightened, that the theological works of famous Protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin should have been included - but what of an otherwise blameless botanist like Otto Braunfels? What makes a flower or leaf heretical? Did Konrad Gesner's Protestantism really vitiate all his zoological findings? Was his description of the guinea pig as threatening as the observations of Galileo? The latter was eventually removed from the Index by a sheepish Catholic establishment in 1741. No such luck for philosophers from Locke, Hobbes and Hume to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Also included are creative writers from John Milton to Honore de Balzac and Graham Greene.

That Greene was a Catholic didn't save him: his offence seems to have been his specific slights against the priesthood. For far more obviously 'problematic' works have gone unnoticed by the Church's censors. Karl Marx's writings, for example, atheistic as they are, and D.H. Lawrence's racier scribblings: they may not be recommended reading but they weren't banned.

Galileo fights his corner before the Italian Inquisition - notoriously, the hearing concluded with dogma defeating science. In this case at least - and only unconvincingly, and for the moment. In the long run, Catholicism's obdurate resistance to rational enquiry was to prove self-defeating.

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TO  BE  CONTINUED

THIS  RECORDED  HISTORY  ALONE,  CONCERNING  THE  INQUISITION,  THE  HEAVY-HANDED,  EVEN  TORTURE,  AND  EXECUTION,  SHOULD  BY  ITSELF,  BRING  ANY  NORMAL  RATIONAL  MIND,  TO  SEE  AND  ADMIT,  THAT  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC CHURCH  WAS  NOT  THE  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  GOD  AT  ALL.  

IT  IS  HARD  FOR  PEOPLE  IN  THE  WESTERN  WORLD,  WITH  MOST  COUNTRIES  HAVING  NO  DEATH  PENALTY  FOR  ANY  CRIME  COMMITTED,  TO  TRY  AND  WRAP  THEIR  HEAD  AROUND  A  TIME  WHEN,  WITH  THE  BACKING  OF  A  SO-CALLED  "CHRISTIAN"  CHURCH,  THAT  THERE  WAS  A  PERIOD  IN  HISTORY  CALLED  "THE  INQUISITION"  TOGETHER  WITH  ITS  HANOUS  TORTURES  AND  EXECUTIONS.

THOSE  WHO  SO  JOYOUSLY  SWOONED  OVER  THE  COMING  OF  THE  POPE  TO  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA  IN  SEPTEMBER  2015,  TO  ADDRESS  CONGRESS,  THEN  THE  UNITED  NATIONS;  WILL  NOT  BE  INTERESTED  IN  RESEARCHING  THE  HISTORICAL  RECORDS  OF  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.  THEY  DO  NOT  KNOW  IT,  AND  THEY  DON'T  WANT  TO  KNOW  IT.  THEY  HAVE  NO  LOVE  OF  THE  TRUTH.

IT  OBVIOUSLY  IS  THAT  WAY,  FOR  NO  OTHER  WAY  WOULD  BRING  1. 2  BILLION  PEOPLE  INTO  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.  THEY  STILL  BELIEVE  THE  POPE  IS  THE  NEAREST  THING  TO  GOD  ON  EARTH,  AND  THAT  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  IS  DESCENDED  FROM  THE  APOSTLE  PETER;  THAT  IT  IS  THE  VERY  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  GOD.

THE  TRUTHS  OF  HISTORY  PROVE  THE  VERY  OPPOSITE!!

Keith Hunt