DARK HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH - PART TWO

 DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH

THE  SPLENDOUR  AND THE  SQUALOR

The Renaissance saw the Catholic Church at the very zenith of its power and

wealth, yet it seemed anything but spiritual at the top. Financial corruption,

sexual license and the building of nepotistic dynasties: a triumphant papacy

presided over an increasingly beleaguered Church.

'Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten! - James 5:2

'Blessed are the meek' Our Lord had said - but there was no sign of them inheriting the Earth just yet, and certainly not that corner of the Earth that housed the Holy See in Rome. Ruthless ambition and greed were more the order of the day down here - vast wealth, megalomaniac vanity and an arrogant contempt for the plight of the poor and the preoccupations of the lowly. This period in the Church's history has left a legacy of magnificence, it

Giuliano de' Medici falls before the onslaught from the Pazzi. The outrage had been at least tacitly authorized by Pope Sixtus IV, it seemed. The Church's embracing of Renaissance realpolitik helped enhance its power and wealth immensely - but at enormous moral and spiritual cost.

can't be denied: clerical patronage underwrote much of that artistic and cultural achievement we now think of as the 'Renaissance'. But it also left a sense of ethical abandonment that Catholicism is still struggling to live down. What could so much wealth and pomp have to do with the spirit of the Gospels?

Murder in the Cathedral

Around 10,000 had gathered in the duomo for morning mass to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ Our Saviour from the dead. New life, human redemption and fresh spring after the lengthy winter of damnation - Easter was the highpoint of the Christian year. For a group of cruel conspirators, though, the day was marked out as one for murder: they had come to Florence's famous cathedral to assassinate Lorenzo de' Medici and his brother Giuliano. The Medici family had dominated the affairs of the Italian city for half a century; now their rivals, the Pazzi clan, were calling time.

IN  THE  BOX

FATHER... AND NEPHEW

That the Catholic Church is utterly obsessed with sex has been an article of faith with modern critics, and it isn't difficult to see why this should be. On the one hand, there have been the all but impossibly exacting standards set for the sexual conduct of lay Catholics; on the other, there've been the clergy's many (and varied) fallings short. So, amid all the fuss there's been about everything from gay marriage to contraception, it has been easy to forget that the Church has any other interests. Likewise, it's been easy to assume that the Church's longstanding insistence on clerical celibacy has stemmed from a feeling that Christ's ministers had to be sexually pure.

Historically, as it happens, that doesn't seem to have been the case. Clerical celibacy may indeed often have been justified in terms of the special status attributed to chastity, but this doesn't seem to have been the basis for the ideal. Rather, the intention seems to have been that priests shouldn't have extra-

clerical emotional or (more important still) financial ties: they should be married to the Church, owing it not just their allegiance but any property they might have. They shouldn't be building dynastic families of their own or trying to leave accumulated wealth or possessions outside the Church.

In practice (at least in medieval practice) the absence of marital ties only opened the way to other, slightly wider, familial loyalties. The modern word 'nepotism' (from the Latin word nepos, meaning nephew) was first used to describe the policies of those popes who advanced their families by doing favours for the sons of their own brothers or sisters. Sixtus IV made no fewer than six of his nephews into cardinals. One - Giuliano della Rovere - was to become Pope Julius II. Not that his nieces were allowed to remain idle: they were strategically married into Italy's leading families. The network of Sixtus' connections stretched far and wide.

Heedless of hallowed ground and the presence of the Blessed Sacrament on the altar above them, a group of Pazzi thugs attacked the Medici benches, daggers drawn. As worshippers screamed and recoiled with fear, they surged forward, pushing past the Medici henchmen who came out to meet them, making determinedly for the two men they had come to kill. Giuliano fell beneath a rain of blows - stabbed 19 times in all, he was to bleed out in a matter of minutes on the cathedral floor. But his elder brother was only wounded in the shoulder. The fighting spilled out across the lobby, through the great doorway and into the streets outside: only now did the scale of the conspiracy become clear. In what amounted to a wholesale coup attempt, the Pazzi and their friends had tried to take charge of the Signoria - the seat of government - but they were beaten back by forces loyal to the Medici.

Sixtus IV cuts a striking - if worldly - figure as befits a ruler declaring war. His conflct with the Medici ushered in a time of turbulence in Italy and in the Church at large, its worldly wealth the object now of envy and faction-fighting.

Bundled quickly out of danger's way, Lorenzo lived to restore order and resume his authority as the leading powerbroker in Florence and in Italy.

Dirty Work

What has gone down in history as the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478 had been to a large extent the brainchild of the Pope. The Pazzi had been pawns. A crime combining murderous attack with the most outrageous sort of sacrilege had been committed on behalf of Catholicism's leader. The Salviati family, Sixtus IV's bankers and an old family with important connections in several cities - including both Florence and Rome - had helped to organize an attack intended to increase the influence of Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa, by promoting Pope Sixtus' power at the expense of the Medicis.

We're a long way here from the spirit of loving thy neighbour, embracing poverty and turning the other cheek to oppression. Niccolo Machiavelli, a Medici protege and the notorious apologist for this sort of ruthless realpolitik, had yet to write his revolutionary

As famously portrayed by Raphael, Pope Julius II was a formidable - even threatening - figure, but the 'Warrior Pope' won his place by nepotism. Sixtus IV had been his uncle: while popes couldn't father children (officially, at least), even so they were able to establish dynasties.

treatise II Principe ('The Prince', 1532). But if his thinking had not been formulated, its spirit was already alive and nourishing in a Florence - and an Italy - in which power was always up for grabs. The winner might take all, but no one expected to be the winner by pulling his political punches, by flinching from violence or resisting corruption of any kind.

All in the Family

Sixtus' sister, Bianca della Revere, had married Paolo Riario, the powerful lord of Imola, north of Florence and near Bologna. Their son, Girolamo, grew up to be his uncle's favourite, and was appointed 'Captain General' - commander of the papal army. This should have been an oxymoronic position, it might be thought, but the Papal States were territories that had to be defended like any other. As a temporal ruler, the Pope also had to have a 'foreign policy'.This was placed under the supervision of another of Sixtus' nephews, Pietro della Revere. Girolamo's marriage into the family of the Dukes of Milan had meanwhile given him extensive lands in north and central Italy. This in turn had fostered the ambition of building even greater power in the country. The Medici family were the main obstacle in his way, hence his alliance with the Pazzi, their local rivals.

The failure of the Pazzi Conspiracy left both sides badly weakened. For Girolamo and Sixtus there was severe loss of face. For the Pazzi there was a decade of harassment, eased only by the comparative weakness of the Medici family given that Florence had been subjected to what amounted to a spiritual embargo by the Pope. On Sixtus' orders, the saying of the mass and the consecration of the Eucharist were outlawed in the city. A deeply vindictive action when it is considered that most of those in Florence had played no part in

recent events, yet they were being deprived of those sacraments they hoped would save their souls.

IN  THE  BOX

FAIR-WEATHER FRIEND?

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH HISTORIAN John

Bale insisted that Sixtus IV gave his cardinals 'the authorization to commit sodomy during periods of warm weather'. Bale, it has to be acknowledged, was a Protestant pamphleteer - hardly the most independent of sources on papal history. A certain scepticism is also needed when approaching the contemporary diary of Stefano Infessura, who repeatedly refers to Sixtus as a sodomite and says that he handed out Church offices in return for sexual favours. Sixtus' own nephew Pietro was a major beneficiary, he claims. Infessura was a republican and a political enemy of the Pope -but what are we to make of similar testimony by the Venetian ambassador of the time, and the Pope's own master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard?

John 'Bilious' Bale was known for his ill-temper, but he reserved his most bitter feeling for the Church of Rome. Disillusioned, he threw in his lot with Henry Vlll's Reformation, for which his writings became a powerful propaganda tool.

IN  THE  BOX

THE  PORNOGRAPHER   POPE

Before he became Pope Pius II in 1458 - before he'd even established himself as a priest, indeed - Eneas Silvius Piccolomini had a reputation as a writer. Not quite on a par with Virgil, the Roman poet to whose epic hero his first name made clear reference - and whose standard description Pius Aeneas ('pious' or 'dutiful' Aeneas) his papal name acknowledges.

He was a writer and scholar, although even if some of his wisdom seems strange in a man of God: his 'moral' treatise The Institution of the Nobleman recommends that its readers find an outlet for sexual frustration in extramarital affairs, for instance.

His subsequent novel, Historia de Duobus Amantibus ('A Tale of Two Lovers') concerned two characters who decided to do just that, one Euryalus and a married lover named Lucretia.

An 'epistolary' novel in the sense that its text takes the form of the two lovers' letters, it was frankly erotic in its subject matter - and a best-seller across fifteenth century Europe.

Popetown

While not, presumably, stinting in his efforts on behalf of what Augustine had called the City of God, Pius II also built a city of his own. Pienza, as he called it, was in fact a wholesale redevelopment of the village of Corsignano, Tuscany, in which he himself had been born in 1405. He saw it as a summer retreat, but also as an expression of the highest principles of Renaissance planning and architecture. The streets and squares were laid out with wonderful regularity, the houses handsome and the palazzi splendid - it was pretty much a condition of getting a cardinalship from Pius that you agreed to build a palace in Pienza. There have been many much graver papal crimes, of course - indeed, Pius II did posterity an enormous favour in founding and constructing his model city. But it was an enormous work of vanity, nonetheless.

Not So Innocent

Not for Giovanni Battista Cibo, from 1484 Pope Innocent VIII, the cynical nepotism of his predecessors. Granted, he had secured his position through the good offices of Guiliano della Rovere, nephew of Sixtus IV's nephew (and future Pope Julius II). But Innocent was above such dealings. Why give lands, titles and properties to nephews, after all, when you've begotten two sons of your very own? Some sources suggest a great many more - as many as a hundred, it has been suggested, although Reformation satirists could be quite extravagant in their claims.

Innocent's approach to the question of clerical celibacy is summed up in an incident reported by Stefano Infessura. One of the Pope's most senior officials, says the diarist:

'Watchful of his flock as befits an honourable man, published an edict forbidding clergy as well as laics, whatever their position might be, from keeping

Indeed such lives did the clergy

lead that there was scarcely a single

priest who did not have

his mistress.

mistresses, whether openly or secretly... When the Pope heard this, he summoned his Vicar and ordered him immediately to cancel his command, saying that the practice was not in fact forbidden. Indeed, such lives did the clergy lead that there was scarcely a single priest who did not have his mistress. The number of prostitutes living in Rome at that time came to 6800 - not counting those who plied their trade under the

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 Pope Pius II had in his youth been more raffish than reverent: an intellectual, a poet, a writer of erotic fiction. A true 'Renaissance Man', his interests were wide-ranging and extended from religion to town planning.

If Pius II had never achieved anything else, he would have been of interest as builder of Pienza, a real jewel of a Tuscan town. Carefully conceived and lovingly laid out, it fulfilled all the principles of Renaissance planning. 

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guise of housekeepers or otherwise in secret.'

That said, the two sons of Innocent we know of for certain had both been born before Cibo had been in holy orders - a fairly trivial transgression, then, by the standards of the day. Far more serious was the extent to which II Papa ('the Pope') pulled all the strings he could to secure his sons' advancement in society, in politics and the Church.

The elder, Franceschetto, a spoilt child, grew up to be a wastrel and an arrogant bully. Late into the night, he would strut about the streets of Rome with his rowdy friends. 'He forced his way into the houses of the citizens for evil purposes', one contemporary reported. His gambling habit was legendary - but, unfortunately for his family, completely true: once he contrived to lose 14,000 ducats in a single night at cards. So broke was he that, taking advantage of his father's final illness, he tried to take the entire papal treasury for himself. On Innocent's death, finding himself with no protector to look out for him, Franceschetto had to flee from Rome. Even so, Franceschetto had - by Innocent's good offices - married well. He had indeed wedded into the Medici family. Putting the Pazzi Conspiracy behind them, Florence's first family had continued to accumulate power, becoming a major force in Italy as a whole.

Borgia Beginnings

Right now, though, another clan was coming to the fore in Church affairs: the Borgias were descendants of the Spanish House of Borja. The first of the notorious 'Borgia Popes', Callixtus III (in office 1455-58) had actually conducted himself fairly blamelessly. His consuming preoccupation, apart from prayer and worship, had been the attempt to organize a crusade to recover Constantinople from the Ottoman Turks. That this came to nothing was down to quixotic incompetence rather than to malice or corruption. Callixtus could have been a great deal worse, historians concur. He was, it's true, a tireless promoter of his nephews' interests - but nepotism was the norm now, as we have seen. Callixtus would have been all but forgotten had it not been for one nephew in particular: created a cardinal by his uncle, Rodrigo Borgia became Pope on the death of Innocent VIII in 1492. Taking the title Alexander VI, he was to reign as St Peter's heir for 11 years.

Mixed Signals on Slavery

The year of 1492 was Alexander VI's accession, but it is of course more famous for Columbus' discovery of the Americas. It was also the year in which the Muslim Moors were finally driven out of Spain. Between the culture of crusade that had prevailed in previous centuries, and the new sense of opportunity opening up with the Age of Discovery, there was much soul-searching about the rights and wrongs of owning slaves.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Christ himself has nothing to say on the subject in the Gospels - although the Old Testament takes slavery as a given. The Church's attitudes had changed, veering back and forth between unreflecting acceptance and bland discouragement, but there was no apparent feeling that the institution was ipso facto wrong. Rather, a consensus emerged that, while the enslavement of Christians was self-evidently an outrage and the enslavement of anyone less than ideal, in one case slavery could be justified. If it brought a benighted Pagan into contact with the one true faith, then a great right was bundled up in a small wrong.

The first forays by Portuguese navigators down the western side of Africa found whole nations of heathens excluded from God's grace (and conveniently only lightly-armed); soon seafarers were opening up new countries over the Atlantic. As the native population

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A picture of piety, it would appear - but Innocent VIII was so far from living up to his name that, by some accounts, he had fathered a hundred children. The Renaissance papacy was more a worldly than a spiritual position, and successive popes conducted themselves just like temporal rulers.

We grant... full and unhindered

licence to attack, seek out, take

captive and make conquest of the

Saracens and Pagans ...

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plummeted, felled by unfamiliar Old World infections or worked to death by their Christian conquerors, the solution became apparent: ship the first group to the Americas to replace the second.

The Church's role in what was to become the Atlantic slave trade was strictly secondary: no Pope or prelate told the traders that this was what they had to do. As the age's supposed moral arbiter, though, the Church was looked to for 'permission' - and this, there is no doubt, it freely gave. Tacitly, for the most part, but to some extent - just sufficiently - its approval was expressed, most notably in Pope Nicholas V's bull or pronouncement Dum Diversas. The meaning of the Latin title (basically, 'till things are different') suggests the interim nature of the statement - but it was to cover the lifetimes of many millions, to their tragic cost.

'We grant', it said, the Kings of Spain and Portugal - the two great Catholic powers driving the new colonialism, 'full and unhindered licence to attack, seek out, take captive and make conquest of the Saracens and Pagans, as well as any other infidels and foes of

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Alexander VI has been widely regarded as the ultimate 'Renaissance Pope' - with all that implies in the way of rapacity and ruthlessness. Though actually the second of the 'Borgia Popes', he's the one who shaped the dynasty's reputation for libertinism and murder on an epic scale.

The King of the Congo receives Portuguese soldiers as three Christian missionaries stand beside the King in this illustration showing Portugal's sixteenth-century colonisation of the Congo. Christianity gained a quick hold in central Africa, with churches being built throughout the region.

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Christ, wherever they may be found, along with their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities and other properties ... and to take them into perpetual slavery.'

Alexander the Terrible

The very idea of the 'Renaissance Pope' conjures up an impression of power, opulence and corruption gone entirely mad, an outrageous cocktail of magnificence and sleaze. And the ultimate Renaissance Pope - the one against all others were measured (and by whose reputation all have been to some extent smeared) was an effective - even conscientious - administrator of the Church, it seems. It was in everything else that Alexander fell short - in his sexual practices and his murderous politicking; and in what's generally considered to have been one of the most profoundly corrupt and cynical of papal reigns. After, all Rome was saying, 'buying' the conclave that elected him, setting

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If Christ could forgive Mary Magdalen, Alexander VI could go one (or forty-nine) better, celebrating his daughter Lucrezia's marriage by entertaining fifty courtesans in the Vatican. Notorious in every way, Alexander wasn't so much a legend in his own lifetime as a one-man argument for Reformation.

Pope Alexander VI, his family and followers find financial redemption in Jesus' sacrifice: the Borgias saw Christ's Church as a treasure to be plundered. Alexander came to embody everything that was wrong with Catholicism. His papacy brought the Church into its greatest-ever disrepute.

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up cooperative cardinals in sumptuous palaces at his own expense, he quickly made it clear that he saw the Church of Christ as a source of cash. Not just for himself but for his family. As his contemporary Gian Andrea Boccaccio put it in a letter to his friend, the Duke of Ferrara, 'ten papacies would not be enough to satisfy his kinsfolk'.... these virtues were bound up with still greater faults: his manner of living was dissolute and he knew neither shame nor sincerity

neither faith nor religion.

Rodrigo had started as he'd meant to go on, the riotous dissoluteness of his life unaffected by his anointment as a cardinal at the age of 29. Pope Pius II had reason to feel embarrassment almost immediately, as he explained in a letter:

'Four days ago, a number of ladies of Siena who are completely given up to worldly frivolities were gathered in the gardens of Giovanni di Bichis. We have been told that you, without heed to the high office you are invested with, remained in their company from the seventeenth hour to the twenty-second ... From what we hear, the most licentious dances were performed; no amorous activities went unpractised; while you yourself conducted yourself in an entirely worldly and unclerical manner. Decorum prevents my stating all that is said to have taken place, since not only the acts but their very names are unworthy of one in your position.'

A Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing

If he had been solely a sexual predator, Rodrigo's reputation wouldn't now be anything like so bad, but his enemies feared him as a murderous Machiavel, a cunning schemer. The young Giovanni de' Medici knew well what to expect of his appointment, observing to another cardinal, 'Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious, perhaps, that this world has ever seen; and, if we do not flee, he will infallibly devour us.'

A (perhaps) more fair-minded judgement comes from the Florentine historian and statesman Guicciardini (1483-1540). 'Alexander', he writes, 'was very active, and possessed of remarkable penetration; his judgment was excellent, and he had a wonderful power of persuasion; in all serious business he displayed an incredible attention and ability.'

'But' - and there was bound to be a 'but', of course: 'these virtues were bound up with still greater faults: his manner of living was dissolute, and he knew neither shame nor sincerity, neither faith nor religion.'

A damning judgement on the head of any major creed, it might be thought, but Guicciardini isn't done, continuing: 'He, moreover, was possessed by an insatiable greed, an overwhelming ambition, a more than barbarous cruelty, and a burning passion for the advancement of his many children, who, in order to carry out his iniquitous decrees, did not scruple to employ the most heinous means.'

If Alexander had a redeeming feature, it was perhaps his outrageous freedom from hypocrisy: he flaunted his mistresses and openly doted on his children. Nine have been identified for certain, although there may well have been many more. The first of his publicly acknowledged mistresses, Giovanna ('Vannozza') dei Cattanei, bore him four children: Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia and Gioffre. Of these, the first became Duke of Gandia when he grew up; the second the Duke of Valentinois; and Lucrezia, at one time or another, the Duchess variously of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio.

Lucrezia Borgia, beautiful and dangerous, looks slyly sidelong from Bartolomeo Veneto's portrait. The daughter of a 'celibate' pope, Lucrezia would have been an ironic comment on the state of the Church even if she hadn't gone on to have incestuous relations with her brother and her (holy) father.

Lovely Lucrezia

Lucrezia was the most controversial woman of her age. Between three marriages and rumoured affairs (two of them incestuous, with her father and her brother, Cesare), she's been remembered as the ultimate Machiavellian she-devil. Bewitching with her beauty; seducing with her smile; pouring poison into her victims' drinks from a hollow ring...

Where history meets myth is hard to say so many centuries on. Another side to the femme fatale emerges in Florentine Ambassador Lorenzo Pucci's account of a visit to Lucrezia in her palazzo on Christmas Eve 1493. He found Alexander's latest mistress, Giulia Farnese - and their daughter, Laura - living with Lucrezia quite happily:

'I called at the house of Santa Maria in Portico to see Madonna Giulia. She had just finished washing her hair when I entered, and was sitting by the fire with Madonna Lucrezia, the daughter of our Master, and Madonna Adriana, who all received me with every appearance of pleasure. Madonna Giulia asked me to sit by her side ... Giulia also wanted me to see the child; she is now quite big, and it seems to me, resembles the Pope...'

The greetings over, the company all trooped through together to hear mass, after which the Ambassador made his farewells - leaving this little blended family behind, a picture of domestic bliss.

IN  THE  BOX

PRETTY AS A PICTURE

Vannozza dei Cattanei may have been the most enduring, but of all Alexander's mistresses it is Giulia della Farnese we feel we know the best. We can actually see her face in several major works of Renaissance art. 'Giulia la Bella' - Julia the Beautiful - her contemporaries called her, and it isn't difficult to understand why when we see her in Pinturicchio's depiction of the Madonna and Child, with Pope Alexander kneeling at her feet.

Or rather, of surviving copies, for the fresco was subsequently lost - perhaps destroyed, given the obvious indecorousness of an image of this kind. Was Alexander laughing at everyone? It's hard to get inside the head of a man who, on the one hand, seems to have treated his sacred position with such cavalier contempt, but to have been a reasonably serious official of the Church in other ways. Likewise, we can't help wondering whether there wasn't an element of satire in Giulia's depiction (completely nude), as the allegorical figure of Justice before the tomb of her brother Alessandro, who reigned as Pope Paul III from 1534 to 1549. She remained quite naked till the mid-nineteenth century, when a scandalized Pope Leo IX had a metal chemise made for her and painted it white to match the marble.

Best of Enemies

Pope Pius III, Alexander's successor, was the son of Pius II's sister. His sickness and death, after a reign of only 26 days, inevitably sparked suggestions of foul play - perhaps of poisoning. He was followed on to St Peter's throne by Pope Julius II - no one's nephew, for a change, but great-nephew of Sixtus IV. In keeping with the clerical mores of the age, he had an illegitimate daughter. Felice della Rovere was destined to become a major player in the politics of the time. There were also some who said his friendship with the handsome young Cardinal Francesco Alidosi was closer than perhaps it should have been. He certainly seems to have over-promoted his protege, placing him in charge of a papal army he wasn't remotely competent to command - and then to have been broken-hearted when he was murdered by the angry general who'd been forced to take the blame.

A rival of Alexander in 1492, Julius had been incensed by his election - so much so that he'd gone stomping off to France. There he'd stirred up King Charles VIII with stories of sharp practice by princes and cardinals - to such effect that the French King had launched an invasion of the Kingdom of Naples. Julius came along for the ride - and for Rome, of course - but to no avail: Alexander had outmanoeuvred him, making his own deal with King Charles' chief minister.

Ultimately - and anticlimactically - Julius won the papacy without really trying. Alexander died in 1503, by which time his son Cesare was sick himself. Any idea that he'd become the next Borgia Pope had to be dropped abruptly at this point, and so it was that Julius was duly crowned.

His reign continued quietly: indeed, Julius is now generally best remembered for being the man who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Was the great artist just the latest in a series of male favourites? Was there - at very least - an erotic undertone to their relationship? That has certainly been suggested, and it might help explain the tempestuousness of the Pope and painter's dealings down the years.

Charles VIII entering Florence in 1494, as imagined by artist Giuseppe Bezzuoli (1784-1855). Charles invaded Italy with 25,000 men in 1494. He marched across the peninsula, subduing Florence on the way, and reached Naples in February 1495.

IN  THE  BOX

FORZA FELICE!

Born of her father's long-term liaison with Lucrezia Normanni, an aristocratic Roman widow, Felice della Rovere was brought up within the institution of the Church. Marrying into the rich and powerful Orsini family, she became one of Italy's most influential women, a major force in the politics of the day. Less colourful than Lucrezia Borgia, she was arguably much more important, a major power behind the papal throne - not just her father's, but those of his successors Leo X and Clement VII. The feminine force who really drove this seemingly most patriarchal of institutions, Felice was the nearest there's ever been to a Pope Joan.

'Let Us Enjoy It'

The year of 1513 saw the final emergence of the Medici on to the wider Italian stage with the election of Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici as Pope Leo X. A crucial breakthrough for the family, and one that had been a long time coming. That said, there's a danger in seeing the Church politics of this time as too much in terms of dynastic struggle. Leo wasn't just his family's representative in Rome, he was his own man - and that

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Pinturicchio's famous fresco, painted in the Duomo or cathedral of Siena in 1500-01 captures the pomp and splendour of the Renaissance papacy. Here Pius III is crowned, a powerful temporal as well as a spiritual leader, attended by his bishops, his Swiss Guard - and a cheering crowd.

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man was, in his way, not unappealing. 'Since God has given us the papacy,' he said, 'let us enjoy it.'

And so he did, with a spendthrift determination that smacked of fanaticism, entertaining continuously on the most lavish scale. It wasn't just that he gave good parties (although his banquets were legendary, the sumptuous food and wine equalled by the spectacular shows of music and dancing), he also sponsored cultural events and popular parades. As well as a patron of the Arts (most famously Raphael), he also made lavish endowments to science and scholarship. An unabashed highbrow, Leo at the same time wasn't too uptight for lower entertainments: he loved broad clowning, and even had his own personal buffoon, Fra Mariano Fetti, employed at a stipend of 800 ducats a year. His vulgar taste for curiosities came together with his connoisseurship in strange examples of 'higher whimsy' - like the portrait of his pet elephant Hanno he commissioned from Raphael.

Pope Julius II kneels as, at the miraculous Mass of Bolsena (shown here by Raphael), the consecrated host begins to bleed. Just visible behind the last of the candle-bearers - dark-haired, in dark clothes and with her head just tilted - his daughter, Felice, directs operations from the rear.

Leo was also enthusiastic for architecture. He had old churches restored and new ones built. The construction of the New St Peter's, set in motion by Nicholas V, then continued in expanded form under Julius II, really began to gather pace under his papacy.

It would be quite wrong to assume that, despite these expensive tastes, Leo lived entirely for himself. His generosity was impressive - excessive, even. Hospitals, orphanages, convents, the poor: all were to receive substantial help. Christ himself couldn't have found him wanting as far as open-handedness was concerned. The big problem was going to be paying for it all.

IN  THE  BOX

THE  PRISONER  OF  CASTEL  SANT '  ANGELO

There had been far worse Popes than Leo X, but few who'd been so frankly worldly. The Renaissance had swept away any sense of the Pontiff as primarily a spiritual leader. Popes were powerful potentates now - but, oddly, this had the effect of making them more vulnerable, exposed as they were to all the turbulence of Earthly politics and diplomacy. Their presence as 'players' in the international arena meant that they were no longer seen as untouchable by worldly rulers, as the second Medici Pope, Clement VII, was to find. The alliance he'd made with France's Francis I to gain leverage against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V irritated that impatient ruler beyond endurance. In 1527, accordingly, he invaded Italy and the papal army was badly defeated. In the event, though, both Pope and Emperor got more than they had bargained for in the battle's aftermath when mutinous Imperial forces ran amok. The Sack of Rome, although a clear defeat for the papacy, could hardly be described as a victory for the Emperor, who looked on in helpless horror as his soldiers raped and plundered in the city. Clement spent six months imprisoned inside his own summer residence, Castel Sant'Angelo, and had to pay his captors a substantial bribe for his release.

The Sack of Rome, 1527, was a devastating blow to the Eternal City, an embarrassment for Charles V, but an insurmountable humiliation for the Papacy. The Holy Father Clement VII, held prisoner in the Castel Sant'Angelo, had to pay a substantial ransom for his release.

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AND  SO  MORE  WORLDLINESS  AND  IMMORALITY,  MORE  POLITICKING,  MORE  OPEN  SCANDALS,  MORE  SPLENDOR  AND  SQUALOR,  ARE  PART  OF  THE  HISTORY  OF  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.  A  HISTORY  THAT  MOST  CATHOLICS  DON'T  WANT  TO  KNOW  ABOUT,  DON'T  INVESTIGATE,  DON'T  GET  TAUGHT  -  ALL  THEY  SEE  TODAY  IS  A  POPE   -  WITH  HIS  HUMILITY,  HIS  WARM  SMILE,  HIS  FRIENDLINESS,  AND  FOR  CATHOLICS,  THE  ROMAN  CHRISTIAN  CHURCH  IS  STILL  THE  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  GOD  ON  EARTH.  

TRULY  AS  THE  APOSTLE  PAUL  WROTE,  "FOR  SUCH  ARE  FALSE  APOSTLES,  DECEITFUL  WORKERS,  TRANSFORMING  THEMSELVES  INTO  THE  APOSTLES  OF  CHRIST.  AND  NO  MARVEL;  FOR  SATAN  HIMSELF  IS  TRANSFORMED  INTO  AN  ANGEL  OF  LIGHT……" (2 COR. 11:13, 14).

Keith Hunt

DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC CHURCH

FROM REFORMATION TO ENLIGHTENMENT

The Renaissance party left an acrid hangover, the sins of centuries catching

up with a Church that had exhausted its credit - financially and spiritually.

Faith gave way to cynicism; reformers found new ways of following Christ,

while philosophers questioned the foundations of belief

^{'The  true  light,  which  enlightens  everyone'  -  John 1:9}

Leo left a legacy of unrivalled splendour, and Western art is forever in his debt. But his spiritual contribution is harder to detect. And, while he doesn't seem to have been personally immoral on the scale of so many of his predecessors (vague rumours of the odd gay relationship aside), his outrageous spending brought the Church to near-ruin - complete and utter ruin, some would say. Some did, indeed, most notably Martin Luther, the German priest whose indignation was to bring about a Reformation.

Martin Luther burns the bull with which Pope Leo X had attempted to refute his charges. The Reformation released a surge of theological passion and intellectual energy - but also a wave of violent intolerance.

The Pawnshop Pope

It has to be admitted that, in his desperation to fund his spending, Leo was resourceful, and he didn't stand pompously upon the dignity of the Church. After all, what previous Pope had tried to replenish his dwindling coffers by calling in the pawnbrokers to carry off artworks and furnishings from the great churches and papal palaces? Where Christ had angrily driven the moneylenders from the Temple, his successor, it seemed, was eagerly inviting them in. But this financial catastrophe was nothing to the moral and spiritual bankruptcy that was now to beset the Church.

Julius II's plan for a new St Peter's, calling as it did on vast reserves of funding, had sent the Church's campaign for donations into overdrive. A rebuilt basilica had first been mooted by Pope Nicholas V in the fifteenth century, but Julius II redrafted his proposals on a far bigger scale. A cynic might suggest that he conceived of the vast new basilica as a fitting house for the imposing tomb he'd commissioned for himself, rather than for the bones of St Peter or as a Spiritual headquarters for his Church. Leo X took up Julius' project with his customary enthusiasm and, as

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Desiderius Erasmus the Dutch

humanist, wrote of the disgraceful

'degeneracy' of priests who

were actually 'filthy ignorant

impudent vagabonds'

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his vision expanded, so did the expense. The Pope's solution, elegant in its simplicity, was calamitous in its implications. Not content with pawning material luxuries, he started pawning his powers of pardoning, selling indulgences in frank and unquestioning exchange for cash. The system, as we've seen had always been open to abuse: now the Pope had opened up a market in divine forgiveness.

A Crisis of Confidence

Conscientious Catholics couldn't help but be aware of the flaws of the Church and its hierarchy. For the most part, though, they managed to forgive them. Even if the institution was human, the faith was divine, they'd reasoned: the office was greater than the man and the Church much bigger than its clergy.

Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, spoke for many when he wrote of the 'universally acknowledged' corruption of the Holy See, and the disgraceful 'degeneracy' of priests who, while claiming to be like the Apostles, were actually 'filthy, ignorant, impudent vagabonds'. They pretended to poverty but in reality wormed their way into men's homes and polluted them with evil: 'Wasps that they are, no one dares exclude them for fear of their stings.' Even so, Erasmus remained loyal to the Church. Others, though, their confidence crumbling, began to wonder whether Catholicism could still be justified, even in theological terms. The sale of indulgences may have been the last

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 Pope Julius II climbs up to inspect Michelangelo's ongoing work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The relationship between the painter and his patron were notoriously fraught, but the result was one of the most spectacular artistic achievements of all time.

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spiritual straw for theologian Martin Luther, but his disillusion had gone a great deal further by the time he made his stand of 1517. It is impossible to know in hindsight how far ethical disgust prompted spiritual questioning, but it certainly created a context in which the unthinkable could be thought. John Calvin's theological break with Rome ended up extending far beyond the corruption issue, but his rebellion was clearly given impetus by his moral outrage. For him, the trade in relics didn't just seem distasteful, it discredited Catholicism. If all the relics in the world were brought together, he suggested, 'it would be made manifest that every Apostle has more than four bodies, and every Saint two or three.' In other words, the sins of the Church weren't just tarnishing its reputation, they were undermining the very basis of belief.

IN  THE  BOX

BROUGHT TO BOOK

What became known as 'Protestantism' grew out of intellectual questioning, not just moral disdain. The Renaissance had brought a ferment of ideas, and printing technology had distributed the benefits far and wide. A growing middle class felt more self-confident and secure in every area of life, especially in the prosperous cities of northern Europe. Why not question religion too? Rather than tamely submit to being spoon-fed spiritual doctrine by their clergy, they expected to judge things for themselves. Whether consciously or subconsciously, Martin Luther had understood the new importance of the individual conscience in a way the Catholic hierarchy had yet to. In 1522, he published his German translation of the New Testament so that his parishioners could read the Gospels for themselves. William Tyndale's English Bible came out in 1525 to bitter condemnation from the Church. As Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, St Thomas More was to have the works of both men burned. Tyndale himself was to suffer the same fate when he was caught by the Catholic authorities in Antwerp, Belgium, and condemned as a heretic: he went to the stake in 1536.

Henry VIII's great seal authenticates the grant (to the ironically-named Sir Thomas Pope) of the lands and properties of the abbeys at Winchombe, Battle and Bruerne. The English king saw the monasteries as an asset to be stripped systematically, to enrich himself and reward his faithful supporters.

About-turn in England

To this day, British coins carry the name of the reigning monarch, then the letters 'F.D.', which stands for Fidei Defensor - 'Defender of the Faith'. Leo X awarded this honorific to England's Henry VIII in recognition of his services to Catholicism. In 1521 the King (a considerable scholar) had published his own pamphlet, A Defence of the Seven Sacraments (1521), painstakingly dismantling many of Luther's objections to Church teaching. But when his Queen, Catherine of Aragon, proved unable to bear him a male heir, Henry found himself in conflict with the Holy See. When Pope Clement VII refused him the annulment of their marriage that would allow him to wed Anne Boleyn, Henry was enraged. From now on, he insisted, the monarch would be the head of England's Church.

Henry's theological thinking hadn't changed. His 'Church of England' was still Catholic in everything but its fealty to Rome. Protestant reform was actively discouraged - at least at first. Henry's main priorities were the centralization of his rule and the satisfaction of his ongoing need for funds. The 'Dissolution of the Monasteries', which got under way in 1536, was a means of furthering both these aims at once. The break-up of the monastic system allowed the King to confiscate lands and treasures, while at the same time destroying the power of the Catholic Church in the country at large. Everything from gold vessels and embroidered vestments to lead roof lining and wood were carted off from the monasteries, while local profiteers followed, raiding the ruins for building-stone.

As time went on, though, the Church of England started heading off in a more continental-style, Protestant direction. Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer both had sympathies with some of Luther's reforming views. There was also a growing sense that 'Anglicanism' had to be marked out more theologically

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Henry confides in his trusted chancellor. Till his eventual disgrace and death in 1530, Thomas Wolsey would have given a Renaissance Pope a run for his money with the wealth and splendour of his lifestyle, and the immensity of his power.

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from what it was replacing: successive official prayer books pushed more Protestant doctrinal lines. Even now, though, the King set strict limits on religious faith: Henry VIII may have had some 60 Catholic martyrs executed, but more than 20 men and women were burned for preaching Protestant beliefs.

Henry had to have his kingdom run just-so. His consuming pathology was no more religious fanaticism than it was sex addiction. It was his ruthless, obsessively centralizing and controlling zeal.

IN  THE  BOX

A  TALE  OF  THREE  THOMASES

Dictatorial though he may have been by nature, Henry's instinct was always to delegate. He ruled through a succession of ministers and Lord Chancellors - all named Thomas. The first one, Wolsey, was a cardinal of the Catholic Church, but was much more worldly in his focus as Lord Chancellor. His taxation reforms enriched the Crown even as his reforms to the justice system bolstered royal authority at the expense of local lords. Wolsey's wealth and power became so great he was almost able to set himself up as a second King - a risky strategy when No.1 was so possessive of his prestige. The Cardinal's great palace at Hampton Court was confiscated by the King after Wolsey's inevitable fall from grace. (He faced treason charges when he sickened and died in 1530.) Wolsey's successor Thomas More has since been canonised by the Catholic Church to which he did indeed stay loyal and for which, in 1535, he died a martyr's death. But he wasn't to be mourned by England's Protestants, of whom he'd proven a cruel persecutor. Several 'heretics' were burned at the stake during his reign. Thomas Cromwell was as cruel in his conviction as his predecessor had been, but the victims now were Catholics - holdouts against Henry's Reformation. For what it's worth, the new minister seems to have been sincere. In the end his Protestant reforming zeal so far outstripped the King's that he was taken prisoner and beheaded in the Tower in 1540.

PAINTING: Antoine Caron's interest in classical antiquity comes out unexpectedly in his 1591 treatment of the arrest of Sir Thomas More. King Henry VIII appears (in the archway at left, on horseback) in more contemporary garb, but he was actually as tyrannical as any Roman emperor.

Turn and Turn About

Henry's young son, Edward VI, succeeded his father when he died in 1547. Mature for his years, he seems to have thought deeply about his faith and brought real Protestant conviction to his reign. But it was over in the blink of an eye. Always sickly, Edward died in 1553. It

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Under Mary I, the English Reformation was thrown violently into reverse. Six Protestant martyrs were burned together in Canterbury in 1555. Such public shows may have served as a warning, but - whichever side conducted them - they also inspired with courage those quietly keeping up their faiths.

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was all-change with the accession of Mary I. Henry's daughter didn't share his religious views. Hardly surprising, given that the Church of England had been brought into being specifically so her father could set aside her mother, Catherine of Aragon, who in her eyes had remained the rightful Queen of a Catholic England. 'Bloody Mary' was resolved to restore the One True Faith.

In furtherance of that cause an estimated 280 martyrs were burned at the stake - hundreds more were imprisoned and tortured by her agents.

A woman writhes, hung in chains from a crane in a crowded street during an eruption of violence against France's seventeenth-century Protestants, or Huguenots. Such outrages were quietly condoned by a Crown and Catholic Church which had no wish to see the order of centuries overturned.

And all for nothing. Mary died in 1558, only for her half-sister Elizabeth I to take the throne. Now the Catholics were the martyrs once again. Elizabeth passed Tenal Laws'preventing Catholics from holding public office or owning property. 'Recusants' - those who refused to swear their allegiance to Anglicanism - were hunted down. Catholic priests slipped into England secretly to help keep the creed alive in remote areas like Lancashire and Norfolk. Guerrilla-missionaries, they worked heroically underground. The country houses of Catholic families were equipped with special secret chapels and hiding-holes for priests, cunningly concealed in roof-spaces, under floors or behind false walls.

Sectarian Struggles

The Reformation polarized things. In those countries that continued to be Catholic, the Church became even more powerful than before. Catholic monarchs could see how easily the spiritual self-reliance the Protestants preached might be carried over into the sphere of worldly politics. In the Spanish Netherlands there could be no doubt: religious Reformation had brought calls for wider reforms and the Dutch had mobilized for independence. While the Inquisition redoubled its efforts here and in Spain, the French Crown cracked down hard on the Huguenots. Urged on by his queen - Mary, Queen of Scots - Francis II devoted his brief reign (1559-60) to the persecution of the Huguenots. The decades that followed brought what have come to be known as the 'French Wars of Religion' as rival Catholic and Protestant factions fought it out. Or,

.......

The country houses of Catholic families were equipped with special hiding-holes for priests cunningly concealed in roof-spaces, under floors or behind false walls.

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rather, it might be said, the great aristocratic houses of Guise and Bourbon vied for supremacy - for the contest was clearly as much a dynastic as it was a religious one. There's no doubt, though, that - as was to happen in many other conflicts in the centuries that followed - familial and ideological tensions took on a religious aspect.

So it was to prove in the home of the Reformation. Germany was then a patchwork of smaller states, principalities and duchies divided along religious lines. Conflict had been averted earlier with the agreement at the Peace of Augsburg (1555) of the principle cuius regio, cuius religio ('whose region, whose religion'). In other words, if a ruler was Catholic, then that was the

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IN  THE  BOX

THE  ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S  DAY  MASSACRE

The marriage of Henri III of Navarre to Charles IX's sister, Marguerite ofValois, in 1572 was meant to bring the two religious camps together: Henri was a Huguenot, Marguerite a Catholic. Unfortunately, many Catholics (not excluding the bride herself, it was rumoured) were bitterly opposed to the match. The Duke of Guise, the self-appointed leader of France's Catholic conservatives, was positively enraged. It didn't help that the Huguenot Admiral de Coligny was among the wedding guests: he was

widely believed to have ordered the assassination of Guise's father years before. The attempt by one of Guise's men to get revenge by shooting Coligny ended in failure, but set the sectarian temperature in Paris soaring. Pre-empting any Huguenot reprisals, the Duke of Guise and his men followed up the first attack: bursting into Coligny's house, they quickly killed him. In the three days that followed, Catholic mobs ran amok in a spree of slaughter that eventually left over 30,000 dead.

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religion in his state; if he was Protestant, then so were his countrymen and -women. In 1618, however, that fragile peace broke down, and the first battles of the Thirty Years War were fought.

A real meat-grinder of a conflict at the heart of Europe, the Thirty Years War was fought by brutally unaccountable mercenary armies who, having no local loyalties, showed no mercy. When the Protestant city of Magdeburg was taken in 1632, for example, the population was put to the sword, some 25,000 people - mostly civilians - slaughtered. More than a fifth of Germany's population was killed - either massacred by enemy armies or caught up in the famines and epidemics that followed the military campaign. The question of 'Who started it?' is moot, the direct responsibility of the Catholic and Protestant churches

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IN  THE  BOX

UNHOLY  COMMUNION?

Was Descartes put to death by a priestly assassin? That suggestion has been made by one biographer, Theodor Ebert. The philosopher died in Stockholm in 1650, where he was tutor to Queen Christina; the cause of death was believed to be pneumonia. But Ebert disputes this. Sweden's Queen is known to have had a restlessly inquiring mind and to have had reservations about her country's Lutheranism: she seems to have been drawn at one time or another towards both Catholicism and freethinking. By 1649, though, she was taking active steps towards conversion to Catholicism. Concern grew that Descartes' influence might be a brake. Hence the alleged intervention of the French missionary Jacques Viogue who, says Ebert, gave the sage a communion wafer poisoned with arsenic.

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in what was essentially a war between rulers debatable. Yet the episode's claim to a place in Catholicism's 'dark history' is not only indisputable but twofold: Catholics played parts as both the villains and the victims here.

Enlightened Values

Europe's religious wars had of course been deeply destructive, ugly and unedifying, but they'd at least acknowledged the centrality of faith. A disgrace to Christian ideals they may have been, but they had been fought on the assumption

that their causes were worth dying for - even if they'd involved an immense amount of killing too. The Catholic view of Protestantism as diabolical heresy at least paid it the compliment of not dismissing it as a mere irrelevance. Likewise, Protestant hatred of the Church of Rome as the Painted Whore of Babylon might

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 One of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is seen as having introduced philosophical reason to the realm of scientific enquiry and completely re-ordered our sense of what and who we are.

......

be seen as preferable to a jaded dismissal as worn-out superstition, neither here nor there.

Unimaginable at the seventeenth century's start, such judgements would still have seemed recklessly outrageous at its end. But the times were definitely changing, even so. Two great thinkers had set in train a revolution in thought: Rene Descartes with his formula Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am') in 1637, and the Englishman Isaac Newton with his Philosophiae Materialis Principia Mathematica ('Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy', 1687).

Descartes transformed the very terms of enquiry by making the human individual the first arbiter of experience, ('I think, therefore I am': I am my own existential guarantee.) Newton took things further: for the first time, it was possible to imagine a universe in which God's role had been drastically downscaled. This still left the problem of the 'first cause' (how could all this exist if someone hadn't made it?), but there was no necessity (perhaps no place) for a deity who, in St Matthew's formulation, 'knows every time a sparrow falls'.

Sir Isaac Newton's conception of the cosmos owed much more to scientific reason than it did to God. Whilst it didn't dispense with the idea of a creator altogether, it left 'him' badly marginalized. Newton himself believed in God - but not the divinity of Christ.

The  Fighting  Philosophes

It took time for these developments to filter through into the everyday thought of even the highly educated, but by the eighteenth century attitudes were changing fast. In France particularly, where the Church had associated itself closely with a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy, Catholicism was increasingly being regarded with disdain. Sophisticates were starting to embrace a new and satisfyingly scientific-sounding creed called 'deism': this accepted a creator as first cause, but went no further. God, having made the cosmos, it was suggested, had then pretty much left it to its own devices. The deity didn't concern himself with the lives of mortal men and women: 'Do you think,' asks a character in Voltaire's satirical novel Candide (1759) 'that when the Sultan sends a ship to Egypt he worries about whether the rats in the hold are comfortable?'

Nor, by the same token, did the supreme being care whether he was worshipped, prayed to or honoured with any of the other mumbo-jumbo offered by the Church. Which meant, in turn, that those things offered to the Church were done so under false pretences: religion was a racket, preying on the fears of the poor and superstitious. 'Theological religion', wrote Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), 'is source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent

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Sophisticates were starting to

embrace a new creed called

'deism': this accepted a creator as

first cause but went no further.

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of fanaticism and civil discord. It is the enemy of mankind.' 'I have only ever uttered one prayer to God,' he said to a friend in 1767, 'and that was a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And he granted this.'

Voltaire, or to give him his real name, Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), was one of a new breed of French writer-thinkers, the philosophes. Others included the scholar-journalist Denis Diderot (1713-84). The great project of his life was a vast (and, it was hoped, ultimately universal) Encyclopedia that would bring together all human knowledge, ascertained and organized by scientific and philosophical principles. As challenging in his own way was Diderot's friend, the Swiss-born thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), with his insistence on the corrupting influence of social institutions: 'Man was born free,' he said, 'but is everywhere in chains.'

For this young generation, the Catholic Church was the enemy of truth; the spiritual arm of a reactionary order that mired the French people in benighted ignorance, abject poverty and blind superstition. It was up to modernity to clear away the obstacles to progress, to sweep away the old institutions: Ecrasez Vinfame -'obliterate the infamy', said Voltaire.

With his scorching wit and his writerly esprit, Francois-Marie Arouet (or 'Voltaire') helped set the tone for a modernity in which brilliant sceptics would dance effortlessly around ponderous prelates, showing up the folly and corruption of the Church.

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YES  WE  SHOULD  BE  ABLE  TO  SEE  FROM  HISTORY,  WHY  SOME  PEOPLE  WOULD  HAVE  BECOME  CYNICAL  AT  THE  CHURCH  OF  ROME;  HOW  IT  WOULD  HAVE  TURNED  MANY  AWAY  FROM  THE  IDEA  OF  A  GOD;  HOW  THEY  WOULD  MAKE  FUN  OF  THE   ROMAN  CHRISTIANITY;  HOW  THEY  WOULD  DISDAIN,  HOLD  IN  CONTEMPT,  IN  SCORN,   THE  RELIGION  OF  ROME.  

Keith Hunt

DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC CHURCH

MISSIONS AND MASSACRES

"Go and teach all nations.., Christ's command was a sacred trust - and a

charter for paternalism and oppression. Catholic missionaries brewed cruel

persecution to spread their Word, but with it they took imperialistic attitudes

that would give the Church a problematic place in modern history.

People dwelling in darkness have seen a great light - Matthew 4:16

Christ's apostles had spread the Gospel through Syria and Asia Minor, and westward to Rome - which, as far as the first century was concerned, was the centre of the world. There was even a tradition that St Thomas had carried the Gospels as far as India. Several centuries of consolidation followed, but by the High Middle Ages a new spirit of evangelization was stirring: missionary work appealed to the enterprising ethic of the new friars. St Francis of Assisi had taken his followers out of the monastery and on to the road as mendicant preachers; the black-robed Dominicans were highly-motivated teachers, carrying the Christian message far and wide.

St Francis of Assisi meets Egypt's Ayyubid Sultan Malik al-Kamil in 1219 in an effort to convert him - and bring to an end the Fifth Crusade. The later Middle Ages saw renewed attempts to spread the Christian word beyond the confines of Europe to the wider world.

Their first objective had been the revival of Catholicism in a Europe sinking into apathy and worse (this was the age of the Cathar heresy in southern France). But both orders of friars had missions to the Pagan peoples of Western and Central Asia from the thirteenth century. In 1289, Pope Nicholas IV dispatched John of Montecorvino with a party of Franciscans to take messages to Kublai Khan of China and other leading Mongols in the East. Setting up in Beijing, he built his own impressive church in which he baptized some 6000 people over 11 years, he reported proudly.

A Wider World

An impressive score, indeed - but at approximately 0.01 per cent of China's population it was clear the Middle Kingdom wasn't going to become Christian any time soon. All these early missions were necessarily small-scale ventures: geographically and politically, Christianity was confined to Europe by the forces of Islam to the east, by the Sahara to the south and by the Atlantic to the west. But the voyages of discovery

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St Francis Xavier (1506-52) was a protege of Ignatius Loyola and founder with him of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). An indefatigable proselytizer, he took the Catholic message to India, Indonesia, Japan and finally to the very doorstep of China.

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made by Portuguese and Spanish navigators - of whom Vasco da Gama and Columbus were only the most famous - opened up a door to a much vaster and more varied world. Out there, they found, were innumerable nations who, however different they might be in their 'civilization' or 'savagery', were all alike in never having heard of the Gospel Word.

The evangelizing impulse had never quite gone, but it had been lost sight of for a while in the confusion of the Middle Ages, in the conflicts over the papacy and the eruption of heresy in the heart of Europe. Now, however, it found a new impetus. Despite a demoralizing blow, the Church was bouncing back from the Reformation, and here were new worlds to conquer, fresh peoples to convert.

Into the East

The Jesuits led the way: in 1542, St Francis Xavier established an outpost in Goa on India's western coast. The 'Apostle of the Indies' went on to preach his faith in Indonesia and, from 1549, Japan. The other orders were not idle: the Franciscans had a mission up and running in the Sultanate of Malacca, in Malaysia, and Augustinian friars began operations in the Philippines.

China was a challenge: this vast and complex empire had its own ancient history and religious traditions. And a civilization that still, in many respects, put European culture to shame - heathens the Chinese might be, but 'benighted' never. They pushed on undaunted nonetheless. Francis Xavier was about to embark on his mission to China when he died on an

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Out there were innumerable

nations who were all alike in

never having heard of the

Gospel Word.

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island off Guangdong, on its southern coast, in 1552. Within a few decades, his fellow-Jesuits, Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, established their own mission in Beijing.

The Jesuits were welcomed by the Chinese elite and made important contacts in a scholarly and scientific community eager for fresh thinking from the West. There were few takers for Catholicism, though, and progress was hampered even further by ill-tempered competition between Jesuits and Franciscans. In 1644, in any case, Manchu invaders swept away the old regime in China, inaugurating a new order that was far less accepting of 'foreign' faiths.

IN  THE  BOX

CARVING UP THE EARTH

The right of Europe's great Catholic seagoing powers to colonize the world was never questioned: it was indeed felt that they had a duty to take the light of Christianity to those who dwelt in darkness. That the enterprise was likely to be fabulously profitable was incidental; if people were to be killed, subjugated and enslaved, the Christianizing cause was just.

The Church's greatest concern was that the new colonialism might lead to conflict at home in Europe. Separate spheres of influence for the greatest powers were going to be needed. So it was that, in Spain in 1494, in the immediate aftermath of Columbus' first voyage and under the supervision of Pope Alexander I, the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed. This gave Portugal authority over newly-discovered territories to the east of a line (roughly) corresponding with that of longitude 48° W. Areas to the west of this line would belong to Spain.

Hence the allocation of so much of Latin America to the Spanish, along with the Philippines, while the coastal colonies of Brazil were granted to the Portuguese. In addition, Portugal could claim proprietorship over Africa and the East Indies, as well - if they could get a foothold - over China and Japan.

The Way of the Cross

Despite its later isolationism, Japan was welcoming to its first European visitors, survivors of a Portuguese ship that was blown onto rocks on the coast and wrecked in 1543. Even when the first missionaries arrived a few years later, relations remained cordial: the priests (from the Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit orders) were greeted as guests of honour at the imperial court. Far from being impeded, their evangelizing activities in the decades that followed seem to have been accepted: anything up to 200,000 embraced the creed of Christ.

The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) had given Portugal all territories to the east of longitude 48°W. Spain got most of the New World, then - except for the eastward jutting coast of South America, now Brazil

It wasn't until 1587 that Toyotomi Hideyoshi moved against the missionaries. The despot saw them as a threat to his centralizing rule. On Hideyoshi's orders, the foreign priests were expelled altogether from Kyushu, Japan's southwestern island, although even now individual believers were left in peace. Missionary work continued undercover and many thousands more were converted before Hideyoshi decided to seriously crack down.

In 1597, Hideyoshi decided that enough was enough. An example would have to be made if the foreigners and their culture were not to take over. On 5 February, no fewer than 26 Catholics - both foreign missionaries and Japanese converts - were publicly put to death at a mass-execution in the town of Nagasaki. Since they set so much store by Jesus' death on the cross, Hideyoshi had apparently reasoned, it was only fitting that they should themselves be crucified. A cold and sadistic logic, which might have made sense had the sufferers not gone to their deaths with a dignity that made the symbolism of the occasion irresistible. 'I have committed no crime,' said St Paul Miki - a Japanese convert to Catholicism, 'and the only reason why I am put to death is that I have been teaching the doctrine of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I am very happy to die for such a cause, and see my death as a great blessing from the Lord. At this critical time, when, you can rest assured that I will not try to deceive you, I want to stress and make it unmistakably clear that man can find no way to salvation other than the Christian way.'

Christianity was not formally abolished until 1614, but the crucifixions continued regardless. Nagasaki, the main port for European traders, was naturally the focus for missionary activity: inevitably, then, it was the

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IN  THE  BOX

GOOD FOR GOA?

'I want to free the poor Hindus from the stranglehold of the Brahmins and destroy the places where evil spirits are worshipped.' St Francis Xavier's words on arriving in Goa (1542) sound sympathetic. Except that - arguably - his priests were replacing one 'stranglehold' with another, still more constricting, as the Indians living here had already found. The Portuguese fleet had arrived here three decades before had begun by killing an estimated 10,000 Muslim defenders of what had for several centuries been an Arab Sultanate, before going on to extirpate 'Pagan' worship in the city and surrounding area. And, however pious his intentions, his proselytizing mission cannot sensibly be separated from a military campaign and administrative takeover on the part of the Portuguese which was, to all intents and purposes, imperialistic.

And so it was to continue, as can be seen from a 1566 decree by Antonio de Noronha, the Portuguese viceroy in the region: 'I hereby order that in any area owned by my master, the king, nobody should construct a Hindu temple and such temples already constructed should not be repaired without my permission. If this order is transgressed, such temples shall be destroyed and the goods in them shall be used to meet expenses of holy deeds, as punishment of such transgression.'

The oppression only intensified into the 1580s, as an Italian visitor, the Florentine Filippo Sassetti, was to observe: 'The fathers of the Church forbade the Hindus under terrible penalties the use of their own sacred books, and prevented them from all exercise of their religion. They destroyed their temples, and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty, and were liable to imprisonment, torture and death if they worshipped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers.'

In the decades that followed, many thousands were to be brought before the Goa Inquisition, and untold numbers were tortured and killed. The tribunal wasn't wound up till 1812. 'Poor Hindus' indeed.

St Francis Xavier's remains are kept in Goa, his first landfall in Asia, where they are housed in a great basilica built in his honour. They are brought out briefly for exposition once every ten years. Pilgrims flock to his shrine from all around the world.

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focus for the crackdown too. Richard Cocks, an English sea captain, reported seeing 16 martyred in the city, 'whereof five were burned and the rest beheaded and cut in pieces, and cast into the Sea in Sackes of thirtie fathome deeper yet the Priests got them up againe, and kept them secretly for Reliques.' Cocks noted the burning down of churches across Japan, the digging up of their hallowed graveyards and the building of pagodas and Buddhist temples in their place. All, he wrote, 'utterly to roote out the memory of Christianitie out of Japan.' At Miyako, he saw 55 Christians put to death at once, 'and among them little children five or six years old burned in their mother's arms, crying out: "Jesus receive our souls". Many more are in prison who look hourly when they shall die, for very few turn pagans.'

Japan's Catholics - native converts and European missionaries - got the message. The former decided to lay low while the latter left. When, a few years later, an attempt was made to smuggle some missionaries back in from the Philippines, it was the signal for a new wave of repression. In total 55 Christians (including the returning missionaries) were executed - burned or beheaded - and in the weeks that followed many more were martyred - whole families, including small children, condemned to a cruel death. Further pendulum-swings were to follow, as successive Shoguns either clamped down on Christianity or decided to tolerate it (partly for the sake of external trade). According to the eighteenth-century legal scholar Arai Hakuseki, another wave of persecution in the 1650s saw anything up to 300,000 converts forced to 'lean on their own staffs' - in other words, commit hara kiri.

A fitting end for those who followed the foreign creed with all its talk of sacrifice and of walking the 'Way of the Cross'? The first of a number of mass-crucifixions in Japan was held in February 1597, at Nagasaki.

Hispaniola's Holocaust

The victims in Japan, the Catholic missionaries were very much the villain in the Americas, where conversion and subjection went hand in hand. Justified by their Christianizing mission, the Spanish conquerors pursued policies of hideous cruelty, killing and terrifying indigenous populations into submission. As Fray Bartolome de las Casas observed at firsthand during the conquest of Hispaniola in the early sixteenth century, Christ's emissaries didn't display much in the way of love: 

'They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were sheep herded into a pen. They even placed bets on whether they could cut a man in two - or decapitate or disembowel him - at a single stroke of the axe. They grabbed suckling babies from their mothers' breasts and swung them across nearby rocks to smash

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 The Spanish Jesuit Charles Spinola was one of several Christians - foreign missionaries and local converts - who were burned at the stake by the Shogun's officials in 1623. The crackdowns in Japan came after years of comparative tolerance, so Christianity was well-established, with a great many adherents.

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their heads in - or, laughing and joking, tossed them over their shoulders into a running river. They spared no one, setting up special wide gallows on which they could set their victims dangling, their feet just off the ground, while their bodies were burned alive ...'

Lest, however, their pious purpose should be forgotten in the confusion and the carnage, they hanged them thus 'thirteen at a time, in honour of Our Blessed Saviour and the Twelve Apostles'.

Indeed, concluded Las Casas, 'they invented so many new methods of murder that it would be quite impossible to put them all down on paper.'

Those who survived such treatment - men, women and children alike - were set to work in the new mines and plantations, forced to carry heavy loads (and their masters in their litters) over enormous distances. In short, said Las Casas, 'they were treated as beasts of burden and developed huge sores on their shoulders and backs as happens with animals made to carry excessive loads. And this is not to mention the floggings, beatings, thrashings, punches, curses and countless other vexations and cruelties to which they were routinely subjected and to which no chronicle could ever do justice nor any reader respond save with horror and disbelief.'

In Cuba, Las Casas described how hospitable villagers brought out offerings of bread, fish and other foods for the arriving Spanish. Some 3000 men, women and children were promptly cut down in an unprovoked spree of slaughter.

Bartolome de las Casas was a friar himself, of course, so it's only right that his courageous witness should be recorded on the positive side of the Church's historic moral ledger. Other churchmen were to do what they could to ease the condition of the conquered in the Americas, like those Jesuit missionaries whose Paraguayan Reducciones in Paraguay - although originally conceived as reservations (almost concentration camps) became a safe haven for the

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... they were treated as beasts of

burden and developed huge sores

on their shoulders and backs as

happens with animals made to

carry excessive loads.

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Indians from enslavement. Or like Bishop Vasco de Quiroga in Michoacan, Mexico, who did so much to protect his indigenous flock from those who would oppress them. The problem is that Las Casas' counsel was falling on deaf ears, while such credit as is due to the memory of these other benevolent priests is so overwhelmingly outweighed by the debit on the other side.

Under the protection of the crucifix, Francisco Pizarro seizes the Incan King, completing his conquest of Peru. The conquistadors were to kill, rape, plunder and enslave, but the worst of the destruction they brought was quite unwitting - the introduction of germs to which New World natives were not immune.

Mexican Massacres

Hernan Cortes, who in 1521 became the conqueror of Aztec Mexico, made much of his evangelizing zeal in his letters home. As he explained to Charles V of Spain, the Aztecs had practiced human sacrifice systematically and on an appalling scale. In one of his letters, he described to his monarch how he had himself ventured into the heart of the Pagan temple in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). Here, he said:

'... are the images of idols, although, as I have before said, many of them are also found on the outside; the principal ones, in which the people have greatest faith and confidence, I precipitated from their pedestals, and cast them down the steps of the temple, purifying the chapels in which they had stood, as they were all polluted with human blood, shed in the sacrifices. In the place of these I put images of Our Lady and the Saints, which excited not a little feeling in Moctezuma and the inhabitants, who at first remonstrated, declaring that if my proceedings were known throughout the country, the people would rise against me; for they believed that their idols bestowed on them all temporal good, and if they permitted them to be ill-treated, they would be angry and without their gifts, and by this means the people would be deprived of the fruits of the earth and perish with famine. I answered, through the interpreters, that they were deceived in expecting any favours from idols, the work of their own hands, formed of unclean things; and that they must learn there was but one God, the universal Lord of all, who had created the Heavens and Earth, and all things else, and had made them and us; that He was without beginning and immortal, and they were bound to adore and believe Him, and no other

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Hernan Cortes rides into battle - a monstrous sight in itself for his Aztec enemy, who had no idea such things as horses might exist. Cortes' achievement was extraordinary, but he was assisted by his enemies' bewilderment in the face of firearms, armour and other strange things.

Moctezuma, held hostage by the Spaniards, begs his warriors to abandon their attack as the battle for Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) rages. Their technological advantages apart, the outnumbered conquistadors had quickly learned the advantages of pursuing a policy of divide-and-rule.

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creature or thing. ... I said everything to them I could to divert them from their idolatries, and draw them to a knowledge of God our Lord.'

Yet it hardly seems so tendentious to complain that Cortes and his men had offered 'human sacrifices' in the name of Christ on their campaign through Mexico, fighting and killing as they went. By their own testimony, they had killed 30,000 people in the city of Cholula alone; some 200,000 may have died at Tenochitlan.

In the long run, the casualties were to be a great deal higher in Mexico itself and in the Americas at large. Factor in diseases brought to the New World (albeit unwittingly) by the European conquerors and it is believed that more than 90 per cent of the population was probably wiped out.

The Requirement

Can the Church be held responsible for colonial crimes it didn't itself commit? Perhaps not, but it benefited hugely from the slaughter. It also licensed it - and this was no mere technicality but a significant thing in an age in which Europeans did genuinely fear for the

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Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521, after a heroic last stand by the Aztec warriors. They could not prevail against European technology - or the ruthless courage of the invaders. Soon vast areas had been absorbed into a - strictly Catholic - 'New Spain'.

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fate of their immortal souls and might at least have tempered their excesses if encouraged to do so by their moral guides. It's been fashionable as late to scoff at the 'religious' motives of those now seen as entirely cynical, brutal opportunists - and such scepticism is fair enough, up to a point. It's nevertheless surely significant that, for what it's worth, these Spanish conquerors invariably took pains to read the Requerimiento ('Requirement') aloud - and have it formally witnessed by a notary - to any indigenous chief or monarch they met before his realms were ransacked and his people killed or captured. Ludicrous as it may seem now, this document did underline the 'legitimacy' of such depredations and made clear the connection between the colonialists and the Catholic Church:

' [I] hereby notify and inform you that God Our Lord, One and Eternal, created Heaven and Earth and a man and woman from whom you and I and all the peoples of the world are descended ... God placed one man named St Peter in charge of all these peoples ... So it is that I request and require you to acknowledge the Church as your mistress and as Governess of the World and the Universe, and the High Priest or Pope in Her name and His Majesty in his place, as Ruler, Lord and King.'

If the hearer didn't heed this 'request', the document continued:

'I will come against you in overwhelming force, and make war on you in every way I can and subject you to the yoke and the obedience of the Church and of His Majesty the King, and I will take your women and children and make them slaves ... The responsibility for the death and destruction this will bring will rest with you.'

IN  THE  BOX

UP FOR DEBATE

In 1550-51, an important debate was held in Valladolid, then the Spanish capital. Two Dominicans, Fray Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Fray Bartolome de las Casas, took the floor. Up for discussion was the question of whether the indigenous peoples of 'New Spain' should be considered human, in the way that Europeans were. On the one hand, the explorers reported, they looked like humans - at least superficially: they stood upright; had heads, arms, legs and unfurred skin as humans did. On the other, it was said, they went about their lives completely naked, just like animals, and they had none of those technologies or skills that signalled civilization to Europeans. Were such beings to be treated as equals? Or should they be taken under subjection for their own

sake? Sepulveda eloquently argued the latter case. Had not Aristotle himself written that some peoples were by their very nature slaves, and needed to be subjected for their own good? On the contrary, Las Casas maintained, the 'Indians' were entitled to exactly the same treatment as Europeans. Although, as he went on to argue, these rights were being scandalously ignored. Las Casas' was the first influential voice to be raised against the cruelty of European colonialism and Catholic evangelism in the New World.

 At the Valladolid Debate, Spain's Charles I (Emperor Charles V) consulted clerical advisers. Here Fray Juan de Quevedo and Bartolome de las Casas make the case that America's 'uncivilized' natives all are human - and all equally worthy of respect.

Risorgimento and Retreat

Throughout the Age of Discovery and on through the Enlightenment era, the geographical reach of the Church was being steadily extended in the New World. Ironically, though, the conditions were already being created - in the philosophical and scientific scepticism of Descartes and his successors - for the erosion of its importance at home in Europe.

Even in 'Catholic' countries the Church was in retreat. Nationalism was on the rise among an increasingly affluent and educated urban middle class that wanted autonomy and freedom for the individual as well as for country. Marx might have dismissed the resulting turbulence as a 'bourgeois revolution' but it was quite corrosive enough as far as Catholicism was concerned. Italy itself wasn't to be spared: the

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Catholic America (sporting the simian features of Thomas Nast's cartoon-Irish) seeks to assist an unceremoniously unseated Pope Pius IX. Dislodged from the Papal States by a moustachioed Victor Emmanuel, King of the New Italy, the Pope was most indignant, but most Americans beheld his plight unmoved.

Pius IX appears with more dignity in this respectful portrait. More dignity than he actually possessed, it might be argued. In an apparent headlong flight from modernity, Pius took a succession off what now seem desperate measures to shore up the failing authority of the Church.

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Risorgimento or 'Resurgence' which swept the country in the nineteenth century was not such good news for the Vatican. The new mood of cultural self-esteem and the political confidence this brought with it made it apparent that the new Italy was in no mood to take any orders from the Church. The papacy was squeezed

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Alarmingly Pius IX's 'Syllabus

of Errors - an Index of ills in the

modern world - included free

speech and religious toleration.

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- quite literally, it might be said, the Papal States first forced to democratize, then absorbed into a unified Italy. Confined to his own little corner of Rome, the Vatican Palace still nominally (if a little incongruously) a sovereign state, the Pope cut an increasingly beleaguered figure.

As of 1870, indeed, Pius IX was the self-proclaimed 'Prisoner of the Vatican', although the only obstacle to his leaving was his own papal pride. The Church has never been conspicuously forward-looking, perhaps, but its longstanding resistance to radical change and its profound suspicion of liberalism and all its works were undeniably underscored by the humiliations of this time. The assumption that there was a natural affinity between Catholicism and what might loosely be called the 'forces of reaction' was to dog the Church for a century and more.

Pius' passive-aggressive self-imprisonment only underlined an intellectual retreat he'd been making since the 1860s when he'd started drawing up his 'Syllabus of Errors' - an increasingly baggy, catch-all index of all the Vatican thought was wrong with the modern world. Alarmingly, it included things such as free speech and religious toleration. It was of course Pope Pius IX who, in 1869, staged the First Vatican Council - the convention that definitively recorded the dogma of papal infallibility. Could it have been a coincidence that the first Pope ever to feel the need to

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Pius IX presides over the First Vatican Council (1869) with quiet authority - if only his writ had run beyond the palaces of Rome. Increasingly beleaguered, Pius set his Church against modernity, storing up problems which have even now to be resolved.

IN  THE  BOX

ABDUCTED BY THE POPE

Edgardo Mortara almost met his maker when he was a few weeks old in 1851, when he was very nearly carried off by a bout of fever. So badly had his condition scared the servant girl looking after him that at one point she'd splashed him with water in an emergency baptism. An understandable reaction in a devoutly Catholic young woman, perhaps - no matter that Edgardo and his family were Jewish. Edgardo got better and the whole thing was forgotten until a few years later when he was seven and the affair was brought to light. Edgardo had been raised in the Jewish faith - but this was against the law in what were still the Papal States, where canon law prevailed over all else. The authorities felt they had no alternative but to take Edgardo away from his outraged parents: it was forbidden for any Catholic child to be brought up in a non-Catholic home. So it was that young Edgardo grew up the adoptive child of the Holy Father: a vociferous campaign by his desolate parents and by Jewish and liberal activists couldn't shake Pope Pius IX's resolve to keep him. Or, in fairness, Edgardo's to stay: reaching adulthood in 1870 when the Papal States ceased to be, he made his own choice to continue in the Church and become a priest.

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always be right had this set down as dogma at a time when his true authority was coming under question?

In a sense, successive Popes were going to be 'Prisoners of the Vatican' for a while: Pius' withdrawal from the world marked the start of a 70-year sulk.

Into Africa

The Church's precarious position in a changing Europe meant it had all the more reason for looking outward. In the colonialist 'Scramble for Africa' it was well to the fore - but in a background role, of course. While the great European powers aggrandized themselves, the Church helped out with behind-the-scenes support, the spiritual arm of imperialist expansion in Africa. (Not that the Catholic Church was alone by any means. From the start of the 'Scramble' in the 1880s, the sun never set on the work of Anglican and Protestant missionaries spreading the Word of British supremacy along with that of God.)

Railways and the rule of law went hand in hand with enslavement and exploitation; savage repression in pursuit of a 'civilizing' mission. The legacy of colonialism in a 'Dark Continent' apparently all the gloomier for European intervention has been hotly debated down the decades since.

The same sort of weighing of one thing against another has to take place for the Church's contribution to be assessed. Missionary priests and nuns may have fed the starving, nursed the sick and educated children - weren't they just 'enabling' oppression, though, overall?

Sometimes they went much further. Even in the annals of colonialism, the story of the Congo Free State (CFS) stands out in its acts of cruelty: between 1885 and 1908 over ten million people are believed to have died. At this time what was later to be the 'Belgian Congo' (and later still the Democratic Republic of Congo) was pretty much a private enterprise, bought and owned personally by Belgium's King Leopold II. The grotesqueness of the project started with its scale (the CFS covered well over 70 times the area of Belgium itself) but went on to include an administrative system bordering on insanity. Massacres were almost routine - whole communities killed to 'encourage the others' to work harder. Rape was not just a soldiers' 'perk' but a means of social discipline. No taboo was sacred when it came to instilling the fear of God and Leopold's Congo Company: boys were forced to have sex with their sisters - their mothers, even. Production norms, in agriculture, rubber-tapping or mining, were enforced by physical mutilation: if you didn't meet your target, you lost your hand.

 Belgium's Leopold II, a giant constricting snake, crushes the Congo in his 'rubber coils'. (Rubber was among the most lucrative crops being cultivated there.) Though not directly responsible for perhaps the cruellest colonization of modern times, the Church played an important ancillary role.

Forced labourers carry equipment in the Congo for their colonial overlords. The prevailing view in Europe, and in a Church which was European in its attitudes, was that Africa was a 'Dark Continent' that should be converted - by force if necessary - and set to work.

The Church's culpability in one of modern colonialism's most terrible atrocities is disputed. And with some reason. Individual priests spoke out against the abuses at the time. Officially, moreover, the Church took no part in and had no influence over what was primarily a matter of policy in the power of Leopold and his managers in what amounted to a commercial company. But the Church's notorious child-colonies didn't just take in orphans: in the long term they created more. These institutions fed directly into the Force Publique - the notorious paramilitary police force of the Free State, the vicious instrument of official terror in the country. Parentless boys were brought up by the missionaries to identify entirely with the occupying authorities and see their own people as an enemy to be raped, mutilated, killed and generally kept down.

The cruelty didn't come from one side only: Catholic converts were among the 45 or so young Christians burned alive at Namagongo (in modern Uganda) in 1886. As pageboys of the King of Buganda, Mwanga II, they might have expected to be protected by their status, but their lord had started to feel threatened by the inroads the foreign missionaries were making among his people. Rulers like Mwanga were right to feel that their position was precarious, and that Christianity was (as it were) oiling the wheels of a European takeover in East Africa.

Twenty-two Ugandan Catholics (as well as a number of Anglican converts) were killed by King Mwanga II in the 1880s. This banner commemorates their canonization, which took place in 1964 as the Church woke up to the importance of its role in Africa.

IN  THE  BOX

WHITE FATHERS,  WHITE RULE

They were white themselves, of course, but it was their dress that gained the Society of Missionaries of Africa their common nickname as the Peres Blancs or 'White Fathers' from their foundation by Charles Lavigerie.

Their robes - pure white from head to foot - offered a sort of homage to those of the Arabs of the Sahara region, where their missions got under way in

the 1870s. They subsequently pushed south and east, doing genuinely heroic service (several were killed by hostile tribesmen) in what are now Mali, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Uganda and Burundi. Although their work was peaceful in itself, its strategic value should not be ignored. The Presence of Cardinal Lavigerie in Tunis, remarked one French statesman, 'is worth an army to France'.

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WE  SEE  HERE  THAT  WHILE  MANY   CATHOLICS  WERE  KILLED

 IN  THE  NEW  WORLD  EXPANSION;  DIRECTLY  OR  INDIRECTLY  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  GAVE  BACK  [EVEN  MORE  SO]  WHAT  IT  RECEIVED.  IT  IS  CLEAR  FROM  ALL  RECORDED  HISTORY,  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  HAS  BLOOD-STAINED  HANDS.

HOW  CAN  A  CHURCH  WITH  THIS  KIND  OF  HISTORY  BE  THOUGHT  OF  AS  "THE  TRUE  CHURCH  OF  GOD"?  HOW  CAN  A  POPE  AND  CHURCH  CLAIM  TO  BE  DESCENDED  FROM  THE  APOSTLE  PETER?  HOW  CAN  1. 2  BILLION  MEMBERS  OF  THIS  CHURCH  BELIEVE  IT'S  THE  CHURCH  OF  JESUS  CHRIST?

TRULY  THE  LEADERS  FROM  THE  POPE  DOWN,  AND  THE  MEMBERS,  HAVE  DECEIVED  THEMSELVES  INTO  GROSS  ERROR  AND  DECEPTION,  BY  CLAIMING  THEY  ARE  THE  DESCENDANTS  OF  THE  ORIGINAL  FIRST  CENTURY  A.D.  APOSTLES  OF  CHRIST  JESUS.

IN  THE  AGE  TO  COME,  WHEN  RESTITUTION  OF  ALL  THINGS  COMES  TO  PASS,  WILL  ALL  PEOPLES  OF  ALL  NATIONS,  UNDERSTAND  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  AND  ITS  DAUGHTER  CHURCHES,  HAVE  NEVER  BEEN  PART  OF  THE  TRUE  BODY  OF  CHIRST.

Keith Hunt

DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC CHURCH

THE DEVIL'S CENTURY

Wars, revolutions, genocides, terror campaigns, coups and assassinations: the

twentieth century saw one enormity after another. The Catholic Church was

variously a victim of and a witness to - in some cases arguably an accessory

in - some of the greatest crimes of modern times.

'When the thousand years are ended, Satan will he released from
his prison' - Revelation20:7

Herzegovina, 1981. A country under Communism; a state swallowed up, indeed, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A valiant light against Nazi oppression. Marshal Tito had been accorded a certain respect, however grudging, by the people he had ruled over through the post-War years. But Josip Broz - to give him his birth-name - had finally died the year before; his successors had seemed less worthy of their status. For the moment, though, their power remained in place: not until the early 1990s would civil war start to sweep Yugoslavia and the country fall apart in acrimony and bloodshed.

For the Catholic Church - as for the world - the twentieth century seemed a catalogue of tragedy. Marshal Tito's funeral in Belgrade in 1980 marked the end of a time of tyranny - but brought a new one of genocidal violence.

Nestling in the mountains not far from the Croatian border, Medjugorje was a beautiful and peaceful place - deceptively so, for the scene of a notorious massacre four decades before. In 1941, during the Second World War, over a thousand Serbs had been slaughtered by Croats from the fascistic Ustase movement and thrown into mass-graves which then remained unmarked - and yet not unremembered by a people still in pain.

Small wonder, then, that when the Virgin Mary appeared to a group of children here they should have paid particularly close attention to her view of recent history. This, the twentieth century, had, she told them, been the century over which Satan had presided. God had agreed to let him take a turn in charge of the universe as a test for his Church down here on Earth. Hence, from a parochial point of view, the sufferings of a Yugoslavia whose twentieth century had already been all but unbearable - even if in the years to come it was going to get a great deal worse. And hence a global history in which tyrannies of Right and Left had vied in cruelty, terror and violence had almost become the norm.

It should be stressed from the start that the Medjugorje visions have been controversial, even within Catholicism; senior churchmen have expressed grave doubts about the seers' testimony. What cannot seriously be disputed is that the twentieth century was to prove a particularly trying time for the Roman Catholic Church - as it was, indeed, for humanity as a whole.

Mexican Mayhem

'For the ten years from 1910 to 1920,' historian Thomas Benjamin has written, 'Mexicans devoted most of their energy to war and destruction.' A damning summary, yet one with which it's difficult to disagree. So violence against the Catholic clergy (and counter-violence committed in the Church's name) have both to be seen in the context of this wider conflagration. The Mexican Revolution was an almost unbelievably bloody and anarchic affair, its violence only very vaguely directed towards a final goal.

As elsewhere in a Hispanic world in which the Church was clearly identified with conservative landowning interests, anticlericalism and political radicalism went hand in hand. The two great rebel leaders, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, were very different characters, with widely divergent views, but neither had any time for the Catholic Church. Neither did the urban intelligentsia - many of them freemasons - whose self-conscious progressiveness made them contemptuous of a Catholicism that many workers and peasants resented as being parasitical on the poor. Attacks on priests and churches were frequent during the fighting - when the city of Durango was sacked by Pancho Villa's men in 1913, the embroidered mantle from the Blessed Virgin in the cathedral ended up adorning the shoulders of a bandit's mistress. Convents were attacked and nuns were raped; churches were plundered and burned and images desecrated.

When some sort of constitutional rule was restored in 1917, anti-Catholic feeling - far from coming to an end - was institutionalized. The 'Calles Law', while nominally just ensuring the scrupulous separation of Church and State, went a great deal further in

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Rumours of the 'Death of God' in the twentieth century turned out to have been exaggerated. People turned out in their joyful thousands in 2001 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first vision of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje, in Bosnia.

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circumscribing the rights of the Catholic clergy. (Church property was confiscated; Catholic schools were shut down and convents closed. Even wearing a priestly cassock in public was outlawed.) It also arguably gave tacit 'permission' for cruder and more violent discrimination at grass-roots level. Certainly, that was the message that filtered down to rabble-rousers in city neighbourhoods and small towns. It isn't known how many priests were murdered: only a few dozen were openly lynched, while many hundreds fled the country. By the mid-1920s, though, between official restrictions and popular harassment, in large

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Basking in their new-found power, Zapata and his men 

prepare for government - and the liberation of a 

landlord-ridden, priest-infested country. 

For many in Mexico the Church was no more than 

the spiritual arm of the ruling class; an enemy which 

had to be destroyed.

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parts of Mexico there were none left. An attempt by Catholic Cristeros to fight back from 1927 was met with savage violence: 90,000 were to die on both sides during this three-year civil war.

Opium and Opprobrium

In Russia, too, anticlericalism was the default position among a revolutionary caste ever mindful of Marx's view that religion was 'the opium of the people'. Through most of the Soviet republics summoned into existence by the Revolution of 1917, Christianity was represented by the Orthodox Church, but the implications for Catholicism were to be profound in the longer term.

For the first few years at least, the Soviet achievement was an inspiration for downtrodden workers in the West who saw in it the opportunity

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^c^^Ml

Ransacked by Russian Bolsheviks, this tattered, messy and rubble-strewn scene is emblematic of the situation of the Catholic Church in the Soviet sphere. Allowed to eke out an ignominious existence, it could never feel any real autonomy - nor ever, really, that it was in any sense secure.

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for real change; and, by the same token, they saw the Church of Rome as instinctively reactionary, a brake on progress towards a better, fairer world. Nor did the Catholic hierarchy disappoint, denouncing all attempts at social or political reform as godless Communism and driving thoughtful men and women into the intellectual embrace of the Bolsheviks.

Flirting with Fascism

For many, in Italy and in the world outside, the Lateran Treaty dragged the Church still deeper into disrepute.

Signed in 1929, it granted the Church its own little sovereign state in the Vatican City while at the same time guaranteeing its political neutrality and accepting the constitutional arrangements prevailing across Italy as a whole. As far as it went this was no great betrayal, perhaps - successive Italian governments had been pressing for something similar; and later administrations have honoured the Treaty to this day. What upset progressive Catholics was the fact that Pope Pius XI had reached this accommodation with Mussolini, the Great Dictator, and was effectively pledging the Church's allegiance to his Fascist state.

In return, Mussolini won concessions: massive compensation for the loss of the old Papal States (over which the Church had been moping and moaning since 1871, when Pius IX had made himself the prisoner of the Vatican). II Duce - despite his own personal

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Not quite a pact with the devil, perhaps, but the next best thing in the Italy of the 1920s, Pope Pius XI signs his Concordat with Mussolini. In its obsessive concern with resisting Communism, the Church was to overlook all sorts of offences in its allies.

 A cathedral goes up in flames at the climax of Spain's 'Red Terror' of 1936. The Left's suspicions of the Church, as the reactionaries' first line of defence, were by no means entirely unfounded, though they were certainly to some degree self-fulfilling.

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scorn - appointed Catholicism the state religion, made criticism of the Church a crime, outlawed divorce and made religious education mandatory in the country's schools. All state legislation was to be reviewed to ensure that it stayed in line with canon law. No one imagined for a moment that Mussolini had undergone a Damascene conversion of any kind. He made no secret of his continuing disdain. But Fascism (till now dismissed as an ideology of thugs) had secured the respectability it had craved, whilst Pius XI declared Mussolini 'a man sent by providence'.

MUSSOLINI  DECLARED  HE  WAS  THE  LEADER  OF  ANOTHER  HOLY  ROMAN  EMPIRE;  HIS  EMPIRE  WAS  THE  6TH  REVIVED,  AND  THERE  WILL  BE  ONE  MORE  AT  THE  END  OF THIS  AGE,  TAKING  SHAPE  IN  EUROPE  - Keith Hunt

The Cross and the Carnage

In Spain, it seemed that providence favoured the overthrow of the elected government and its replacement by a murderous military dictatorship.

So, at least, it must be concluded from the Church's unstinting support for Francisco Franco and his friends. Not that this was such a surprise. Those leaders of the Spanish armed forces who staged an uprising against the elected Republican government in 1936 did so, they said, in defence of traditional Spanish values - among which Catholicism was key. On the Left, this was quite clearly understood: in the summer of 1936 it was the clergy who bore the brunt of the 'Red Terror'. Churches were burned and convents ransacked, and in a matter of weeks some 60,000 people (including 6800 priests) were killed.

Inevitably, perhaps, the Red Terror was followed by a 'White' one, as Franco's forces exacted their cruel tit-for-tat. Not that they'd needed any such excuse: hatred of the Left was deeply embedded in the

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IN  THE  BOX

A  CARNIVAL  OF  BLASPHEMY

Much less serious than the slaughter of Spanish priests in real terms, but in its way every bit as significant at a symbolic level, was what Archbishop Antonio Montero Moreno has since referred to as the 'martyrdom of objects'. The bodies of priests and nuns were dragged up from crypts, their open coffins piled up in city streets; statues of saints were smashed, disfigured or put together as if to copulate; churches were turned into dance halls and storage depots;

religious vestments were seized and mock-processions held through jeering, spitting crowds. Class and religious resentments went together: typically, affluent conservatives identified with the Church. Rounded up by anarchist gangs, bourgeois believers were forced to utter blasphemies before they were shot, their executioners enjoying the thought that these well-heeled holy joes and Josephines wouldn't be dying in a state of grace.

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officer-class, who wore their crucifixes and rosaries as a badge of honour, and who saw the Church as not only the emblem but the spiritual justification for the society they saw themselves as building. 'We shall,' said General Emilio Mola, 'build a great, strong, powerful state that is set to be crowned with a cross.' Where other right-wing dictators of the era attempted

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Suffice it to say though that the

Catholic Church - not just in

Spain itself but beyond in Rome -

was to be an important cheerleader

for General Franco.

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to absorb religious institutions into those of an all-encompassing (hence 'totalitarian') state, the Caudillo saw the Church as sacred, his administration as its protector. In Spain, in recent years, debate has been raging over whether Franco can truly be characterized as having been a 'Fascist'.

And his conservative cheerleaders are right: technically he wasn't - for what the distinction's worth. The Catholic Church cannot of course be held wholly

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 Christ and Caesar were too cosy by half in the Spain of General Franco. Here the Caudillo visits Cardinal Federico Tedeschini, the Papal Nuncio. Franco's regime murdered men, women and children in their tens of thousands with the Church's tacit blessing. The whereabouts of over 114,000 victims are still unknown.

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responsible for the 'White Terror' and the 200,000-odd deaths it's believed to have brought; neither can the extent of its culpability be easily quantified. Suffice it to say though that the Catholic Church - not just in Spain itself, but beyond in Rome - was to be an important cheerleader for Franco. Not just during the Civil War but in the years after when his murderous regime was otherwise to a large extent excluded from the world community.

The Holy Father and the Fatherland

Friedrich Nietzsche, notoriously, had dismissed Christianity for its 'slave morality'. Turning the other cheek assuredly wasn't Adolf Hitler's style. Like Mussolini, born a Catholic, the future Fuhrer had turned his back on the Church as he grew older and began to conceive his vocation as leader of an all-conquering Aryan Fatherland.

Even for the leader of the Third Reich, though, there were realities that had to be recognized. One was the considerable number of Catholics in Germany, especially in the South. A naturally conservative constituency, they remained wary of Hitler and his National Socialists. Hence Hitler's overtures to Pope Pius XI, who hoped to secure the position of the Church in a changing Germany and find an ally in his opposition to the Communist advance in Europe.

Pius, who four years earlier had signed a similar Concordat with Mussolini, had no hesitation in agreeing to the treaty. The Concordat he signed in 1933 may have been seen by the Pope as nothing more than a diplomatic recognition of political practicalities, but Hitler was able to exhibit it as though it were a sacred blessing.

The Nazis made more uncomfortable bedfellows than the Italian Fascists had, their ugly anti-Semitism soon apparent to the world. In 1937, abashed, the

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The future Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, was Papal Nuncio in Germany. Here he leaves the Presidential Palace in Berlin. That Pacelli 'went native' with the Nazis is untrue - he disdained their brutish views - yet he never seems to have appreciated the enormity of their crimes.

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Pope went so far as to send out an encyclical - a letter to be read in German churches - entitled Mit Brennender Sorge ('With Burning Sorrow'). It contained an outspoken condemnation of the Nazis' attacks upon their country's Jews as well as their efforts to control the activities of the Catholic Church in Germany. So horrified had Pius XI become by Hitler's influence, he'd finally concluded that he was possessed by the devil and had attempted to exorcise him at long-distance.

IN  THE  BOX

JEWISH  QUESTIONS

The Church's reputation is for dogmatic certainty (even where such certainty may be ill-advised) but it can be as woolly and ambivalent as any other institution. So it was with its wartime conduct - a dereliction of duty never really redeemed by isolated acts of humanity and courage; so it was in its prewar attitudes to the Jews. Blanket charges of 'anti-Semitism' against the Church are easily enough refuted by specific examples - but then so too are blanket exonerations. While the medieval idea that the Jews should be collectively condemned as the 'killers of Christ' was now no longer being preached, many in the Vatican still saw 'the Jews' as a deadly threat. In 1929, one spokesman, Father Enrico Rosa, drew what he clearly saw as a scrupulous distinction between an unworthy and un-Christian racial anti-Semitism and a 'healthy evaluation of the danger emanating from the Jews'. His fellow - Jesuit Gustav Gundlach teased out his argument a little further the following year. To hate the Jews because they were Jews - and, as such, intrinsically alien and 'other' - was deplorable, he argued. To hate them because they were cosmopolitan in their loyalties and damaging in their influence in the arts, the media, science and finance was quite another thing. The 'Chosen People' of Old Testament times, it seems, were now the vanguard of all that was dangerously modern; the enemies of established Western values.

'Hitler's Pope'?

The 1933 Concordat had been negotiated by a young and energetic cardinal, Eugenio Pacelli - a lover of Germany and its culture, and a conservative through and through. As Pope Pius XII from 1939, he was to steer the Church through the stormy waters of the Second World War - wrecking its moral reputation, many have suggested, in the process. Pius' characterization - caricaturing, even - as 'Hitler's Pope', is arguably harsh: relations between the two men were seldom cordial and never easy. There is little doubt, though, that Pius saw in Hitler just what the German Fuhrer saw in him: a man with whom - whatever his drawbacks - he could do business.

The Holocaust is rightly remembered as one of the very darkest episodes of modern history, the Church one of many institutions that fell badly short. And this is especially significant, given the moral authority it has historically claimed; the right it has assumed to tell its members - and the wider world - how it should live. Pius XII's defenders have pointed to the good he did - justifiably, up to a point: it's easily forgotten that the young Pacelli had actually been the author of the impassioned plea against racism in Mil Brennender Sorge. And it's been demonstrated too that, as Pope, he organized rescue measures in the Vatican City that led to the saving of a great many Jewish lives. But the good he did was invariably done by stealth. When the world looked to him for leadership he was silent - at best equivocal. An unabashed elitist, he despised National Socialism for its vulgar populism, but doesn't seem to have been as outraged by its morality as he might have been. He wasn't a Nazi; nor could he even be charged of an indifference to the threat it posed - but he was more exercised by the threat represented by Communism in the east.

What can be said of Pius goes for the Church as a whole: it isn't difficult to find ways in which good was done and evil resisted. Many individual priests and nuns performed acts of astounding courage to save Jewish families from death in Germany. And the authorities reacted, rounding up what they saw as their enemies: Dachau alone housed 2600 priests. In Poland, national resistance to the German invaders was largely coordinated by the Catholic clergy. Some 2500 priests in that country were to be executed by the Nazis. Overall, though, the fact remains that the Final Solution was a challenge dismally ducked: the Church has been struggling to reassert its moral authority ever since.

Poland Oppressed

Poland's problem, in the post-War era, wasn't to come from Nazism but from Communism. The Red Army liberated it only to take it under Soviet rule. The Church clung on here, in an excruciatingly uneasy co-existence with a socialist government that wouldn't let it flourish openly yet never felt quite strong enough to stamp it out completely. Important leaders were arrested and imprisoned - thousands tortured. As elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain, a state-sponsored pseudo-Church was created, but the people of Poland were never fooled. Even so, Catholicism struggled to maintain a meaningful presence in the country. Pope John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla, was many years later to talk of Poland's 'Silent Church' - capable of offering some degree of comfort and continuity, but not to raise its voice in spiritual leadership.

One priest more than any other articulated the aspirations of Poles

for freedom at this time: Jerzy Popieluszko preached each week at

his Warsaw church.

When Poland's people did eventually find their voice, though, it was in response to the pastoral visit of Pope John Paul II himself, who came soon after his election in 1979. They turned out to see him in their hundreds of thousands: in all, it's estimated, a third of the Polish population came to see him celebrate a series of open-air masses. The Communist authorities didn't like it but didn't dare object. That visit seems to have emboldened Poland, helping to inspire the setting-up of Solidarnosc (the 'Solidarity' movement) in 1980.

The Church continued to lend crucial support. After General Jaruzelski's government imposed martial law in December 1981, the workers' meetings with which the Solidarnosccampaign had started were forbidden - but people could still come together to celebrate mass. One priest more than any other articulated the aspirations of Poles for freedom at this time: Jerzy Popieluszko preached each week at his Warsaw church. In 1984, its patience exhausted, the state had its agents stage a car crash for Popieluszko's

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The cross has been conceived on the gigantic scale formerly reserved for Soviet war memorials and Lenin statues: Pope John Paul Il's trip to Poland (1979) - the first major engagement of his pontificate - was both a joyful homecoming and a warning to the regime.

Pope John Paul II makes a point to General Wojciech Jaruzelski. But Poland's Prime Minister was not convinced. Even so, throughout the 1980s, Catholicism remained an inspiration for patriotic Poles fighting to free their country from Communist oppression.

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benefit. He escaped unhurt, but was seized and abducted a few days later. He was beaten to death, his body abandoned by the side of a reservoir, a martyr for Catholicism - and his country.

The Latin Masses

If the fight against Communism had brought out the best in the Catholic Church in Poland, the same could hardly be said of what had happened in South America. Since the 1970s, the Church had allied itself strongly with some of the most unpleasant regimes in the world in Augusto Pinochet's Chile and the Generals' Argentina. Like the United States establishment, the Church had viewed the region with mounting concern for many years - since Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution of 1959, indeed.

Latin America's poor and dispossessed masses had seemed 'naturally' to be the property of the Church - a vast and unquestioningly obedient congregation. That they might now be seizing the opportunity to liberate themselves caused consternation. In the paranoia of the Cold War era, any sign of popular unrest was viewed with trepidation; any stirrings of student radicalism denounced as communistic. Even as priests in Poland risked their lives for freedom, the Church in Argentina and Chile was turning a blind eye while suspected activists were abducted, tortured and killed, their bodies dumped by roadsides or dropped from helicopters far out at sea. In Chile in 1973, the democratically elected government of the Marxist Salvador Allende had been overthrown in a bloody

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The image of Father Jerzy Popietuszko is carried in procession through the streets of Warsaw in celebration of his beatification on 6 June 2010. Patriotism and piety have gone together in a Poland whose Catholic religion was repressed along with its people under Communism.

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coup by the country's military, led by General Augusto Pinochet.

Three years later in Argentina, fearing a similar drift into disorder and Marxist revolution, the leading generals seized power. In both countries, the military set to work stamping out any sign of resistance, snatching up dissidents from their homes and from city streets. Most were never to be seen again: in Argentina alone, these desaparecidos ('disappeared ones') numbered getting on for 30,000. Estimates for those killed and missing in Pinochet's Chile are only slightly less.

'The disappeared cry out for Justice!' And so did their suffering mothers and other relations through the long and bitter years of Argentina's 'Dirty War'. Many priests were sympathetic - some were 'disappeared' by the Generals' thugs themselves - but the hierarchy tended to side with the right-wing regime.

Welcome as it was in many ways, the election of the Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis in 2013 called attention to a time many in the Church had been trying to forget. As so often in the Church's history, a great many priests, nuns and ordinary Catholics had acquitted themselves with commitment and courage on behalf of their people: once again, though, it seemed that the hierarchy had let them down. The part played by the American CIA in supporting General Pinochet's coup in 1973 has been much publicized. Less well known is the support he received from the Catholic Church. In the days following the coup - a time in which over 3000 civilians were murdered - the Chilean Episcopal Conference asked the people to assist the government in its 'difficult task of restoring national order and the economic life of the country, so seriously affected'. In Argentina too, senior churchmen lent the military junta at least their tacit support, although many priests and nuns fought hard for freedom and justice at parish level. Unsurprisingly, the role of the future Pope Francis has been hotly contested since his appointment, although claims that he collaborated with the dictatorship, betraying his own priests, remain unsubstantiated.

Catholic Communism?

Liberation Theology may have been a bastard creed, at it inspired real heroism in many of its adherents. As first outlined by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez, the 'Theology of Liberation' demanded a radically-overhauled Catholicism which would work to bring bout change in this world, not just happiness in the next. No longer would it be the 'opium of the people': it would be a formula for revolutionary transformation of society. Many thousands of priests, nuns and lay Catholics heard Gutierrez's Gospel and were inspired.

Many were to die for their beliefs. In Colombia, Camilo Torres, announcing that 'if Christ were alive day, he would be a guerrilla,' enlisted with his

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 La Moneda, Santiago, was bombed by the Chilean air force in the military coup which brought General Pinochet to power in 1973. The country's elected Marxist President, Salvador Allende, who committed suicide inside his palace, had been deeply distrusted both by the United States and by the Church.

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country's Marxist National Liberation Army, in whose service he was killed during his first action in 1966. Archbishop Oscar Romero, who from his pulpit led popular opposition to El Salvador's oppressive military regime, was assassinated at the altar as he said mass one day in 1980. Clerics were also well represented among the Sandinistas who came to power in Nicaragua in the 1980s, including the priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal.

The Church was not impressed. Even when its own nuns were raped and murdered by right-wing death squads in El Salvador, it seemed more concerned about the risk of Communist contamination in the Church. Pope John Paul II's experiences of life in Poland almost certainly helped to shape his sceptical reaction to Liberation Theology, despite his own well-documented

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 Born in Lima, in 1928, Gustavo Gutierrez grew up to become a Dominican friar - and founder of 'Liberation Theology'. So central was Christ's command to help the poor, Gutierrez argued, that his disciples had a duty to fight for revolution.

Nuns seek in vain to save the life of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. An ally of the poor, he had been gunned down by members of a right-wing death squad while saying mass.

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concern for social justice. (In September 2013, Pope Francis raised eyebrows by giving the aged Gustavo Gutierrez, by now 85, an audience. Was Liberation Theology about to get a second chance?)

Bank of Brothers

Early in the morning of 18 June 1982, the body of a man was found hanging from scaffolding underneath an arch of London's Blackfriars Bridge. Squeezed into his pockets with eight bricks for weight was $14,000 in three different currencies: this had been no ordinary suicide - if that was even what it was. The dead man was soon identified as an Italian, Roberto Calvi, chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano who had gone missing from his home in Milan some days before.

IN  THE  BOX

DIRTY TRICKS

The history of South and Central America in the second half of the twentieth century was - to put it mildly - messy and unpleasant. Discussion has tended to focus on the role of the United States, and more specifically the secret activities of the CIA in what was seen as 'America's Backyard'. In Central America particularly, the interests of US business were seen as paramount: the Free World had to be made safe for United Fruit. Yet other organizations had much at stake as well - none more than the Roman Catholic Church, which looked to Latin America as a secure heartland of belief.

When we read of US support for the monstrous regime of Rafael Trujillo, who terrorized the Dominican Republic for 30 years from 1930 to 1961, we shouldn't forget the vital support he was given by the Church. At a time when even the US was losing faith in their sometime puppet, his Concordat with the Vatican (1954) came to his rescue, giving him the one shred of diplomatic legitimacy he had. That same year, while the CIA was parachuting arms with Soviet markings into Guatemala to smear Jacobo Arbenz's reforming government, New York's Cardinal Francis Spellman was burning up the wires to Archbishop Mariano Rossell Arellano in the country. A pastoral letter, read out in all the churches (to a largely illiterate population) urged Guatemalans to 'rise up as one man against this enemy of God and country'. In Nicaragua, the Somozas - Anastasio ('Our Son o a bitch'), Luis and Anastasio Jr - all had the backing of the USA, and the Church. So did the murderous Contra Front after the Somoza tyranny was overthrown. In Honduras, Costa Rica - you name the country - the Church saw cruel conservative regimes as preferable to even moderately reforming ones. If Camilo Torres' claim that Christ would have been a leftist guerrilla must be questionable, it hardly seems likely that he would have joined a right-wing death-squad or a military junta.

In the days that followed, as police became increasingly suspicious that Calvi had been murdered, financial investigators found huge discrepancies in the Banco Ambrosiano's accounts. Accusations of malpractice had been flying around for years - Calvi himself had been convicted of illegally exporting currency and sentenced to four years' imprisonment, although he had been given his freedom while he waited to appeal. There were major fraud charges pending against him too. The day before his disappearance, his secretary had leapt from her fourth-floor office window, leaving a note alleging that her boss's crimes had brought the Banco Ambrosiano down. It was certainly in deep trouble, its management collectively dismissed by Italy's finance ministry, who had established their own committee to handle its affairs.

Roberto Calvi served as President of the Banco Ambrosiano, Milan, until his suicide in 1982. His death drew unwelcome attention to the Vatican's extraordinarily intricate financial arrangements and exposed an unholy tangle of curious connections and secret deals.

John Paul I lies in state in the Clementine Chapel of St Peter's after the shortest papal reign of recent times. Inevitably, his death - after only 33 days in office - gave rise to rumour and speculation of the most lurid sort.

Calvi wasn't the first crooked financier, and he wouldn't be the last, but his was no ordinary story of corruption. As the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, he had become known as 'God's Banker', mainly because the Vatican Bank had owned a substantial shareholding. He had also been a prominent member of P2 - a masonic lodge that was rumoured to control the commanding heights of the Italian economy and media. (That P2 members jokily referred to themselves as the frati neri or 'black friars' - like the bridge - was said by some to have been a sign that his murder had been the work of his brother masons.)

What happened to Calvi isn't clear, and where a lack of clarity exists conspiracy theory thrives: speculation on the case has embraced everything from mafia money-laundering to channelling CIA funding to the Nicaraguan Contras. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank (or, in full, the 'Institute for the Works of Religion'), took a down-to-earth approach to this worldliest of duties: 'You can't run the Church on Hail Mary's', he observed. What Our Lady would have thought of his friendships (and, said his accusers, business dealings) with convicted fraudsters and international gangsters we can only guess.

Vatican Victim?

Was Pope John Paul I a collateral casualty of these shenanigans? Within 33 days of taking office he was dead. (Amazingly enough, that doesn't make his appointment by any means the shortest papal reign in history: in fact it comes in at number 11 in a table topped by Urban VII, whose reign in September 1590 had lasted only 13 days.) By the Vatican's own account his passing was just 'one of those things' - he was hardly the first man in his sixties to have had a heart attack. But speculation was inevitable: the peculiar combination of power, wealth and secrecy in the highest reaches of the Church make its affairs attractive to conspiracy theorists at the best of times - add in

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IN  THE  BOX

FROM  P2  TO  PORN

The Catholic Church has supped with so many devils down the centuries that one more won't make much difference, perhaps. Even so, it's curious to find such close and complex links between Catholic officials and Propaganda Due or 'P2', given the Church's longstanding opposition to freemasonry. (Since 1738, soon after the founding of the first Grand Lodges in Enlightenment Europe, the Church has banned its members from involvement in freemasonry.) Still, the converse should have been true as well. Born of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the 'Craft' had traditionally taken a contemptuous attitude towards the Church and its teachings. Instead, its members had espoused a 'deist' view in which a 'Grand Architect' had designed the universe.

Given the number of scandals, political and financial, in which the lodge's Venerable Master Licio Gelli was found to have been involved, it is hard to see him as a searcher of mystic truth. If the financier had any aim beyond that of enriching himself and his friends, it seems to have been the resurrection of

Fascism in Italy - or at very least the extirpation of Communism in the country. This of course was an aim he shared both with the Catholic Church and the CIA, and with both organizations he seems to have maintained mysterious contacts down the years.

Gelli himself has withdrawn from the frontline of Italian politics in recent years: his plan for Italy's 'democratic rebirth' has been in good hands with Silvio Berlusconi, he has told the press. In backing Berlusconi's rise, the Church showed impressive tolerance in turning a blind eye to his TV empire's recipe of softcore imagery and right-wing propaganda. Its patience only snapped when the media mogul proved to have been getting too close to (allegedly under-age) girls himself at the 'bunga-bunga parties' to which he treated his friends.

Pope John Paul II isn't sure he sees the joke he's supposed to share with Silvio Berlusconi. The Polish Pope had denounced the output of the billionaire media mogul's TV stations as a 'curse', but favoured the devil he knew over his liberal opponents.

Scores were killed by a bomb in the Bologna Massacre of 1980. 

No one would suggest that the outrage was the work of the Church. 

But had senior Vatican officials allowed themselves to become

too closely involved with those right-wing extremists who were responsible?

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freemasonry and the recipe is irresistible. It would only take the addition of the CIA and KGB to make the mix complete - and both these elements have been added by investigative writers in the years since.

Of course, the fact that conspiracy theories nourish doesn't mean that there are no conspiracies, and what might loosely be described as the 'P2 Affair' had been a conspiracy and a half. While claims that the late Pope had paid the price for trying to break the hold of freemasons within his hierarchy or for seeking to stamp out corruption remain unproven, they can hardly be so easily dismissed. That there were illicit goings-on seems certain - even if their details have been difficult to delineate - while one would hesitate to say that certain elements would have stopped at murder. Prominent P2 members had kept coming up in investigations into the neo-fascist group that organized the Bologna Massacre in 1980 - a station bombing which left 85 people dead.

II Papa and the Manias

It hardly helped that the Vatican was so cagy in the days immediately following John Paul's death, even prevaricating over who had found the body - he had died in bed. The fear of salacious innuendo apparently prevented their revealing that his death had been discovered by his female housekeeper, Sister Vincenza Taffarel - a nun who had been brought in, cynics leered, at the request of the late Pope himself.

From 'cherchez la femme' to 'cherchez the feminist': some excitable commentators suggested that the Pope had fallen foul of traditionalists in his Church with his remark that 'God is Father, and, even more, He is Mother'. Most of those who read these words took them to mean, first, that God's love transcends mortal sex-roles, and, second, that he has a 'mother's' gentleness, but some took it to represent the embrace of a revolutionary new gynotheology, replacing God with a Goddess. John Paul didn't live long enough to spell his meaning out.

In the Firing Line

John Paul I's successor, Poland's Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, paid him the compliment of taking his name as John Paul II. By contrast, his was to be one of the longest ever papacies. It was very nearly cut abruptly short, however, when, while riding in his 'popemobile' through a crowded St Peter's Square, on 13 May 1981, he was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman. The Pope was critically injured but managed to survive.

John Paul II had become a figurehead for the freedom struggle throughout the Iron Curtain countries.    

Ali Agca had a longstanding record as a member of Turkey's ultra-nationalist 'Grey Wolves' group - a quasi-fascist organization with a well-proven readiness to resort to murder when required. Despite his right-wing credentials, Agca's testimony to investigators after his arrest pointed to the involvement of the Bulgarian secret police, and hence in turn to that of their masters in the Soviet KGB, whose interest in seeing the Pope killed or incapacitated was all too clear. John Paul II had become a figurehead for the freedom struggle in his native Poland in particular, and in the Iron Curtain countries more generally.

John Paul subsequently went to see his would-be killer in prison, where he spoke to him 'as a brother', freely forgiving him for his attack. A plot by Islamic terrorists to deploy a suicide-bomber dressed as a priest against the Pope during a visit to the Philippines in 1995 was foiled when the plan was uncovered a few days before. Had it gone ahead, it was to have been followed up with the mass-hijacking of airliners en route from Asia to the United States - with a crash-attack on the CIA's Virginia headquarters rather like those against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11.

John Paul II visited his would-be-assassin Mehmet Ali Agca in prison in Rome.

IN  THE  BOX

MASS MURDERER?

John Paul II's anti-Communist credentials were unimpeachable, one might have thought. His small-c conservatism was also well attested. He was far more indulgent towards those who hankered after the old Latin liturgy of the 'Tridentine Mass' than either of his predecessors had been.

For some, though, he hadn't gone far enough. Followers of the French reactionary rebel Marcel Lefebvre weren't happy that he hadn't done more to rehabilitate their hero. Reviving the Tridentine Mass at the Econe Seminary he had founded near Fribourg, Switzerland, Lefebvre had started ordaining priests. Given that he had effectively established his own church-within-the-Church, it wasn't hard to see why the Vatican had been irked or why even a sympathetic pope like John Paul II might have felt unable to give him more support.

Feelings ran high among the dissidents, and one the Spanish priest Juan Maria Fernandez y Krohn went for the Pope with a bayonet during a visit to Portugal in 1982. In the event he failed to kill John Paul II. Afterwards he told his prosecutors that he had acted to save the Church: he believed that the Pope was a Soviet secret agent.

Ultra-traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre offered a real challenge, even to conservative leaders like John Paul II.

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WE  SEE  THE  DIRTY  DEALINGS  WITH  NATIONS,  WHEN  A  CHURCH  BECOMES  POLITICAL  AS  WELL  AS  THEOLOGICAL.  A  NUMBER  OF  BOOKS  HAVE  BEEN  WRITTEN,  IN  THE  LAST  40  YEARS,  GOING  IN-DEPTH  WITH  THE  POLITICAL  SIDE  OF  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.  SINCE  CONSTANTINE'S  CONVERSION  TO  ROME'S  THEOLOGY (312  OR  SO  A.D.)  MAKING  IT  THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  EMPIRE,  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  HAS  AT  VARIOUS  TIMES  AND  IN  VARIOUS  WAYS,  HOOKED  ARM  IN  ARM  WITH  VARIOUS  NATIONS.  TRUE  SOME  PRIESTS  AND  NUNS  HAVE  FOUGHT  AGAINST  THE  IDEOLOGY  OF SOME  NATIONS,  AND  HAVE  GIVEN  UP  THEIR  LIVES.  INDIVIDUAL  SINCERITY  AGAINST  OUT  AND  OUT  EVIL,  HAS  ALWAYS  BEEN  THERE  IN  THE  ROMAN  CHURCH;  INDIVIDUALS  AND  THEIR  ACTIONS  AGAINST  UNRIGHTEOUSNESS  ON  A  LOCAL  LEVEL  CAN  NOT  BE  STOPPED  BY  THOSE  HIGHER  UP  THE  LADDER  OF  POWER.  CERTAINLY  RESPECT  AND  HONOR  MUST  BE  GIVEN  TO  THEM. MANY  PRIESTS  AND   NUNS  HAVE  BEEN  OF  A  "GOOD  HEART"  TOWARDS  THE  PEOPLE  THEY  SERVED,  AND  HAD  THE  RIGHT  MIND-SET  TOWARDS  WICKEDNESS  AND  UNRIGHTEOUSNESS  AROUND  THEM.

Keith Hunt

DARK  HISTORY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC CHURCH

NOT SO SAINTLY

Any institution that presumes to judge how people live is liable to be judged

itself - and attract harsh criticism if seen to be falling short. The trust the

Church has been accorded, its wealth and worldly power, have brought

immense temptations - which haven't always been resisted.

'You appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypoerisy ...^'

For any Christian, the spectre of the scriptural Pharisee must loom large as a warning of how the appearance of goodness can militate against the reality. The holy hypocrite, following the letter of the law; judging petty transgressions; overvaluing respectability, but lacking the love and commitment that Christ demands ... Jesus' complaint against the teachers who came to try and catch him out in Matthew 15:8 (see also Mark 7:6) echoes the complaint of Isaiah 29:13: 'These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.' Christ was to be echoed in his turn in the words of Pope Francis in a sermon delivered at the Basilica of

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Pope Francis began his reign in March 2013 with a ready acknowledgement that he and his fellow-clergy had fallen badly short of the standards expected of them by their congregations - and by Christ. The Church's reputation had suffered badly in recent times.

WEEELLL……IF  THAT  WAS  FALLING  SHORT  [AND  IT  WAS  INDEED  -  THE  SEXUAL  SCANDALS],  THEN  FALLING  SHORT  DOWN  THROUGH  THE  CENTURIES  WAS  OFF  THE  CHART  IN  FALLING  SHORT  -  Keith Hunt

...... 

St Paul's Outside the Walls, in Rome, just a few weeks after his election in 2013:

'Inconsistency on the part of pastors and the faithful between what they say and what they do, between word and manner of life, is undermining the Church's credibility. Those who listen to us and observe us must be able to see in our actions what they hear from our lips, and so give glory to God!'

How are even the humblest Catholics to encourage others to do right without - at least implicitly - suggesting that they know better and live better than they do themselves? And how are even good Catholics to maintain their Church's dignity when - as, inevitably must happen, human as they are - they fall short of the values they supposedly uphold? And if the best Catholics are prone to fail, what of those who may have more cynically and systematically exploited the power and trust their status in the Church has brought them to advance their careers and further their own selfish designs? Some critics would like us to see hypocrisy as being an essential component of Catholicism - it has certainly sometimes been a 'besetting sin'.

It is an unfortunate stain on the reputation of an institution that has done (and continues to do) an enormous amount of good: the Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of education and healthcare in the world. Heroic efforts, which have largely gone unsung. At times, though - and there have been far too many of these times - positions of power and authority have been abused. The trust earned by so many dedicated men and women has been exploited for vicious ends.

Dirty Linen

Yet even this sort of' 'few bad apples' description doesn't cover the kind of harm that's done when an entire policy is built on unsound social and ethical foundations. Times change, of course, and attitudes with them, but it's hard to claim with any real conviction that, for example, the way the Magdalene Laundries were run was ever justified. These convent homes for 'fallen women' flourished in Ireland (and

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Survivors of the Magdalene Laundries demonstrate outside Ireland's parliament in Dublin, demanding compensation for the thousands who slaved and suffered in what they believe was a lucrative operation.

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elsewhere) from the early nineteenth century, and were not finally closed until late in the twentieth. Prisonlike in their organization and punitive in their ethos, they subjected women to close confinement and a gruelling round of heavy, physical work. Over time, not just prostitutes but abused children and unmarried mothers - sent here by embarrassed families - were incarcerated. Former inmates testified to the sexual, physical and psychological abuse they had sustained in the homes.

Singer Sinead O'Connor recalled that her own treatment had not been directly abusive (she had been given to the care of the nuns by an anxious father, concerned at 'problem' behaviour such as disobedience and petty theft). But she had been horrified to witness a friend's baby being torn from her arms, never to be seen again. And their confinement was cruel in itself. 'We were girls in there, not women, just children really,' she told the Irish Sun:

'And the girls in there cried every day. It was a prison. We didn't see our families, we were locked in, cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood. We were told we were there because we were bad people. Some of the girls had been raped at home and not believed.'

She got a thick string and she tied

it round my neck for three days

and three nights and I had to eat

off the floor every morning.

Survivors described a regime in which they were stripped of their identity and forced into a self-effacing muteness: "I walked up the steps that day', recalled Marina Gambold, in an interview with the BBC decades later, 'and the nun came out and said your name is changed, you are Fidelma, I went in and I was told I had to keep my silence ... I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening. I was starving with the hunger, I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast every morning ... We had to scrub corridors, I used to cry with sore knees, housemaids' knees, I used to work all day in the laundry, doing the white coats and the pleating …" Punishments could be positively sadistic. "One day I broke a cup," Marina Gambold recalled, and the nun said, "I will teach you to be careful". She got a thick string and she tied it round my neck for three days and three nights and I had to eat off the floor every morning. Then I had to get down on my knees and I had to say, "I beg almighty God's pardon, Our Lady's pardon, my companions' pardon for the bad example I have shown.'"

From 1922, at least, the Laundries

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A world away from the cruel drudgery of the Magdalene Laundry 

to which she was sent as a teenager, Sinead O'Connor sings 

in Los Angeles, 2012. With her international profile, O'Connor 

has proven a powerful voice for a community of survivors 

whose complaints were silenced for so long.

A ledger from the Magdalene Laundry at Hyde Park, Dublin, gives a suggestion of the operation's scale. When the scandal broke, it became apparent that the Irish state had been an important client of a business protestors believe to have been a major moneymaker for the Church.

......

had operated under the auspices of an independent Ireland, many of their referrals - and their business contracts - being with the state. An official report compiled by former-senator Martin McAleese agreed that the institutions had been inhumane in their very ethos, but found no evidence to support survivors' claims of abuse. Or that, as many had been suggesting, the Church had made vast profits - however, McAleese concluded that the institutions had barely broken even. Critics have questioned his findings, however, pointing to the cursoriness of his enquiries into the Laundries' accounts and his officials' failure to discuss their treatment with survivors.

Hence the suspicions that the report was, if not actually a whitewash, at best a most half-hearted investigation; hence too the scepticism about Taoiseach Enda Kenny's formal apology to survivors. While lamenting that the Laundries had been a 'national shame', he did so on the basis of a very limited acknowledgement of the scope of a scandal that remains controversial to this very day.

Today we wouldn't even recognize the concept of the 'fallen woman'; 'slut-shaming' is frowned-upon - however widespread it may be. And we'd recoil at the idea that a victim of child sex-abuse should suffer for another's sins. For some, such shifts in Zeitgeist can be seen as accounting altogether for these crimes - if that's what they are: the nuns concerned (the Sisters of Mercy; the Good Shepherd Sisters; the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity) were guilty of nothing more than articulating the prejudices of their time. And up to a point, indeed, that's true: the state support the Magdalene Laundries were afforded would tend to bear this out. As does the existence of a comparable Protestant institution, the Bethany Home in Dublin, about which similar accusations have since

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IN  THNE  BOX

MONEY MAD

There can be big money in poverty - especially where, as in the comparatively compassionate societies of the welfare age, charities can look to governments for financial backing. State funding appears to have been at issue when, in Canada's Quebec province in the 1940s, thousands of orphans in Church-run homes found themselves abruptly reclassified as mental patients. The reason for their recategorization appears to have been a change in the law determining that the care of orphans would thenceforth only receive provincial funding, while healthcare facilities would get funding from the Canadian government.

The 'Duplessis Orphans' - as they have been called, after the provincial premier of the time, Maurice Duplessis - arguably weren't even orphans (as the word is generally understood) to begin with. Most were the children of unmarried mothers, taken into the charge of the authorities. Suddenly, at the stroke of a pen, they were rebranded as mental patients. In addition to intrusive and sometimes painful 'psychiatric' treatments (which included everything from electroconvulsive therapy to lobotomy), many patients were later to complain of having been used as guinea pigs in medical experiments. Some experienced years of hardship, close confinement and physical and sexual abuse. Priests, nuns, psychiatrists and other staff all seem to have been implicated in mistreatment - as, indirectly, has the government of Quebec. In the face of a long and vociferous campaign, it has refused to hold an official inquiry and survivors have dismissed its offers of compensation as derisory.

Sheet or shroud? This statue stands at the site of the old Sisters' of Mercy laundry in Galway City. Attempts have been made to have it moved somewhere less obtrusive: even now, this subject is a sore point for some in Ireland.

IN  THE  BOX

LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR?

Outside the entrance on the Via Carducci, a set of male genitalia in exquisite topiary poked irreverent fun at the proprieties - and more-than-hinted at the delights to be found within.

For the Europa Multiclub in central Rome was the biggest gay bathhouse on the Continent - 'La Sauna Gay n°1' its publicity proclaimed. Punters could come to parties here to 'unleash' or simply relax in its Turkish bath and whirlpools; enjoy a massage; watch porn in company; hang out in a lounge or retire to a private room. Meanwhile, on the floor above, one of the Church's severest critics of homosexuality (or 'unnatural tendencies'), Cardinal Ivan Dias, had his 12-bedroom apartment. The Church in fact owned several properties in the same block, with a total value of £21 million.

The revelation embarrassed the Holy See just when the world's cardinals were gathering for the election that would bring about the elevation of Pope Francis in March 2013.

......

been made. This does, however, seem shaky ground on which to base the defence of a Church that has been so free with its exhortations to individual men and women to take moral responsibility for their actions.

Something Beautiful?

Ever since the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge brought her to the world's attention with his documentary film Something Beautiful for God in 1969, Mother Teresa of Calcutta has been an icon. She died in 1997 and since 2003 has in the eyes of the Church been beatified as the 'Blessed Teresa' - she is halfway to sainthood, in other words. The founder, in 1950, of the Missionaries of Charity, her work in the city now known as Kolkata was deemed so inspiring that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Emblematic of Catholicism's charitable mission in the modern world, she has at the same time inevitably been the test case by which the Church's claims to be a force for good have been assessed. And a great many of her critics have found her wanting. For all her ostentatious humility, this woman dedicated to the service of the 'poorest of the poor' seemed thoroughly at home among the rich and powerful, it was pointed out. And not just the powerful but the poisonous -

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Mother Teresa meets Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, 1997. The Albanian-born nun was a religious icon in her own lifetime. Like the Church she represented, though, she was dogged by controversy: her mission's methods were questionable; its finances obscure; many of her public pronouncements troubling.

I saw children with their mouths

gagged open to be given medicine

their hands flaying in distress

visible testimony to the pain

they were in.

......

men like American Savings & Loan fraudster Charles Keating, whose donations she gratefully received (and refused to return for the benefit of his victims after his conviction), the corrupt British publisher Robert Maxwell and Haiti's cruel and kleptomaniac Duvaliers.

Meanwhile, it was hard for sceptics to see what the supposed beneficiaries of her saintly mission were actually gaining. Describing what he'd witnessed as an undercover observer making a documentary film in Mother Teresa's Calcutta mission, journalist and filmmaker Donal Maclntyre wrote in the New Statesman of disabled children being tied up to stop them straying. Conditions were generally Dickensian:

'I saw children with their mouths gagged open to be given medicine, their hands flaying in distress, visible testimony to the pain they were in. Tiny babies were bound with cloth at feeding time. Rough hands wrenched heads into position for feeding. Some of the children retched and coughed as rushed staff crammed food into their mouths. Boys and girls were abandoned on open toilets for up to 20 minutes at a time ...'

Volunteers, he said, did their best to clean those who'd soiled themselves:

'But there were no nappies, and only cold water. Soap and disinfectant were in short supply. Workers washed down beds with dirty water and dirty cloths. Food was prepared on the floor in the corridor. A senior member of staff mixed medicine with her hands.'

Heroic labours by selfless staff in impossible circumstances? Certainly, but why?, wondered Maclntyre. Thanks to extensive and uncritical coverage in the world media, contributions were flooding in to Mother Teresa's organization week by week, disillusioned former staff reported. The money went straight into international bank accounts.

This seems to have been at least in part a quasi-spiritual decision: God would provide for her patients, Mother Teresa reasoned; he would decide if someone lived or died. She doesn't seem to have believed in investment in modern healthcare technology - at least not for her charitable patients. (She herself had the best the world's prestigious hospitals could provide.) There was, she seems genuinely to have felt, something spiritually purifying in other people's suffering. She didn't even believe in administering painkillers: 'It is the most beautiful gift for a person,' she said, 'that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ.'

Of course, a fiercely spiritual Catholic and a secular liberal do come at questions of life and suffering from very different standpoints. Neither Mother Teresa nor her staff made any secret of their attitudes or showed the slightest shame at their 'exposure'. Which would seem to suggest a clear - if perhaps sadly misguided - conscience. It's difficult to avoid a certain sense of cognitive dissonance here when one finds that the Missionaries of Charity themselves actually welcomed what Maclntyre had intended as a damning documentary - apparently not even registering the critical message of the film. The late Christopher Hitchens, another critic, seems to have been as shocked as he was affronted when Mother Teresa's reaction to his polemical attack on her was insouciantly to 'forgive' him - regardless of whether or not he wanted that.

SO  THE  REST  OF  THE  STORY  ON  "MOTHER  TERESA"  SHOWS  A  MUCH  DIFFERENT  LIGHT;  SHE  HAD  STRANGE  IDEAS  AND  A  SOMEWHAT  TWISTED  MIND-SET…… NOT  THE  RIGHTEOUS  DO-GOODER  IN  ALL  AREAS  OF  HER  LIFE  -  Keith Hunt

SEX   AIDS

Something of the same mutual miscomprehension may be seen in secular society's disagreements with the Catholic Church over abortion: is the foetus a 'human life' or merely a cluster of cells? Those who hold the former position will naturally see abortion-

......

Sisters of the Congregation Missionaries of Charity (Mother Teresa's order) process past a bank in Lucknow. An ironic image, given questions over the poor conditions of their patients, despite the donations to one of the most celebrated institutions in the world.

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on-demand as a murderous 'holocaust' to be stopped at just about whatever cost - a wildly disproportionate reaction for those taking the latter view. The Church's prohibition on artificial forms of birth control is even more incomprehensible to outsiders (and to a great many Catholics in the developed world, where it's much ignored). Committed Catholics angrily reject the suggestion that they are in any sense 'anti-sex', although it's true that the rights and (mostly) wrongs of sex loom large in ethical debates within the Church. For many, the Church's arguments against contraception belong in the same philosophical realm as the late Pope John Paul IPs claim that a man could commit adultery with his wife: ingenious; perhaps even justified - yet fundamentally unconvincing.

If the Church's teaching on birth control is amusing to secular society in the West and exasperating to many Catholics, more serious objections are raised to anti-contraception campaigns in Africa. If we're going to talk about 'holocausts', what of the Church's attempts seemingly to sabotage the fight against AIDS in Africa, where more than a million adults and children die from the syndrome every year?

Catholic campaigns against the use of condoms have cost hundreds of thousands of lives (and counting) in Africa, it's been alleged. The Catholic counterargument - that marital fidelity is best (and that condoms cost lives by encouraging risky behaviour) - is an argument that does not convince many secular commentators.

......

OF  COURSE  SECULAR  SOCIETY  [MUCH  OF  IT]  CANNOT  SEE  ABORTION  ON  DEMAND  IS  A  SIN;  THEY  CANNOT  SEE  LIFE  BEGINS  AT  CONCEPTION  WHEN  A  SEED  MEETS  AND  ENTERS  AN  EGG.  THE  OFFICIAL  CATHOLIC  STAND  ON  BIRTH  CONTROL  IS  WRONG.  PART  OF  THEIR  REASONING  AGAINST  BIRTH  CONTROL  IS  THAT  MORE  CHILDREN  MEANS  MORE  MEMBERS  FOR  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.  THE  OFTEN  QUOTED  "ONON"  WITHDRAWING  AND  THEN  EXECUTION  BY  GOD,  HAS  NOTHING  TO  DO  WITH  BIRTH  CONTROL  -  Keith Hunt

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Reverend Romps

The Church's pious obduracy - if that's what it is - over all things sexual has been thrown into ironic relief by the growing number of priests apparently struggling with their vows of chastity. Or, at least, with the difficulty of keeping their misdemeanors covered up: do we really have a more wayward clergy, or just a less compliant press? Sex scandals are nothing new, of course, but the 'permissive society' of the last few decades has arguably brought greater temptations for nuns and priests.

And, paradoxically, a greater readiness to judge on the part of a public which requires some convincing that clerical celibacy is either genuinely possible or desirable. We may have become slower to shock but we've been quicker to jeer - and arguably less tolerant than we were before. In an age when some degree of sexual repression was widespread, it may have been less difficult to imagine a refusal of sexual activity which didn't itself smack of sexual perversion. Today the choice immediately awakens a suspicion of hypocrisy, perhaps.

It is a suspicion that has been borne out by a succession of stories. Galway's Bishop Casey was found to have been carrying on with American divorcee Annie Murphy in 1992. They'd had a son together, the suddenly loquacious Murphy now revealed - the bishop had tried to get her to put him up for adoption, but she'd refused. Just four years later, Bishop Roderick Wright of Argyll and the Isles in Scotland ran off with Kathleen MacPhee in a humiliating flight from a delighted press, who subsequently learned that 'Roddy' had a 15-year-old son from an earlier romance as well. In 2012, the Bishop of Merlo Moreno, in Argentina,

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 Is the Catholic Church doing the devil's work in southern Africa? Whilst its members battle valiantly against the ravages of AIDS, the hierarchy has been unbending on birth control. Campaigners question how HIV-infection can realistically be contained without the widescale use of barrier contraceptives.

American divorcee Annie Murphy poses with Peter, the son she had in 1974 to Eamonn Casey - by the time the story broke the Bishop of Galway. His disgrace was an early humiliation for an Irish Church which was to see a lot more scandal in the years that followed.

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was caught in compromising photos with a woman he tried to claim was a 'childhood friend'.

By this time, though, such comparatively conventional transgressions had come to seem a lot less compelling to the watching media. In 2005, another Argentinian bishop, Juan Carlos Maccarone, had been precipitated into early retirement by the surfacing of a film that showed him engaging in sexual acts with a 23-year-old man. Four years later, across the River Plate in Uruguay, Bishop Francisco Domingo Barbosa Da Silveira resigned after it was alleged he'd broken his vow of celibacy. Edinburgh's

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Cheerful, brisk and businesslike, Cardinal Keith Patrick O'Brien cuts an impressive figure as he strides across St Peter's Square in 2005. Less than a decade later he was in disgrace, his well-publicized attacks on gay marriage undermined by his admission of having 'fallen short' in his own behaviour.

As a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger had been described, half-fearfully, half-admiringly as 'God's Rottweiler', but he proved much meeker as Pope Benedict XVI. His early abdication is still a mystery: Benedict's health had not been great, but some hinted darkly at political intriguing behind the scenes.

......

Cardinal Keith Patrick O'Brien, who in November 2012 had been awarded the title 'Bigot of the Year' by gay rights charity Stonewall for his condemnation of civil partnerships, gay marriage and - ultimately - anything that might 'facilitate or promote' same-sex relationships, was forced to step down a few months later over allegations of inappropriate approaches to younger priests. He subsequently admitted that there had been 'times' when his sexual conduct had 'fallen short of the standards expected' of him - and not just in his younger days as a priest but in more recent years 'as ... archbishop and cardinal'.

IN  THE  BOX

PERSONA NUN GRATA

Sister Simone Campbell wowed the Democratic National Convention in 2012 with an impassioned plea for progress on ObamaCare (the Affordable Care Act). But the social justice campaigner, who had cut her teeth as a community lawyer, hadn't been such a hit with the hierarchy back in Rome. Sister Simone was regarded as ringleader of a group of American nuns who'd embarrassed both rightwing Republicans and the Church with their outspoken comments on social questions - and their alleged failure to condemn contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage with sufficient force.

………………..

ABORTION  ON  DEMAND  IS  WRONG;  IT  IS  SIN!  BIRTH  CONTROL  IS  NOT  SIN!

THE  BIBLE  MAKES  IT  VERY  CLEAR,  FORNICATION [SEX  BEFORE  MARRIAGE]  IS  SIN;  ADULTERY  [SEX  WITHIN  MARRIAGE  TO  SOMEONE  OTHER  THAN  YOUR  MATE]  IS  SIN;  PRACTICING  HOMOSEXUALITY  AND  LESBIANISM  IS  SIN.  SAME  SEX  MARRIAGE  IS  THEREFOR  SIN.

THE  BIBLE  IS  VERY  CLEAR  ON  THE  ABOVE;  VERY  CLEAR!

THE  PREVIOUS  POPE  [TO  THE  FRANCIS]  SAID  THAT  THE  BIBLE,  NEW  TESTAMENT,  IS  NOT  AGAINST  MARRIAGE  FOR  PRIESTS,  BUT  HE  STILL  THOUGHT  IT  THE  BEST  FOR  THEM  NOT  TO  MARRY,  SO  THEY  COULD  DEVOTE  THEMSELVES  TO  SERVING  THE  PEOPLE  OF  THE  CHURCH,  WITH  FULL  CONCENTRATION,  AND  NOT  HAVE  TO  CARE  ABOUT  A  WIFE  AND  CHILDREN,  THE  TIME  IT  WOULD  TAKE  TO  LOOK  AFTER  THINGS  WITHIN  A  FAMILY  LIFE.

WITH  SUCH  LATTER  THEOLOGY,  WE  SEE  WHY  THERE  HAS  BEEN  SUCH  COVER-UPS  [AND  UN-COVERED-UPS]  CONCERNING  SEXUAL  LAXETY  IN  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.

Keith Hunt

DARK HISTORY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

GIVE ME A CHILD...'

A vast and powerful institution, wily in the ways of the world, the Church

has seen scandals come and go over 2000 years - but can it so easily shrug

off the problems which beset it now?

'Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them!- Matthew 19:14

'Give me a child until he is seven, and I'll give you the man.' The saying is famously attributed to the Jesuits. Unfortunately, it's come to ring so true in such a shockingly unpalatable way that increasingly few parents these days would feel entirely easy trusting any member of the Catholic clergy with their child. Throughout the 1990s the stories came streaming in of physical brutality and - even more disturbing - sexual abuse in countless orphanages, schools and other institutions, all continuing unchecked over several decades.

Gradually, the realization grew that abuse had been brutal and widespread, that it had involved just about every area of Church life and every religious order, and that in some contexts it hadn't been just

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Opposite: Anti-child abuse protesters march with placades in London during the state visit to Britain of Pope Benedict XVI, September 2010. Many critics believed that the Catholic Church were aware of abuse in its institutions but failed to act.

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frequent but systemic. In Ireland, for example, the Christian Brothers topped the table for brutality and sexual abuse; reported cases from their homes in other countries, from Canada to Australia, ran into thousands.

While the perpetrators were individual priests, brothers and nuns, the hierarchy as a whole was implicated - and not just in the technical sense of being responsible for what had happened 'on its watch'. For, time and again, it turned out that victims had tried to speak up, to take their complaints to the Church authorities, only to find themselves flatly ignored - or pressured into silence. The backlash was slow in coming, but devastating once it arrived: child-abuse payouts have bankrupted no fewer than eight US dioceses in the past 20 years.

A Nasty Nazareth

For most lay Catholics - and observers outside the Church - the most shocking thing about the abuse scandals was the unimaginable mismatch between what was being reported and the saintly public image of those involved. Critics who were quick to see corruption and cynicism in the Church's hierarchy

......

An alleged victim of child abuse collapses in distress after being interviewed at a Dublin demonstration. The Church's systematic cynicism in covering up such practices has badly damaged its reputation in an Ireland which always looked on its Catholic clergy with love and trust.

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didn't question the commitment of ordinary priests and nuns. And how could they? These men and women had given up the good things in life for the service of others. They lived poorly and simply - that was plain for all to see.

But did they, wondered some of those they 'helped', take the deprivations of their own lives out of others? 'Looking back,' one former inmate of a Nazareth home told theIndependent on Sunday (16 August 1998), 'I think one of the reasons was that the nuns weren't happy and they decided we damn well weren't going to be either.'

And they duly damn well weren't. Vera Willshire, who lived in the Nazareth Sisters' home in Middlesbrough, northern England, described a regime of unrelenting brutality. 'I was terrified the whole time and never had a happy day', she said. Once in particular, she reported, she had been 'beaten black and blue, so badly I had to stay in the infirmary for five weeks. When I came out I was given a bag of sweets and told to tell no one about what happened. An aunt who came to visit was told I was confined with an infection.'

Bedwetting, Vera said, 'was about the worst thing you could do. The punishment was being forced to stand in front of a nun's cell with the soiled linen on your head or being sat in the galvanized steel bath while two assistants poured buckets of cold water over your head.'

Of course, the more frightened and traumatized children were, the more they wet their bed. 

Commissioned by the government of Queensland to look into abuse accusations against the sisters in that state, Professor Bruce Grundy found evidence of 'ruthless and sadistic madness' among the nuns.

Brendan Smyth, the paedophile-priest, leaves Limavady courthouse after being extradited to the Irish Republic to face charges in 1994. He is believed to have molested well over 100 children in his time, shielded from justice by the hierarchy of the Church.

The punishment was being forced

to stand in front of a nun's cell with

the soiled linen on your head or

being sat in the galvanized steel bath

while two assistants poured buckets

of cold water over your head.

Priest  and  Paedophile

Among the most notorious cases was that of Belfast-born Father Brendan Smyth. Between the 1940s and 1990s, he molested over 100 children. His victims included both boys and girls in a succession of parishes, first in his home city and then in Dublin and in various parts of the United States. His superiors in the Norbertine order, although well aware of his proclivities from early on, contrived to conceal his crimes. Rather than reporting him, they moved him on from parish to parish - where each time he was welcomed by unsuspecting churchgoers, old and young. The wider Church was implicated, the hierarchy having repeatedly turned a deaf ear to complaints by one of Father Smyth's Norbertine colleagues.

By the 1970s, the offences still continuing, further action had to be taken. Two teenage boys with complaints against the priest were allowed to bring them forward at a special hearing at their school, St Patrick's College, Cavan - but then bullied into signing oaths of silence on the matter. Smyth was free to re-offend - and his superiors to continue with their cover-up. Father Smyth was finally arrested in 1991 in Northern Ireland but jumped bail and spent three years as a fugitive in the Republic. (The widespread suspicion that the Fianna Fail-Labour government there was deliberately obstructing an extradition request from the authorities in the North caused deep disgust and, eventually, the coalition's fall.) Finally, having served three years in Ulster's Magilligan prison, he was taken to the Curragh Prison, outside Dublin, where - a year into a 12-year sentence - he collapsed and died.

Only after this did Cardinal Sean Brady, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, admit that - as a young priest and professor at St Patrick's - he himself had been among those present at the 1975 tribunal. He claimed that he had seen no reason to bring the case to the attention of the secular authorities. No action was taken against him by the Catholic Church even then, although for many months that followed he was forced to dodge doorstepping reporters outside his Dublin residence. As of the autumn of 2013, indeed, he remains in office.

For the Church's critics, the bland complacency of the hierarchy has been as shocking as the abuse itself. The cliche has it that the cover-up is worse than the crime, but here in truth it's hard to tell the two apart. By conspiring to conceal those sexual assaults that were brought to its attention, the Church allowed further offences to take place. More than that, it arguably encouraged them: the policy of moving a paedophile priest on to a new parish once he'd been reported guaranteed him a fresh flock where no one could have been forewarned.

A New Persecution?

Has the Church had an unfair press? Its most indefatigable supporters would like us to think so - although, even among avowed Catholics, such defenders are comparatively few and far between. There is a case, if not for the defence, at least for the suggestion that the Church has by no means been uniquely at fault in protecting child abuse, and that it certainly hasn't been as bad as it's sometimes been painted. The last few decades have seen accusations of sexual abuse from a bewildering range of different state-run and private institutions, from playgroups and remand homes to youth sports teams and the

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IN  THE  BOX

THE POPE AND THE PULITZER

The scandal of clerical child abuse may well be as old as the Church, and there's no particular reason to assume it's been worse in one place than it has been in another. That the story first broke in the United States was perhaps inevitable, though: loyal Catholic commentators were to blame that country's tirelessly inquisitive, irreverent media, and its traditions of public litigiousness and anti-Catholicism for the furore surrounding a series of exposes in the Boston Globe in 2002.

In doing so, they were clearly blaming the symptoms rather than the cause, but there's no doubt that the American media and political culture was one in which all these things were present. It was, moreover, a culture in which a public apology and a show of breast-beating has been shown to work wonders, but this wasn't the Catholic Church's way of doing things. Instead, the Vatican greeted the Globe's revelations - rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize - with a stubborn silence.

Activists in Los Angeles hold up quits decorated with pictures off those who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of the city's priests. Despite paying out over $600 million in compensation, critics claim the archdiocese is concealing other incriminating documents.

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BBC. Have Catholic homes and schools been so different? And have priests been so much worse? Men in positions of authority - from the Church to the judiciary, taking in teachers, the police and the medical profession - have historically been prone to take advantage of their power. The risks of abuse are enormous - and enhanced by the tendency of the institutions within which all these abusers work to see off threats to their prestige by closing ranks and covering up.

There may well be a degree of truth in the suggestion that the relative scale of the Church's problems have been exaggerated - mythologized even. Certainly, the institution itself seems awesome and mysterious in the context of a non-Catholic culture - an effect intensified by its own resistance to any sort of transparency. Even Catholics feel that, as individuals, they're at the periphery of an unimaginably far-reaching organization: it's hard to imagine a Da Vinci Code set among Anglicans or Reform Jews. In one sense it may have suited the Church that neither Pope John Paul II nor Benedict XVI were ever directly and definitively implicated in the scandal - but in the absence of a clear chain of accountability, they couldn't convincingly be cleared either. At the same time, as vast as it is, the Church seems monolithic; easy to identify (and, consequently, sue), whereas the word 'Protestantism' represents any number of independent churches and tiny sects.

Losing Faith

Whatever the reason, the mud has stuck. As early as 2002, 64 per cent of those responding to a poll commissioned by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News were agreeing that Catholic priests abused children 'frequently'. This despite the fact that a range of authoritative US bodies - from children's charities to the insurance industry - could find no significant difference in the rate of abuse between priests and Protestant clergy (or comparable figures, such as rabbis). Nor, according to more rigorous surveys (most notably one by the independent researchers of Philadelphia's John Jay Institute), was there any difference between the rate of offending between the Catholic Clergy and men in general.

Just how reassuring should we find this, though? Shouldn't Catholic priests be better than men in

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When trust goes, it goes completely, Bishop Wilton Gregory finds, addressing an incredulous press corps for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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general? Don't such defences rest on precisely the sort of 'moral relativism' the Church and its supporters are supposed to scorn?

And, granting that Christ asked us to love the sinner, would he have wanted his legacy on Earth to be an institution which, by covering up for him, connived in the sinner's crimes? And which, by its systematic refusal to examine its collective conscience, let evil thrive and suffering continue among the innocent and vulnerable children in its charge. 'Truly I tell you,' Christ was to remind his disciples in Matthew (25: 31), 'Whatever you did to the least of my brothers, you did to me.'

IN  THE  BOX

THE  EMBITTERED  ISLE

Back in 1984, it is estimated, 90 per cent of Ireland's people regularly went to mass. If you chose not to, you were regarded with suspicion. By 2011, in contrast, only an ageing 18 per cent were regular attenders. Now, it seemed, the stigma was attached to going. An international poll of 2012 found fewer than half of its Irish respondents prepared to describe themselves as 'religious' - 47 per cent, compared to 69 per cent just seven years earlier.

How far the blame for this precipitous decline can be lain at the doorstep of Father Smyth's presbytery or Cardinal Brady's residence is hard to know for sure: we should be wary of reading too much into anecdotal evidence, however vivid. Church attendance has been declining across the Western world for many years, a function (arguably) of everything from expanding education to televised football, from changing family structures to DIY. Apathy is one thing, though; outspoken atheism another: Ireland is now among the world's most godless countries. Ten per cent of the population were prepared to describe themselves as 'convinced atheists'. Again, the contrast with the situation just seven years earlier was stark - then only three per cent would have claimed this status. Few commentators doubt that the child-abuse scandal has transformed attitudes to the Church in what was once the world's 'most Catholic country'.

Pope Benedict XVI addresses an emergency meeting of senior Irish clergy at the Vatican in the wake of an ever-growing and seemingly never-ending child-abuse scandal which had thrown this most Catholic of countries into a deep crisis of faith.

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THE  END

CONCERNING  THE  POPULARITY  OF  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH:  THE  PRESENT  POPE  FRANCIS  IS  MAKING  HUGE  STRIDES  TO  POPULARIZE   HIS  CHURCH.  HIS  HUMILITY  IN  LIFE  STYLE;  HIS  FRIENDLINESS;  HIS  WARM  SMILE;  HIS  OPEN  "POPE-MOBILE"  AND  HIS  WILLINGNESS  TO  GO  TO  THE  CROWDS  TO  TOUCH  AND  BE  TOUCHED,  IS  "BRINGING  THE  HOUSE  DOWN"  AS  THE  SAYING  GOES.  WILL  IRELAND  CHANGE  BACK  TO  ROMAN  CATHOLICISM?  MAYBE,  ONLY  TIME  WILL  TELL.  THE  FIRST  VISIT  OF  A  POPE  TO  THE  USA,  AND  SPEECHES  BEFORE  CONGRESS  AND  THE  UNITED  NATIONS,  WAS  GREETED  WITH  ENTHUSIASM  AS  LIKE  A  "ROCK  STAR"  OR  "FILM  STAR"  -  I  THINK  IT  TOOK  THE  PRESS  AND  TV  NEWS  STATIONS   BY  SURPRISE.  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLICS  OF  THE  USA   ARE  A  GROWING  POPULATION.

SO  COMING  BACK  TO  ALL  THESE  STUDIES:  SURELY  THE  READER  WILL,  IF  THEY  HAVE  READ  THEM  ALL,  AND  MEDITATED  UPON  THEIR  DARKNESS,  SEE  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CLAIM  TO  BE  "GOD'S  TRUE  CHURCH  ON  EARTH"  WITH  THE  POPE  AS  THE  NEAREST  THING  TO  GOD  ON  EARTH,  IS  FAR  FROM  THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MATTER!!

WITH  ALL  THAT  RECORDED  HISTORY  SHOWS  US,  DECLARES  TO  US,  SURELY  IT  IS  PLAIN  TO  SEE,  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC CHURCH  HAS,  EVEN  FROM  THE  DAYS  OF  THE  FIRST  APOSTLES,  BEEN  THOSE  WHO  "WENT  OUT  FROM  US"  AS  IT  IS  WRITTEN,  AND  FORMED  AN  EVER  INCREASING  THEOLOGY  THAT  WAS  ANYTHING  BUT  THE  FAITH  ONCE  DELIVERED  TO  THE  SAINTS.

THE  NEW  CORRUPT  AND  FALSE  THEOLOGY  THAT  CAME  AS  THE  ROMAN  CHURCH  INCREASED,  IS  BAD  ENOUGH  ALL  BY  ITSELF,  BUT  THE  PHYSICAL  AND  EMOTIONAL  ABUSE [WHICH  IS  HARD  TO  WRAP  YOUR  HEAD  AROUND  BEING  SO  VILE  AND  HORRIFIC]  IS…. WELL….  DIFFICULT  TO  PUT  INTO  WORDS,  BECAUSE  OF  ITS  STARK  HORRIBLENESS.

TRULY  THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  CANNOT  BE  GOD'S  TRUE  CHURCH  ON  EARTH;  WHICH  LEAVES  YOU  THEN  WITH  ONLY  ONE  OTHER  ALTERNATIVE  AS  TO  WHO  REALLY  CONTROLS  THE  ROMAN  CHURCH…… TWO  GUESSES  AND  THE  FIRST  ONE  DOES  NOT  COUNT!!

Keith Hunt