Filum Romanum - A Thread for the Catholic Church

it's like blaming the vatican for the actions of, say, the Spanish inquisition. Which was, you know, Spanish.

I'm baaaaaaack

That never stopped the English.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Was the Spanish Inquisition condemned for opperating under the mantle of the RCC? If not then the Vatican indeed shares responsibility.

The Spanish Inquisition was mostly an arm of the monarchs of Castile and Aragon (later merged into Spain); the Catholic Church was complicit in it to a degree though some of the excesses were condemned or frowned upon.

Of course trying to go over the heads of powerful monarchs didn't always go well for the Papal State, look what happened with Henry the 8th. The Spanish had too much power and had done too much for the Catholic Church for the Pope to reign in the Inquisition.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Kicking the Church out seems to have worked rather well for us in the long run, especially if one considers the French and Spanish examples. That said, it could have been done rather less brutally.

edited 16th Sep '14 6:19:57 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Then again, there was a type of Celtic Christianity around before the Roman Catholic Church.

Keep Rolling On

Did you actually read the article you linked?

Emphasis added to make a point.

Any concept of Celtic Christianity was merely a regional variant on Western European Christianity that became the Roman Catholic Church during the Great Schism that split it off from what are now called the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

It was an important variant with a distinct impact on history.

@Antiteilchen- You listen to people talk about it and it's always an example of how bad the Catholic church is when it had no more control over the matter than the US government does over the actions of individual police officers.

Everybody had their own traditions and practices that went along with the church, but it still remains part of the overall church.

I'm baaaaaaack

Kicking the Catholic Church out of England may have benefited the English in the long run, but certainly didn't help the anti-Irish sentiment (never mind that the English converted Ireland to Catholicism in the first place)...

Somehow you know that the time is right.

The abuse and racism of the US police force is the responsibility of the US government. Doing something about them is mandatory.

The Spanish Inquisition was not an agency of the Holy See. It was an agency of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and later the Kingdom of Spain. (And the Catholic Church in Spain answered to the throne, not the other way around-hell, by the time of King Philip, the Papacy itself was effectively a Spanish puppet, partly because Italy was a Spanish territory at that point.)

^^ There is no "US Police Force" as such. The various police agencies are departments of towns, cities, municipalities, counties, or the individual states. The closest there is to AUS police is the US Marshals, and they deal only with the federal judiciary (security at the Federal courthouses; fugitives from, and prisoners of, Federal-level courts; and such.) Just so that you know that your analogy was flawed in more than one way.

edited 16th Sep '14 8:07:49 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

But it used the authority of catholic christianity to enact it's policies. It was a religious institution as much as it was a secular one.

Towns, cities, municipalities, counties, and states are part of the US government. They're not part of the federal government but they all together form the political entity of the USA.

Uh... that's completely forgetting just how government worked in Europe at the time, though. <_< It wasn't a case of Church vs State... But Church AND State running things. With the same amount of tension as you'd get between government departments that occasionally overlap.

Catholicism wasn't one, giant megacorp beholden to a single board (although it certainly tried to present that kind of image at the time). But, in reality... think of it as a collection of franchises that could (and often did) argue with Head Office as much as they argued with their various governments.

Trying to apply modern concepts of the boundaries between Church and State is an utter fail when you go to that particular point in time. -_-

Don't fall for the historical hype, OK? Or, you just prove a lot of old Jesuit PR precepts right.

edited 16th Sep '14 8:49:27 PM by Euodiachloris

No, that isn't a flaw in the analogy but an accurate explanation of why the Holy See is not directly responsible for the actions of every group that identifies itself as Catholic.

The Pope is organizationally responsible for all ordained priests, to the same extent that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are responsible for every private in the US Armed Forces. He's also responsible for the Vatican/Holy See's bureaucracy and affiliated organizations, for the Society of Jesus due to its vows, and I'm not sure all of what else. But he's not directly responsible for individual priests (his bishops should be on the ball), he's not responsible for the actions of secular governments, and he's not responsible for the actions of Catholic private citizens.

No, and no. Could the Pope have stopped Spain from using the authority of the Catholic Church even if he had wanted to? No, he couldn't, because the King of Spain, A, wouldn't have to listen (the rulers from Isabella to the Philips controlled their kingdom's churches too tightly), and B, could have deposed him.

And state governments in the US don't answer to the Federal government, at all. Not the same chain of command.

Or that. Much clearer statement on how the Catholic Church worked.

edited 16th Sep '14 8:35:13 PM by Ramidel

I dont know how it works in Ireland, but here in the US each diocese is an independent non-profit organization, chartered by the local state government. From a strictly legal perspective, there is no "Catholic Church". So I dont think you could hold Rome legally liable for damages (believe me, if you could, there are several thousand people who would have sued over the whole child-abuse scandal).

Morally may be another matter. And good PR.

The Vatican doesn't, and really can't, micro manage every group claiming to represent the Catholic Church, even those that include clergy. They can tell them to knock it off, but they can't force them to stop. Especially when it's one of the most powerful catholic nations on earth at the time.

"But it used the authority of catholic christianity to enact it's policies. It was a religious institution as much as it was a secular one."

But you can't blame the Catholic Church for that any more than you can blame any other group that has rouge off-shoots.

edited 16th Sep '14 8:50:51 PM by Joesolo

I'm baaaaaaack

Blaming the RCC for the Spanish Inquisition is only half fair. Now the almost-as-nasty Roman Inquisition, on the other hand...

No argument there. The Spanish Inquisition was a lot better at genocide, though (though I admit that that was probably more a matter of Iberia having a lot more non-Christians than the Papal States).

edited 16th Sep '14 10:05:43 PM by Ramidel

They can order them officially to dissolve, though. The Church did that in the case of the Templars, in 1302; and afterwards in the case of the Jesuits, in 1773 (they were allowed to reform only about forty years later). Any Jesuit or Templar who defied the Church on that would have found themselves punished by the Church in short order, and probably consigned to the secular authorities too (since both suppressions were, at least to some degree, politically motivated too).

Now, the Roman Catholic Church did not control directly the Spanish Inquisition, that's true; but, it seems to me, it did not condemn it with the force it deserved. Yeah, to do so would have caused problems between the Church and the Spanish Monarchy; but, after all, the Church is supposed to stand for justice, not for political expediency, isn't it?

edited 16th Sep '14 10:23:23 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

A data I recall reading about the Spanish Inquisition was that it had a bodycount of two thousand people. Across the same timespan, about sixty thousand were executed for witchcraft in secular courts. The more I read about the Spanish Inquisition, the more it seems blown out of proportion to ridiculous extents.

The Roman Inquisition, on the other hand, feels like typical medieval tyranny, only coming from the Catholic Church rather than a king. Nothing really out of the ordinary.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Kind of hard to expect the Catholic Church to act independently when secular rulers had so much power to meddle with the papal conclaves, and when the Pope also had to be a prince of Italy when most of the peninsula was effectively Spanish territory.

Two thousand dead, and two entire races of people banished from Iberia.

edited 17th Sep '14 12:42:10 AM by Ramidel

True.

But it was also kind of hard for a motley bunch of Jewish "heretics", Roman citizens, slaves and other random-seeming human rabble to keep going on against the opposition of a entity such as the Roman Empire, to keep speaking against injustice, to refuse — steadfastly, and on pain of death — to make even the small concession of making a formal sacrifice to the Emperor's Numen, and to insist, against all sanity, that a largely inconsequential Galilean rabble-rouser who got unceremoniously dispatched after barely three years of activity is the very Lord of Life, to whom Heaven and Earth both bow.

If — as I believe — the Roman Catholic Church is the most rightful successor of that bunch of uncompromising, selfless madmen who fought against the whole world and won, I expect it to behave accordingly. And sadly, in the case of the Spanish Inquisition — as in not a few other instances — its behaviour was definitely not up to scratch.

Admittedly, I don't have much room to criticize, as my overall behaviour is also not particularly close to what should be the Christian ideal. But anyway, I think that we cannot simply absolve the Church for the episode of the Spanish Inquisition — yeah, it was not under its direct control, but it was an atrocity committed in the name of the Church and it should have denounced it as such without hiding cowardly behind political consequences.

edited 17th Sep '14 3:36:08 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Frankly, I'm more concerned about what the RCC does today, as opposed to ancient history. Yes, "condemned to repeat" and all that, but there isnt a single social institution that hasnt done something unforgivable, so I think crimes of the past are best treated as "lessons to be learned from" and move on from there.