Mr. Donohue needs to read his Church history. I love the Catholic religion....but the history of the Church is horrifying. I rationalize it as the human flaw factor. The true faith has nothing to do with the heinous acts and crimes against humanity of which the men of the Church were horribly guilty.
Yes there were and are some people from the Catholic Church that are evil. You can say the same thing about all of humanity as a whole. And yes it is a human flaw factor that is involved.
I have never nor will I ever say that I am a perfect human being because I am Catholic. To the contrary, I grapple with my demons on a regular basis. The people serving the church are the same. Sometimes we fall.
But to keep holding the church(and that includes worshiper’s like me) accountable for things done in ages past is unfair.
I do not worship Pope Benedict. I do not worship the Bishop’s and the Cardinals, but I do worship Christ as a Catholic. I do not do this because I am ordered to or because I am brainwashed. I can leave at anytime, and choose not to despite the fact that the people running the show at the Vatican are not perfect. They aren’t supposed to be.
Donohue was not addressing all of the church’s dark history. Just the usual lies and garbage spewed about by the haters.
Mr. Donohue did read it...you are the one that has misinterpreted history....in the "progressive" (revisionist) mode.....
Bureaucracies always have corruption and the Catholics had their share. That said, ALL OTHER CULTURES had histories far worse than those governed by the Catholic and Christian countries on the whole. Look at the Mayans or the Aztecs Or the Hindus and the Arabs, Spartans, etc. and you will find far more inhumane practices.
At least the Catholic Church put vast resources into searching for the Truth, throughout history with St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Mendel and the monastery education which had great effect on people like Galileo and Columbus, John Locke, Blackstone and many other famous people and led to the founding of the US--the greatest culmination and philosophical paradigm in the history of the world.
Thus, you could say Catholicism led to the most freedom in the history of the world for every race, including (unheard of ...women, children) than has ever been accorded any peoples in the history of the world.
Without the Catholic paradigm, which all Christianity flowed,thinking would not have evolved--the likes of John Milton, Dostoyevsky, Pascal, Descartes, etc., would never have had the opportunities to develop their thinking and achieve what they did if it hadn't been for the Catholic theology that preceded them.
The Catholic Church had changed the Western Civilization paradigm which produced men like Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, not to mention the architects--it goes on and on and the improvement of Western Civilization by Christian thinking has led to the most productive, loving, self-sacrificing people on the face of the earth.