Posted on 05/27/2005 8:06:09 PM PDT by murphE
Thomas Woods, author of "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," was online to discuss the book. [snip]
Thomas Woods: Thanks to everyone for being here. I'm pleased that with relatively light publicity thus far, "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" seems to be doing rather well. I enjoyed writing it, and I hope readers profit from it. Now on to the questions.
East Lansing, Mich.:
I have not read your book, but the title is very presumptuous, let alone provocative. (Did you intend for it to be that way?) Many of us who are not Catholic feel that had Catholicism and the Vatican not had a stranglehold on most of European society for two millennia, the world would be better off today. I do not doubt that many thinkers and contributors to Western Civilization were Catholic and some came from e.g., monasteries and the clergy. However, the tenets of the Catholic Church for most of its existence was not toward the encouragement of independent and scholarly thinking. One only need look at the way Jesus is treated by the church to understand this: primary emphasis on his birth and crucifixion/resurrection, with less emphasis on his life and moral teachings.
When there is one dominant organization in society, those who succeed will almost always come with the blessing of that organization. However, one cannot forget the stifling and silencing of others that such an organization can impose and the carnage it can wreck, whether it is the Crusades, the Inquisition, the excommunication of thinkers such as Galileo, and the at best silence of the Vatican and its pope (Pius XII) during the Holocaust. How many people who could have contributed to Western Civilization never did due to such events?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
ping
Another idiot from East Lansing (I know a lot of them. I go to the University there and I'm in the Music School. Talk about a double shot of liberalism...):)
Read the whole thing. Mr Woods handles them all very well.
Sounds like another great book to read. I had heard Woods was working on it, and that presales were doing well. It will be a hoot to see all the bewildered questions like those of the first one out of East Lansing. Poor fellow, having his brains slow-cooked by the historical revisionists all these years.
Where to begin, where to begin... For one, the Church had to focus primarily on the birth and death of Jesus because that is where the devil has focused his principle attacks. There are far more denials of any and all aspects of these two parts of the Divine Life on earth than there are on the rest of His life. Why? Because if the devil can raise doubt regarding the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the Holy Family, he can easily then assault the wedding at Cana or the Sermon on the Mount. Likewise, if he succeeds in refuting the historical conspiracy among the Sanhedrin against Christ to have him crucified, or the humanly impossible endurance of Jesus in the Passion, or the redemption of the world and the saving of many from their sins by His Most Precious Blood on the Cross, he would have much less problem refuting the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the healing of the paralytic or the restoration of health to the ten leppers.
As we have seen, during the past 400 years since Luther started the steady decline of the Faith worldwide, it has been founded on trying to ignore the integrity of these two fundamental events, and focus on the others, in between. And we can see what the consequence is.
A very instructive thread. Thank you murphE!
I have not read your book, but the title is very presumptuous, let alone provocative. (Did you intend for it to be that way?)
DUH!!! OF COURSE HE INTENDED IT THAT WAY!!!!!! whatta maroon.
I have read this book and enjoyed it immensely. And I'll absolutely second previous remarks about the English-speaking historians' view of Catholic Church is distorted through the lens of Gibbon et al.
A colleague of mine, researching the Byzantine period, was reading the standard English works, and kept finding these writers spending a lot of time and energy refuting a "Cardinal Baronius". Turns out he wrote a history of the Church that aimed to refute the Protestant reading of Church history, and was widely reputed even by his enemies to have done a first-rate job of it.
Baronius, as far as we know, has never been translated into English--leaving a gaping hole in English historiography.
Interesting.
Very interesting comment (about Cardinal Baronius).
Anybody remember the Monty Python sketch where a parrot was shown as a newsreader in what was supposed to be an evening news program and announced that "No parrots were killed on the M-3 [referring to a highway in England] today." Unless history relates to us personally, I guess it tends to get lost.
That said, I want to read Woods' book. I think I'm going to freak out my local library by asking them to buy it. I could afford it myself, but I like to request them to buy conservative or Catholic books, since this is an overwhelmingly liberal university town and I believe realizing that there are conservatives here is a true learning experience for them.
I do the same thing!
Dr. Woods, Professor of History at Suffolk College, returns to Catholic Radio to discuss how Saint Benedict and the Benedictine Monks played a critical role in the development of Western civilization in his recently published book:
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
[Venerable] Cesare Baronius
Cardinal, father of modern church history, born Sora, Naples, 1538; died Rome, Italy, 1607. He studied in Rome, became a follower of [St.] Philip Neri, and was ordained, 1564. Upon the foundation of the Oratory, 1575, he moved to Santa Maria in Vallicella, and in 1584 was entrusted with the revision of the Roman Martyrology. His great work, Annales Ecclesiastici, conceived by Philip as a reply to the attempt to Protestantize history in the Centuries of Magdeburg, was published in twelve volumes, 1588-1607. After the appearance of the 11th volume, containing a treatise on the Sicilian monarchy proving the papacy's claim to the suzerainty of Naples and Sicily as prior to that of Spain, the whole work was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. Baronius became superior of the Oratory, 1593, cardinal, 1596, and was named librarian of the Vatican and charged with the Vatican Press, 1597. He received strong support as a candidate for the papacy in the conclaves of 1605. The Annals, largely a chronological table from the birth of Christ to 1198, is marked by diligent research and accuracy, but Baronius's limited knowledge of Latin and Greek, and his use of documents since proved apocryphal, led him occasionally into error. The work, however, is a rich source from which historians have constantly drawn. It was a complete reply to the Centuriators. The history of later periods has been added by other historians. G. Mansi edited the most convenient complete edition, Lucca, 1738-1759; the latest edition (Bar-le-Duc, 1864-1875; continued, Paris, 1876-1883) is incomplete.
Baronius Press, a book publisher based in England, is named after him. They produce several editions of the traditional Douay-Rheims Bible, a Latin Mass Missal, and a travel-sized New Testament with the Psalms.
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