Posted on 07/25/2008 6:09:41 AM PDT by NYer
It is finished.
I wonder how many of our Catholic friends have heard of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215? This is the event where many of their important dogmas were codified, including the ideas of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, that the Eucharist was the sacrament that only properly ordained priests of the Catholic church could give, and that the Jews were a pariah people, who could hold no public office, had to pay a special Jew tax for their right to exist, and were required to wear special clothing to distinguish them from Christians. The yellow badge marking the Juden was not an invention of the Nazis, but a decree by faithful Catholics in the Middle Ages. That's an interesting juxtaposition, that a symbol of Christian exceptionalism was formalized at the same time that they formally decreed the Jews to be inferior, and a target of hatred.
That combination was useful, too. Declare something cheap, disposable, and common to be imbued with magic by the words of a priest, and the trivial becomes a powerful token to inflame the mob — why, all you have to do is declare a bit of bread to be the most powerful and desirable object in the world, and even if it isn't, you can pretend that the evil other is scheming to deprive the faithful of it. Now you could invent stories of Jews and witches taking the communion host to torture, to make Jesus suffer even more, and good Catholics would of course rise in horror to defend their salvation. None of the stories were true, of course — Jews and infidels see no power at all in those little crackers, and the idea that they were obsessing over obtaining a non-sacred, powerless, pointless relic is ludicrous — but heck, it's a cheap excuse to make accusations illustrated by cheesy woodcuts of hook-nosed Jews hammering nails into communion wafers and lurid tales of blood-spurting crackers and hosts that pulsed like and beating heart, and thereby providing a pretext to encourage massacres.
The first recorded accusation was made in 1243 at Berlitz, near Berlin. As a consequence all the Jews of Berlitz were burned on the spot, which was subsequently called Judenberg. Another famous case that took place in 1290, in Paris, was commemorated in the Church of the Rue des Billettes and in a local confraternity. In 1370 in Brussels, the charge of host desecration, long celebrated in a special fest and depicted in artistic relics in the Church of St. Gudule, led to the extermination of the Jews of the city. The case of 1337, at Deggendorf, still celebrated locally as "Deggendorf Gnad", led to a series of massacres across the region. In 1510, at Knoblauch, near Berlin, 38 Jews were executed and more expelled from Brandenburg. The alleged host desecration in 1410, at Segovia, was said to have brought about an earthquake, and as a result, the local synagogue was confiscated and leading Jews were executed; the event continues to be celebrated as a local feast of Corpus Christi. Similar accusations, resulting in extensive persecution of Jews, were brought forward in 1294, at Laa, Austria; 1298, at Röttingen, near Würzburg, and at Korneuburg, near Vienna; 1299, at Ratisbon; 1306, at St. Pölten; 1325, at Cracow; 1330, at Güstrow; 1338, at Pulkau; 1388, at Prague; 1399, at Posen; 1401, at Glogau; 1420, at Ems; 1453, at Breslau; 1478, at Passau; 1492, at Sternberg, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin; 1514, at Mittelberg, in Alsace; 1558, at Sochaczew, in Poland. The last Jew burned for stealing a host died in 1631, according to Jacques Basnage, quoting from Manasseh b. Israel. Casimir IV. of Poland (1447).
That is the true power of the cracker, this silly symbol of superstition. Fortunately, Catholicism has mellowed with age — the last time a Catholic nation rose up to slaughter its non-Christian citizenry was a whole 70 years ago, after all — but the sentiment still lingers. Catholicism has been actively poisoning the minds of its practitioners with the most amazing bullshit for years, and until recently, I had no idea that a significant number of people actually believed this nonsense, or that the hatred was still simmering there, waiting for an opportunity to rise up in misplaced defense of absurdity.
All of the regular readers have seen it — thousands of mindless comments by Catholics, demanding that no harm come to a cracker. My email is melting down with swarms of insults, threats, pleas, and promises of prayers because I threatened to violate one of their holy crackers. In my years of loud and often inflammatory blogging, it is the most impressive demonstration of mass lunacy I have ever seen.
Mark Sutton is representative of the majority of my email. No threats, at least, but instead he simply takes for granted an astonishing piece of insanity.
Professor Myers,
I was saddened to hear of your plans to harm our Lord Jesus Christ.
It obviously isn't the first time and it won't be the last.
I know you do not believe, but what if it truly is Jesus that you are attempting to hurt?
You are in my prayers.
You would not believe how many people are writing to me, insisting that these horrible little crackers (they look like flattened bits of styrofoam) are literally pieces of their god, and that this omnipotent being who created the universe can actually be seriously harmed by some third-rate liberal intellectual at a third-rate university (the diminution of my vast powers is also a common theme).
Jim Nicholson cranks up the crazy even more. Not many accused me of being a freemason — I've got lots that call me a Jew, which is illuminating given the history of this issue — and I cringe at the thought of a circumcised heart. But yeah, this kind of angry rant is fairly common, too.
You must be the devil himself as even he knows the power in the Holy Eucharist (don't you dare disparage the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by calling Him Who died for you a cracker!). You must be a freemason, or just a very sick man who needs healing and believe me, I will pray for your conversion. Pray you live to see that day so you can ask Him to forgive you and your uncircumcised heart. Just the mere thought of desecrating the Holy Eucharist is enough to get one into hell, but, maybe that is, for now, the horrible place you are aiming for. I dare you to read about Our Lady of Fatima and the accounts of hell as the three children saw, then, maybe you will change you sick mind. God forgive you. However, it was great that you got many people praying for your conversion since you showed the world how sick you are, and maybe God will convert your hard heart. Pity you. From a lay evangelist who prays for you and the rest of this sick world of secular humanists.
Another common theme has been the attempt to turn away the desecration of a Catholic symbol into the desecration of an Islamic symbol. Obviously, it's not desecration they find disagreeable — it's the idea that someone would offend their weird sectarian sensibilities. Here's one from Jack Isaacks that fits the mold.
Dear Professor Meyers,
If you REALLY want to do a courageous, revolutionary act, defecate publicly on a copy of the Quran.
Or do you have the cojones?
Christians won't attack you for desecrating a host, but will those wonderful cuddly peace-loving Muslims be as forbearing if you used their book for a toilet?
Well, how brave are you?
Yeah, right. Catholics won't attack me, but Muslims will. Never mind that the Catholic League demands that I be fired, thousands of Catholics write to me demanding I be kicked out of the university immediately, and that they send me death threats, both the explicit kind and the vaguely menacing kind. Let's not forget Webster Cook, who started this all by simply walking back to his seat with a cracker, and now faces censure and possible expulsion from his university. Oh, those Catholics sure are forbearing and tolerant.
And since I mentioned yesterday that I was taking my oldest son to the movies, these good Catholics have leapt to the opportunity. Since I'm not demonstrating any fear over their threats against me, well hey, let's try a new target! KJ Atkins of Bellarmine University thinks cowardly warnings against my family might be effective.
You fool, the vengeance for your sacrilege will not be . exhausted against you, but it will be carried out on your child. Wait and see.
Oh, I'm sorry, KJ. I'm only impressed by significant material concerns, and yours and other slanders against my family (I'm looking at you, Miki Tracy, the despicable person who thinks making up lies about my father might be persuasive) are not going to convince me of anything other than that religion breeds the most disgustingly vile haters in our country, and that Catholicism fits right in with the rest. I will note, however, that since Bill Donohue tried to get CAIR to join him in his crusade, I have gotten no email from outraged Muslims, over a span of time in which I've received thousands of Catholic hate mail messages.
If you want to see the deep danger of religion, you have to read this comment from Isaac.
As a Christian it is an insult for anyone to call my beliefs stupid shit. I have respected every religion and every idea for years.
Ah, what a beautiful illustration of the complete open mind — utterly undiscriminating, lacking any criteria for acceptance, simply blissfully and uncritically according every idea his full respect. Although, of course, it's also a lie: Isaac does not regard every idea as equally deserving, since he clearly considers the atheist idea that the sacraments of his faith are empty foolishness to be an outrage. Rather, what he loves is the idea that everyone else must respect his beliefs, no matter what they are, and that any disagreement is an insult. This is exactly the kind of uncritical, unskeptical, nonjudgmental idiocy all religions seek to promulgate, because they all know that if we tore off the blinders of tradition and artificiality and mindless etiquette, we'd see right through their lies. Respect every idea! Especially mine! And if you find the idea that this cracker is a god stupid, why, you must be disrespectful and no gentleman!
For even deeper inanity, let's not forget the Catholic blogs! We're talking some serious derangement there: look at Mark Shea's reaction.
I won't mince words. Myers is an evil man. And as evil men, particularly evil intellectuals, tend to be, he is also a mad man as are most of his acolytes and followers.
Myers and Co. are enmeshed in these lies because they have chosen evil. It is evil--archetypally evil--to desecrate the Eucharist. It's the sort of stuff archetypal bad guys in the movies do. It's completely unnecessary gratuitous evil.
To the Mark Shea's of the world, I would say…it's just a cracker.
I think if I were truly evil, I would have to demand that all of my acolytes be celibate, but would turn a blind eye to any sexual depravities they might commit. If I wanted to be an evil hypocrite, I'd drape myself in expensive jeweled robes and live in an ornate palace while telling all my followers that poverty is a virtue. If I wanted to commit world-class evil, I'd undermine efforts at family planning by the poor, especially if I could simultaneously enable the spread of deadly diseases. And if I wanted to be so evil that I would commit a devastating crime against the whole of the human race, twisting the minds of children into ignorance and hatred, I would be promoting the indoctrination of religion in children's upbringing, and fomenting hatred against anyone who dared speak out in defiance.
I'm sorry to say that I only aspire to be a teeny-tiny bit evil, and my target is a handful of virtually inedible crackers in my possession. It's not much, and all I can say in my defense is…it's a start. A very small start. I'm going to need lots and lots of people to rise up and follow suit, subjecting old, dishonest institutions of hardened dogma to our chief weapon of ridicule and deris…our two weapons of ridicule, derision and laughter…no, three weapons of ridicule, derision, laughter, and skeptici…oh, never mind. You know what I mean. Get to work.
OK, time for the anticlimax. I know some of you have proposed intricate plans for how to do horrible things to these crackers, but I repeat…it's just a cracker. I wasn't going to make any major investment of time, money, or effort in treating these dabs of unpleasantness as they deserve, because all they deserve is casual disposal. However, inspired by an old woodcut of Jews stabbing the host, I thought of a simple, quick thing to do: I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus's tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel. My apologies to those who hoped for more, but the worst I can do is show my unconcerned contempt.
By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
Now we get to the source of his depravity.
What will he have to say on the day of his judgement?
For a perfesser he sure don’t write like he is edumacated.
The Fourth Lateran Council did not declare Jews pariahs, it did not impose a tax on Jews and it did not exclude Jews from all public offices.
And Myers ignores the contemporary political situation that this Council took place in.
In 1215 Europe, there were Christians, Jews and Muslims almost all of whom lived under the rule of Christian monarchs or officials.
The Christians lived under public law, common law and canon law. The Jews lived under public law and Torah law. The Muslims lived under public law and sharia law.
Many monarchs wanted to impose Christian laws on Jews and Muslims and eliminate their own community laws.
The Church took a middle ground: Jews and Muslims would not be forced to enforce public law within their communities where it conflicted with their community's laws - for example, in the matter of divorce, which was not permitted by public law but was a common enough phenomenon and legal in the Jewish and Muslim communities.
The Church's position was that if Christian authorities were to be forbidden to impose upon internal matters in the Jewish and Muslim communities, then the people who were exempt from having Christian laws enforced within their community would not be allowed to enforce laws over Christian communities.
This was the modus vivendi that the Church worked out to prevent violence between the communities.
I think this is an obscure and not particularly bright college professor who has never been able to catch the attention of anyone other than those who depend on him for a passing grade. He has now found a way to get his 15 minutes and be taken seriously. All this attention being paid to his “stunt” has played right into his hands. He is a mediocre, nasty piece of work who entertains himself by insulting other people’s fondly held beliefs. Not an original thought in his head. Not much of a man, really, or a scholar.
There were also various systems of dress denoting rank, etc. - medieval Europe was a very status-conscious society. A commoner could not wear a sword, or purple, in many jurisdictions for example.
In medieval Europe you did not just pick an outfit in the morning from your closet randomly like we do today.
Someone who dressed like a knight who was not a knight was considered to be perpetrating a fraud and could find his life in danger. Likewise, a clergyman who dressed like a clergyman when he wanted to enjoy clerical privileges and then dressed like a layman when he wanted to enjoy lay prerogatives was in trouble.
Likewise a Jew who wanted to dress one way in the Jewish community and then another way in the Christian community was also considered a fraud and might wind up causing a dangerous and destabilizing riot in either community.
Few people realize how much the social order of medieval Europe was dependent on such details.
Then I suppose you two would get along swimmingly.
I very much appreciate your historical commentary.
By the way, I didn’t want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur’an and The God Delusion.
From this statement I gather that he is trying to blame the Holocaust on Catholics. Number one the Holocaust was instituted by Nazi Germany a fact even an Associate Professor should know. Nazis were anti-Catholic and Germany predominately Lutheran (with a large Catholic minority).
The Nazi leadership was Occultist. .
Trying to blame the WW II Holocaust of the Jews on Catholics who were among the greatest protectors of Jews is the worst kind of revisionism.
Certainly the Catholics have a great deal of history to be ashamed (as do all peoples, there are no saintly people in all of human history) of but at least try to get the most resent of history correct.
Is that why Canons 78 and 79 made Jews and Muslims dress different from Christians - for law enforcement matters?
(curious, not criticizing)
I really enjoy commentary such as the posts you have put up here. Thanks.
We need to post this Koranic desecration to every single radical jihadist on youtube.com
This vile hateful guy wants attention.
So let’s give it to him.
Information and links to:
1 jihadis on youtube
2 CAIR and various other muslim aclu type groups
3 muslim media within us
4 muslim media external to us
I’m starting with youtube lol.
Canon 68. In a sense, yes.
To give more detail: in medieval Europe the legal and political system was extremely convoluted.
In modern America, participation in political life is a matter of citizenship - you are either a citizen or you aren't. Moreover, there is only one supreme political authority in the US: the federal government in consequence of the Constitution's supremacy clause.
In medieval Europe participation was a matter of allegiance and community, not just citizenship. Different legal systems and jurisdictions existed side by side in a landscape that was divided into thousands of tiny princedoms, dukedoms, commonwealths, free cities, etc.
If you lived in a jurisdiction ruled by a baron but which was also part of the diocese of an archbishop and you committed a crime, you might turn yourself in to the archbishop, hoping that his canonical court proceedings would be more merciful than the common law court proceedings of the baron. Or vice versa. The baron would probably defer to someone as authoritative as an archbishop since the archbishop quite likely was a member of the council of the baron's boss, the king. Or maybe he and his brother barons had had it with the current occupant of the throne and were backing a dynastic rival and were looking for an excuse for mayhem.
There were constant disputes over which system of law applied to whom for what reason. These disputes could spill over into the streets: the wronged party might be a member of a guild or a religious order whose members might take to the streets or exert economic pressure to protest what they considered a violation of their rights or privileges.
In an age without police or any kind of organized law enforcement, the act of overstepping social or legal boundaries usually precipitated a riot or a vendetta which called for a military response, perhaps by several rival militaries.
Things could become a bloody mess very quickly.
Thank you for reading it.
Thanks very much for the clarification.
In 1215 the need for a more organized legal system was deeply felt and the European legal system was in flux.
The Canon law of the Church had not yet been codified into a single system at all - only around the 1180s had church lawyers begun the arduous task of collecting up every different ecclesiatical legal finding made over the past centuries and collating them into some kind of logical order, thanks to the genius of Gratian.
Likewise in the middle 1100s European governments had just started trying to conform their laws to the old law code of the Byzantine Roman Empire (Justinian's Code) as a remedy for the legal confusion of the public courts. The University of Bologna, the world's first university, was founded in 1088 for the express purpose of training legal scholars to help resuscitate the Civil Law of Rome for use in governing the Empire.
The first two points are more or less true. But almost every source I can find disagrees with that last bit.
The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215
CANON 69
Summary. Jews are not to be given public offices. Anyone instrumental in doing this is to be punished. A Jewish official is to be denied all intercourse with Christians.
Text. Since it is absurd that a blasphemer of Christ exercise authority over Christians, we on account of the boldness of transgressors renew in this general council what the Synod of Toledo (589) wisely enacted in this matter, prohibiting Jews from being given preference in the matter of public offices, since in such capacity they are most troublesome to the Christians. But if anyone should commit such an office to them, let him, after previous warning, be restrained by such punishment as seems proper by the provincial synod which we command to be celebrated every year. The official, however, shall be denied the commercial and other intercourse of the Christians, till in the judgment of the bishop all that he acquired from the Christians from the time he assumed office be restored for the needs of the Christian poor, and the office that he irreverently assumed let him lose with shame. The same we extend also to pagans. [Mansi, IX, 995; Hefele-Leclercq, III, 7.27. This canon 14 of Toledo was frequently renewed.]
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html
No "Jew Tax" was demanded by the Council - though Jews who charged excessive interest rates to Christians in financial transactions were ordered to make restitution and were to be compelled to compensate churches for donations that they would otherwise have received from Christians who became indebted by such usury.
CANON 67
Summary. Jews should be compelled to make satisfaction for the tithes and offerings e churches, which the Christians supplied before their properties fell into of the Jews.<.i>
Text. The more the Christians are restrained from the practice of usury, the more are they oppressed in this matter by the treachery of the Jews, so that in a short time they exhaust the resources of the Christians. Wishing, therefore, in this matter to protect the Christians against cruel oppression by the Jews, we ordain in this decree that if in the future under any pretext Jews extort from Christians oppressive and immoderate interest, the partnership of the Christians shall be denied them till they have made suitable satisfaction for their excesses. The Christians also, every appeal being set aside, shall, if necessary, be compelled by ecclesiastical censure to abstain from all commercial intercourse with them. We command the princes not to be hostile to the Christians on this account, but rather to strive to hinder the Jews from practicing such excesses. Lastly, we decree that the Jews be compelled by the same punishment (avoidance of commercial intercourse) to make satisfaction for the tithes and offerings due to the churches, which the Christians were accustomed to supply from their houses and other possessions before these properties, under whatever title, fell into the hands of the Jews, that thus the churches may be safeguarded against loss.
Canon 68, incidentally, barred Jews and Muslims from appearing in public at all - regardless of dress - on certain Christian holidays.
PZ Myers is still a complete ass, however.
Judging from what he wrote, it would seem he has a personal grudge against the Catholic Church, that is based on a great misunderstanding. I have every confidence that someone will charitably point out the gross errors in the poor judgment that resulted in his act of desecration. Until then, as christians, we must follow the example of our Lord and say: "Father forgive him for he knows not what he does".
I believe you are absolutely right. He also has some seriously false understandings of the Catholic Church. If anything, this 'desecration' is a cry for help. I pray that some Catholic scholar can gain his ear and properly educate him on the facts of the Lateran Council. Myers deserves our prayers.
Perhaps wideawake can correct me or add more detail (whichever!), but IIRC at the time, Christians were not allowed to lend at interest at all, so Jews pretty much had the money-lending market cornered.
If you think about it, he holds nothing “sacred”...except HIS conception of reality, that is. That conception is totally sacred and irrefutable.
Interesting dichotomy, what?
I am praying for him. I really am.
Frank
Lending at interest was generally forbidden to Christians - however, there were loopholes.
For example the montes pietatis were Christian institutions that operated like pawnshops and effectively made secured loans at interest.
There was also currency arbitrage used to conceal interest, etc.
Usury was a problem in the medieval period because only certain people were allowed to charge interest - and because the credit market was so restricted, so undeveloped, and because risks were so much more concentrated then, effective rates of interest were upwards of 20-30% in general.
That was a fair price, given the risks, but it was considered grounds for murder and pillage back then.
Thanks!
Oh dear God.
Can anyone get to his trash and retrieve the host? I hope. This is terrible.
"Nothing is sacred" or "all morality is relative" or any of a number of other shibboleths of the secular left are classical examples of the fallacy of special pleading.
I’ll bet trashing the Koran gets PZ fired after all.
Spot on, old friend!
F
I already took care of Cair.
There are so many radical jihadi and linked organizations on youtube, that it is disgusting.
Good work, I think I’ll see if I can track down an Islamic Student group on campus and make sure he gets attention with them as well.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.