Diane Moczar > Quotes

“Finally, Galileo did not say “And yet it does move” as he left the courtroom. There is no contemporary record of his saying this; the claim first appears in a book about Galileo written over a century later.1”
― Diane Moczar, Seven Lies About Catholic History

“Individual natural human rights are considered one of the great contributions of the glorious Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, so the professor thought he was on safe ground in asking such a thing of the miserable Middle Ages. Well, what do you know; a few years later, medievalist Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights traced this concept back to medieval philosophers, including St. Thomas Aquinas.”
― Diane Moczar, Seven Lies About Catholic History

“Catholics have always held that the soul is immeasurably more important than the body. Therefore, one who destroys the faith and grace that are the life of the soul is more guilty than one who merely kills the body. For this reasonable attitude there is surely no reason to apologize.”
― Diane Moczar, Seven Lies About Catholic History

“It is ironic that what most interested Greek and Christian scholars was the true purpose of things — the ultimate Why — while contemporary thinkers are either totally uninterested in such questions or think that qua scientists they have no business thinking about them. The modern scientific mind, in fact, denies the reality of any nonmaterial cause and is thus reduced, should it be interested in final causality at all, to the futile exercise of looking for ultimate explanations in matter itself.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack

“During the investigation, Galileo lived in a Vatican palace with a servant, his food and wine provided by the Tuscan ambassador. He was never in prison and was neither tortured nor in fear of torture. The tribunal of cardinals read and voted on the report of the two officials who dealt with the accused; three refused to vote, and the pope never confirmed the verdict. As Descartes remarked, the action taken against Galileo was merely the disciplinary action of a committee.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack

“The emphasis on final causality, the answer to the ultimate Why, was abandoned in favor of the descriptive how — how it operates, not why it is there in the first place.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack

“The Catholic Church allowed the publication of his work, but Calvin and Luther (who called Copernicus an ass) condemned it on scriptural grounds. Some of the technical difficulties with Copernicus’s theory were dealt with by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who thus made the heliocentric theory more plausible. Kepler, however, was persecuted by the Protestants in Tubingen and had to flee to the Jesuits for protection in 1596.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack

“the bizarre reign of Oliver Cromwell, far more of a tyrant than King Charles ever was. The few non-Puritan members of Parliament were evicted, and the remaining few dozen supported Cromwell, who insisted that he held his “calling” from God. England was divided into military districts, and Puritan standards were enforced: Christmas was abolished, theaters closed, and other elements of English life frowned on by the “Saints” were eliminated.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack

“As Auguste Comte observed, “All revolutionary ideas are only social applications of the principle of private interpretation.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack

“Besides the three thousand dead, some fifty thousand were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Even when his rage subsided, Cromwell apparently did not repent of the atrocity; indeed, he called it “a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.” Similar scenes were repeated in other Irish cities.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack

“In the Catholic colony of Maryland, the Glorious Revolution was a catastrophe. The colony had flourished, despite antagonism and sometimes armed invasion from Virginia. Indians were protected and many were converted by Jesuit missionaries; there was intermarriage between Indians and settlers. In 1641 the first black man in the colony, a former indentured servant, was elected to the Maryland General Assembly. Following the Revolution, however, the Church of England became the established church in Maryland. Catholics were denied civil rights, the Mass was illegal, and execution was the punishment for making converts. One measure, which sounds more like Stalinist law than anything else, provided that a Catholic child who apostatized had a right to all his parents’ possessions.”
― Diane Moczar, The Church Under Attack