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Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History
As we all know and as many of our well-established textbooks have argued for decades, the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history; Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and rightfully called “Hitler’s Pope,” the Dark Ages were stunting the progress of knowledge to be redeemed only by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment. The religious Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for riches and power. But what if these long held beliefs were all wrong?
In this stunning, powerful, and ultimately persuasive book, Rodney Stark, one of the most highly regarded sociologists of religion and bestselling author of The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco 1997), argues that some of our most firmly held ideas about history, ideas that paint the Catholic Church in the least favorable light are, in fact, fiction. Why have we held these wrongheaded ideas so firmly and for so long? And if our beliefs are wrong, what is the truth?
In each chapter, Stark takes on a well-established anti-Catholic myth, gives a fascinating history of how each myth became conventional wisdom and presents a startling picture of the real truth. For example, instead of the Spanish Inquisition being an anomaly of torture and murder of innocent people persecuted for “imaginary” crimes such as witchcraft and blasphemy, Stark argues that not only did the Spanish Inquisition spill very little blood, but it was a major force in support of moderation and justice.
Stark dispels the myth of Pope Pius XII being apathetic or even helpful to the Nazi movement, such as to merit the title “Hitler’s Pope,” and instead shows that the campaign to link Pope Pius XII to Hitler was initiated by the Soviet Union, presumably in hopes of neutralizing the Vatican in post-World War II affairs. Many praised Pope Pius XIIs vigorous and devoted efforts to saving Jewish lives during the war.
Instead of understanding the Dark Ages as a millennium of ignorance and backwardness inspired by the Catholic Church’s power, Stark argues that the whole notion of the “Dark Ages” was an act of pride perpetuated by anti-religious intellectuals who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.”
In the end, readers of Bearing False Witness will have a more accurate history of the Catholic Church and will also understand why it became unfairly maligned for so long. Bearing False Witness is a compelling and sobering account of how egotism and ideology often work together to give us a false truth.
In this stunning, powerful, and ultimately persuasive book, Rodney Stark, one of the most highly regarded sociologists of religion and bestselling author of The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco 1997), argues that some of our most firmly held ideas about history, ideas that paint the Catholic Church in the least favorable light are, in fact, fiction. Why have we held these wrongheaded ideas so firmly and for so long? And if our beliefs are wrong, what is the truth?
In each chapter, Stark takes on a well-established anti-Catholic myth, gives a fascinating history of how each myth became conventional wisdom and presents a startling picture of the real truth. For example, instead of the Spanish Inquisition being an anomaly of torture and murder of innocent people persecuted for “imaginary” crimes such as witchcraft and blasphemy, Stark argues that not only did the Spanish Inquisition spill very little blood, but it was a major force in support of moderation and justice.
Stark dispels the myth of Pope Pius XII being apathetic or even helpful to the Nazi movement, such as to merit the title “Hitler’s Pope,” and instead shows that the campaign to link Pope Pius XII to Hitler was initiated by the Soviet Union, presumably in hopes of neutralizing the Vatican in post-World War II affairs. Many praised Pope Pius XIIs vigorous and devoted efforts to saving Jewish lives during the war.
Instead of understanding the Dark Ages as a millennium of ignorance and backwardness inspired by the Catholic Church’s power, Stark argues that the whole notion of the “Dark Ages” was an act of pride perpetuated by anti-religious intellectuals who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.”
In the end, readers of Bearing False Witness will have a more accurate history of the Catholic Church and will also understand why it became unfairly maligned for so long. Bearing False Witness is a compelling and sobering account of how egotism and ideology often work together to give us a false truth.
277 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 16, 2016
254 people are currently reading
2219 people want to read
About the author
Rodney Stark
70 books302 followersRodney Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, and began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He left Berkeley to become Professor of Sociology and of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington. In 2004 he joined the faculty of Baylor University. He has published 30 books and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome. However, the greater part of his work has been on religion. He is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. He also has won a number of national and international awards for distinguished scholarship. Many of his books and articles have been translated and published in foreign languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Slovene, and Turkish.
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August 16, 2023
Rereading for the podcast. Original review below.
=======
I have long been aware of Rodney Stark's excellent work using facts and statistics to set the historical record straight.
This might be the best part of the book, at the end of the introduction:
The fact that Stark isn't Catholic matters because it means he doesn't have a dog in this fight. Except, of course, as a historian who loves truth more than "what everyone knows." I was really surprised that every chapter had examples of current historians (who Stark calls "distinguished bigots) perpetuating untruths, usually despite clear evidence from modern historians who had disproven them.
I really loved this book. Even in the cases where I knew a lot about anti-Catholic history I always learned new and surprising facts. Often this was the result of simply reorienting my thinking.
For example, I knew the Church's inhumane behavior to thousands of people during the Inquisition was largely exaggerated, but I was totally unprepared for archival evidence to show that these claims are a pack of lies. Pack. Of. Lies. It's so ingrained to believe that there was at least some level of culpability that I realize it looks outrageous for me to say this. But it is true.
As are the lies that have been perpetuated about motivating anti-Semitic medieval pogroms culminating in the Holocaust, precipitating the Dark Ages (which never existed, by the way), provoking the Crusades, burning witches, supporting slavery, and much more.
I could go on, but you get the point. No wonder the Church has a hard time among moderns. As Stark himself points out, anyone would resent an organization guilty of the hateful acts that the Catholic Church has been charged with committing throughout history. Luckily for us, he has plenty of facts, usually from secular sources, to show that those crimes never were committed in the first place.
You don't have to just take Stark's word for it. Each chapter has a chart of historians whose work contributed to the proof Stark lays out for us, and there is an extensive bibliography with recommended reading.
Get this book and read it whether you're Catholic or not. The proof is there. The truth matters.
=======
I have long been aware of Rodney Stark's excellent work using facts and statistics to set the historical record straight.
This might be the best part of the book, at the end of the introduction:
Finally, I am not a Roman Catholic, and I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history.And we thank you.
The fact that Stark isn't Catholic matters because it means he doesn't have a dog in this fight. Except, of course, as a historian who loves truth more than "what everyone knows." I was really surprised that every chapter had examples of current historians (who Stark calls "distinguished bigots) perpetuating untruths, usually despite clear evidence from modern historians who had disproven them.
I really loved this book. Even in the cases where I knew a lot about anti-Catholic history I always learned new and surprising facts. Often this was the result of simply reorienting my thinking.
For example, I knew the Church's inhumane behavior to thousands of people during the Inquisition was largely exaggerated, but I was totally unprepared for archival evidence to show that these claims are a pack of lies. Pack. Of. Lies. It's so ingrained to believe that there was at least some level of culpability that I realize it looks outrageous for me to say this. But it is true.
As are the lies that have been perpetuated about motivating anti-Semitic medieval pogroms culminating in the Holocaust, precipitating the Dark Ages (which never existed, by the way), provoking the Crusades, burning witches, supporting slavery, and much more.
I could go on, but you get the point. No wonder the Church has a hard time among moderns. As Stark himself points out, anyone would resent an organization guilty of the hateful acts that the Catholic Church has been charged with committing throughout history. Luckily for us, he has plenty of facts, usually from secular sources, to show that those crimes never were committed in the first place.
You don't have to just take Stark's word for it. Each chapter has a chart of historians whose work contributed to the proof Stark lays out for us, and there is an extensive bibliography with recommended reading.
Get this book and read it whether you're Catholic or not. The proof is there. The truth matters.
June 21, 2020
This book exposes just about every myth you’ve heard about Catholic history. The author, a renowned scholar who is far from Catholic, debunks conventional wisdom about the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition that has been passed on for decades. The author also points out that, contrary to popular belief, Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery in Europe, the protection of Jews throughout history, belief in science, and creating capitalism. Stark is an amazing scholar and I applaud him for exposing these myths despite being Protestant!
Edit (5/20/20): I incorrectly called Stark secular when he is actually a Protestant.
Edit (5/20/20): I incorrectly called Stark secular when he is actually a Protestant.
June 2, 2016
As always, please give me a helpful vote on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/review/R1I372DR...
Bearing False Witness by Rodney Stark
I’ve been addressing anti-Catholic tropes on the internet for the last twenty years. When I started, I honestly believed that these accusations were supported by fact, or, even, if not totally accurate, were substantially accurate. My particular forte of late has been the slander that the Catholic Church supported Hitler and the Nazis. By going past the books that everyone is reading into the books written by those involved in the “Church Struggle,” I have established that the modern view is a total distortion of the facts. Germans, Europeans and the world knew that the Catholic Church was completely opposed to National Socialism for a variety of reasons, including its exaltation of nation and race over God as the supreme good. I have newspaper articles from the New York Times that demonstrate that the German Catholic bishops repeatedly condemned National Socialism from 1923 through 1945. The German Catholic Bishops excommunicated Nazi party members. Catholic electoral districts did not vote for the Nazis at anywhere near the rate of Protestant districts. The Nazis lumped “political Catholicism” in with international Bolshevism and international Judaism as one of its three great enemies. These points are not opinions or apologetics; they are facts.
Yet, I repeatedly am shown pictures of purported Catholic priests – who are often Lutheran – performing the Hitler salute – which was required on penalty of imprisonment - and told that Catholics made National Socialism possible.
Needless to say, my interlocutors are as ignorant as a box of rocks, and yet they are arrogant with the arrogance that only indoctrination into an unshakable belief can give.
Weird and insidious.
Stark’s recent book is an effort to shake this modern faith. This is not a work of Catholic apologetics. Stark is not a Catholic. It is, rather, a different kind of “apologetics.” It is a work of “historical apologetics.” Stark reveals as his conclusion that his purpose is nothing less than to defend history, which has become distorted by ignorance and political ideology, and encrusted generations of bigotry, to create the “perfect storm” of ignorance, and a dangerous ignorance since rejecting Catholic history effectively paves the way for rejecting Western History and Western values.
Stark’s approach is to state the conventional wisdom of Catholic duplicity or evil and then point out with simple facts how false the conventional wisdom is in root and branch. Candidly, for a reader who has read Stark’s other books, much of this is a rehash, but this book is useful in collecting the many false tropes in one source, and he does offer additional and new insights. The topics that Stark covers are Antisemitism, the non-canonical gospels, persecution of pagans, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, religion and the rise of science, slavery, the Catholic Church and fascism, and the Catholic Church's alleged social stagnation. In very simple and clear statements of data, Stark debunks the myths. This is not to say that Catholicism has never done anything wrong, but Stark absolves it of guilt for the grossest crimes it has been repeatedly accused of.
This book should be required reading at a high school or college level simply out of fairness for the years of defamation. Also, it would advance the project of knowing the truth, which education supposedly has as its goal. The lay reader would undoubtedly have one of two reactions. The reaction of many, unfortunately, would be denial because the facts don’t fit the myths. The second, more hopeful reaction, might be “mind-blowing” as the imagined past is replaced by the actual past.
For someone who has mastered the facts, the more interesting question is “why?” Why is it that in the space of 80 years, Catholicism went from the undisputed opponent of the Nazis to its putative handmaiden?
Stark points to a number of factors. One factor is the burden of history. Protestantism, particularly Protestant England, waged a “cold war” against various Catholic powers, including Spain and France, and made much use of the “black arts” of propaganda. Once the “Black Legend” had been launched into the universe, it has been impossible to eliminate from the essentially Anglophone world. This traditional Protestant propaganda has merged with an ideological stream that is either anti-religious or secular leftist:
“Although Gibbon was one of the very first “distinguished bigots,” he is in excellent company— the list of celebrated, anti-Catholic scholars (some of them still living) is long indeed. We will meet scores of them in subsequent chapters, some of them many times. Worse yet, in recent years some of the most malignant contributions to anti-Catholic history have been made by alienated Catholics, many of whom are seminary dropouts, former priests, or ex-nuns, such as John Cornwell, James Carroll, and Karen Armstrong. Normally, attacks originating with defectors from a particular group are treated with some circumspection. But, attacks on the Church made by “lapsed” Catholics are widely regarded as thereby of special reliability!”
Stark doesn’t mention the theory of the former Romanian spy chief, General Ion Mihai Pacepa, that Soviet Union engaged in its own “black arts” of propaganda in crafting its own “Black Legend” that indoctrinated millions into believing that Pope Pius XII was a Nazi sympathizer. [See Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.] For all of his interest in Sociology, Stark doesn’t offer an explanation as to why these streams have merged, endured, and been accepted by so many. It may seem obvious to Stark, who grew up breathing in anti-Catholicism with his Lutheran mother’s milk, but it does seem that modern anti-Catholicism is different from the prior kind insofar as it has such an appeal to Catholics, who may be finding themselves identifying more with ideology or nation than faith.
The hopeful sign is that the pressure from the outside, from the “distinguished bigots” who more and more are not distinguishing between Catholic and Protestant, is pushing Catholic and Protestant closer. Stark points out that the ecumenism in his own university, Baylor – a traditionally Bible-Belt Baptist institution – has grown to an extent unimaginable when he started teaching.
For myself, I will offer my own sociological insight: I think that traditionally anti-Catholic Protestants have learned that anti-Catholicism is a luxury they can no longer afford. It was once possible to enjoy a book that depicted Catholicism as corrupt and criminal, but when Dan Brown’s execrable “The Da Vinci Code” came out and provided pop pabulum history that a basic Christian doctrine like the divinity of Jesus had been adopted by a vote on the slimmest margin – a lie – Protestants began to understand that the Catholic limb they had been sawing on was the limb they were sitting on. Likewise, Protestants have seen attacks on the Crusades turned into attacks on Western Christianity generally. The dark art of propaganda is easily turned.
And, then, there has been the intellectual damage done to scholarship as propaganda becomes the coin of the academic realm and scholarship is judged by how it fits the narrative rather than how it fits the facts.
Let’s hope that Stark is successful in his project.
Bearing False Witness by Rodney Stark
I’ve been addressing anti-Catholic tropes on the internet for the last twenty years. When I started, I honestly believed that these accusations were supported by fact, or, even, if not totally accurate, were substantially accurate. My particular forte of late has been the slander that the Catholic Church supported Hitler and the Nazis. By going past the books that everyone is reading into the books written by those involved in the “Church Struggle,” I have established that the modern view is a total distortion of the facts. Germans, Europeans and the world knew that the Catholic Church was completely opposed to National Socialism for a variety of reasons, including its exaltation of nation and race over God as the supreme good. I have newspaper articles from the New York Times that demonstrate that the German Catholic bishops repeatedly condemned National Socialism from 1923 through 1945. The German Catholic Bishops excommunicated Nazi party members. Catholic electoral districts did not vote for the Nazis at anywhere near the rate of Protestant districts. The Nazis lumped “political Catholicism” in with international Bolshevism and international Judaism as one of its three great enemies. These points are not opinions or apologetics; they are facts.
Yet, I repeatedly am shown pictures of purported Catholic priests – who are often Lutheran – performing the Hitler salute – which was required on penalty of imprisonment - and told that Catholics made National Socialism possible.
Needless to say, my interlocutors are as ignorant as a box of rocks, and yet they are arrogant with the arrogance that only indoctrination into an unshakable belief can give.
Weird and insidious.
Stark’s recent book is an effort to shake this modern faith. This is not a work of Catholic apologetics. Stark is not a Catholic. It is, rather, a different kind of “apologetics.” It is a work of “historical apologetics.” Stark reveals as his conclusion that his purpose is nothing less than to defend history, which has become distorted by ignorance and political ideology, and encrusted generations of bigotry, to create the “perfect storm” of ignorance, and a dangerous ignorance since rejecting Catholic history effectively paves the way for rejecting Western History and Western values.
Stark’s approach is to state the conventional wisdom of Catholic duplicity or evil and then point out with simple facts how false the conventional wisdom is in root and branch. Candidly, for a reader who has read Stark’s other books, much of this is a rehash, but this book is useful in collecting the many false tropes in one source, and he does offer additional and new insights. The topics that Stark covers are Antisemitism, the non-canonical gospels, persecution of pagans, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, religion and the rise of science, slavery, the Catholic Church and fascism, and the Catholic Church's alleged social stagnation. In very simple and clear statements of data, Stark debunks the myths. This is not to say that Catholicism has never done anything wrong, but Stark absolves it of guilt for the grossest crimes it has been repeatedly accused of.
This book should be required reading at a high school or college level simply out of fairness for the years of defamation. Also, it would advance the project of knowing the truth, which education supposedly has as its goal. The lay reader would undoubtedly have one of two reactions. The reaction of many, unfortunately, would be denial because the facts don’t fit the myths. The second, more hopeful reaction, might be “mind-blowing” as the imagined past is replaced by the actual past.
For someone who has mastered the facts, the more interesting question is “why?” Why is it that in the space of 80 years, Catholicism went from the undisputed opponent of the Nazis to its putative handmaiden?
Stark points to a number of factors. One factor is the burden of history. Protestantism, particularly Protestant England, waged a “cold war” against various Catholic powers, including Spain and France, and made much use of the “black arts” of propaganda. Once the “Black Legend” had been launched into the universe, it has been impossible to eliminate from the essentially Anglophone world. This traditional Protestant propaganda has merged with an ideological stream that is either anti-religious or secular leftist:
“Although Gibbon was one of the very first “distinguished bigots,” he is in excellent company— the list of celebrated, anti-Catholic scholars (some of them still living) is long indeed. We will meet scores of them in subsequent chapters, some of them many times. Worse yet, in recent years some of the most malignant contributions to anti-Catholic history have been made by alienated Catholics, many of whom are seminary dropouts, former priests, or ex-nuns, such as John Cornwell, James Carroll, and Karen Armstrong. Normally, attacks originating with defectors from a particular group are treated with some circumspection. But, attacks on the Church made by “lapsed” Catholics are widely regarded as thereby of special reliability!”
Stark doesn’t mention the theory of the former Romanian spy chief, General Ion Mihai Pacepa, that Soviet Union engaged in its own “black arts” of propaganda in crafting its own “Black Legend” that indoctrinated millions into believing that Pope Pius XII was a Nazi sympathizer. [See Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.] For all of his interest in Sociology, Stark doesn’t offer an explanation as to why these streams have merged, endured, and been accepted by so many. It may seem obvious to Stark, who grew up breathing in anti-Catholicism with his Lutheran mother’s milk, but it does seem that modern anti-Catholicism is different from the prior kind insofar as it has such an appeal to Catholics, who may be finding themselves identifying more with ideology or nation than faith.
The hopeful sign is that the pressure from the outside, from the “distinguished bigots” who more and more are not distinguishing between Catholic and Protestant, is pushing Catholic and Protestant closer. Stark points out that the ecumenism in his own university, Baylor – a traditionally Bible-Belt Baptist institution – has grown to an extent unimaginable when he started teaching.
For myself, I will offer my own sociological insight: I think that traditionally anti-Catholic Protestants have learned that anti-Catholicism is a luxury they can no longer afford. It was once possible to enjoy a book that depicted Catholicism as corrupt and criminal, but when Dan Brown’s execrable “The Da Vinci Code” came out and provided pop pabulum history that a basic Christian doctrine like the divinity of Jesus had been adopted by a vote on the slimmest margin – a lie – Protestants began to understand that the Catholic limb they had been sawing on was the limb they were sitting on. Likewise, Protestants have seen attacks on the Crusades turned into attacks on Western Christianity generally. The dark art of propaganda is easily turned.
And, then, there has been the intellectual damage done to scholarship as propaganda becomes the coin of the academic realm and scholarship is judged by how it fits the narrative rather than how it fits the facts.
Let’s hope that Stark is successful in his project.
March 28, 2018
This is a book that had one job. It describes it in the subtitle and Dr Stark makes it clear in the last sentence of his prologue "...I did not write this book in defense of the church. I wrote it in defense of history." (7)
That job is done well. Dr Stark takes apart many instances of anti-Catholic propaganda, which he freely admits that he has bought into in the past. The book is structured in ten chapters, each one dealing with a particular myth about things that the Church has done in Her history. If I had to pick the three most important of these chapters, I would say that they are the first one which takes on the idea of institutional anti-Semitism, the fourth, which debunks the myth of the Dark Ages (no such thing existed), and the chapter on the Church's relationship with science. There are also chapters on the Inquisition, the Church wiping out Pagans after the Edict of Milan, the Chuch's stance on slavery, and Her relationship with authoritarian governments. The main points are well researched and cross referenced with extensive footnotes and a box in each chapter with brief biographies of other scholars working on that particular issue so that one can do further reading.
This book is intended to provide a quick overview and debunking of the more egregious anti-Catholic stuff out there, and in some ways that is its saving grace. Dr Stark, unfortunately, does not seem to have delved as deeply into Church history as he could have, repeating other common myths while tearing apart the most harmful. He also constructs a theory of how the Church functioned in the middle ages which does not really stand up to scrutiny, and unfortunately that theory plays a rather large role in the last chapter on the development of capitalism and detracts from what would otherwise be an interesting discussion of medieval economics.
I would say, if you actually believe that the Catholic Church is the root of all that is evil, you should give this book a read. It traces the roots of many of the myths which people believe about the Church and, as I said, does a thorough job debunking them, plus providing further reading on the subjects. If you are a Catholic who has had to deal with accusations of being anti-science or been told that it was your religion that wiped out the ancient Greco-Roman and Norse religious practices, this is also worth the read, if only for the cited researches. If, however, you are a Catholic who has a good command of Church History or is well versed in Medieval Studies, go to the library and copy the bibliography because it is going to be more useful to you in the long run than working through this brief survey.
That job is done well. Dr Stark takes apart many instances of anti-Catholic propaganda, which he freely admits that he has bought into in the past. The book is structured in ten chapters, each one dealing with a particular myth about things that the Church has done in Her history. If I had to pick the three most important of these chapters, I would say that they are the first one which takes on the idea of institutional anti-Semitism, the fourth, which debunks the myth of the Dark Ages (no such thing existed), and the chapter on the Church's relationship with science. There are also chapters on the Inquisition, the Church wiping out Pagans after the Edict of Milan, the Chuch's stance on slavery, and Her relationship with authoritarian governments. The main points are well researched and cross referenced with extensive footnotes and a box in each chapter with brief biographies of other scholars working on that particular issue so that one can do further reading.
This book is intended to provide a quick overview and debunking of the more egregious anti-Catholic stuff out there, and in some ways that is its saving grace. Dr Stark, unfortunately, does not seem to have delved as deeply into Church history as he could have, repeating other common myths while tearing apart the most harmful. He also constructs a theory of how the Church functioned in the middle ages which does not really stand up to scrutiny, and unfortunately that theory plays a rather large role in the last chapter on the development of capitalism and detracts from what would otherwise be an interesting discussion of medieval economics.
I would say, if you actually believe that the Catholic Church is the root of all that is evil, you should give this book a read. It traces the roots of many of the myths which people believe about the Church and, as I said, does a thorough job debunking them, plus providing further reading on the subjects. If you are a Catholic who has had to deal with accusations of being anti-science or been told that it was your religion that wiped out the ancient Greco-Roman and Norse religious practices, this is also worth the read, if only for the cited researches. If, however, you are a Catholic who has a good command of Church History or is well versed in Medieval Studies, go to the library and copy the bibliography because it is going to be more useful to you in the long run than working through this brief survey.
April 24, 2017
If you are an anti-Catholic or anti-Christian bigot, this is a book you should read. If you are just someone with a low opinion of religion, this is also for you. If you are Catholic and take the charge to defend the faith seriously, again read this book.
Did you know that less than four thousand people were killed by the Spanish Inquisition in over two hundred years? In contrast, the Spanish Republic, darling of the Left, killed over five thousand Catholic Clerics in less than six months. Did you know that the Dark Ages, supposedly caused by the Catholic Church, was a era in which great strides were made in agriculture, metallurgy, architecture, music, and during which slavery was abolished throughout Europe?
I could go on and on but Rodney Stark does a much better job on these and other subjects. Two reservations however, Stark refers to Albert Einstein's son in law. Unfortunately Einstein's daughter died in an institution at a young age and never married. I believed he was referring to a biographer with a name similar to the one that he thinks is the son-in-law. Also, foolishly he believes Easter's day was put near the spring equinox. It was actually because it was put in synch (or close to it) with Passover.
Did you know that less than four thousand people were killed by the Spanish Inquisition in over two hundred years? In contrast, the Spanish Republic, darling of the Left, killed over five thousand Catholic Clerics in less than six months. Did you know that the Dark Ages, supposedly caused by the Catholic Church, was a era in which great strides were made in agriculture, metallurgy, architecture, music, and during which slavery was abolished throughout Europe?
I could go on and on but Rodney Stark does a much better job on these and other subjects. Two reservations however, Stark refers to Albert Einstein's son in law. Unfortunately Einstein's daughter died in an institution at a young age and never married. I believed he was referring to a biographer with a name similar to the one that he thinks is the son-in-law. Also, foolishly he believes Easter's day was put near the spring equinox. It was actually because it was put in synch (or close to it) with Passover.
February 14, 2020
ENGLISH: A very comprehensive review of anti-catholic myths in history and the popular mind, by a non-catholic, which gives the book further credibility. Although a few references could have been improved and a few data are debatable, in general the book is very good.
ESPAÑOL: Una revisión muy completa de los mitos anti-católicos en la historia y en la mentalidad popular. El no ser católico el autor da al libro mayor credibilidad. Aunque algunas referencias podrían haberse mejorado y algunos datos son discutibles, en general el libro es muy bueno.
ESPAÑOL: Una revisión muy completa de los mitos anti-católicos en la historia y en la mentalidad popular. El no ser católico el autor da al libro mayor credibilidad. Aunque algunas referencias podrían haberse mejorado y algunos datos son discutibles, en general el libro es muy bueno.
April 7, 2017
America would benefit if all Americans read this book.
I was raised as an anti-Catholic Southern Baptist in the 1950's and am now Catholic. This book disrupts the ant-Catholic bias in my understanding of history just as others have upended my understanding of Christian theology. I recommend it even for people who are agnostic or atheistic because the book addresses many of the historical distortions underlying those positions.
I was raised as an anti-Catholic Southern Baptist in the 1950's and am now Catholic. This book disrupts the ant-Catholic bias in my understanding of history just as others have upended my understanding of Christian theology. I recommend it even for people who are agnostic or atheistic because the book addresses many of the historical distortions underlying those positions.
February 23, 2020
The book reads very quickly, debunking common historical misconceptions about the catholic church, such as it promoted slavery or was the enforcer of the so-called dark ages after the Roman empire fell. The topics of discussion were not new to me, although some of the facts and argumentations I have read for the first time here.
The book leaves me a bitter feeling to think, if there is so much historical evidence against the misconceptions described in the book, why are we even having a debate about it, and some of them are even taught in school?
The book leaves me a bitter feeling to think, if there is so much historical evidence against the misconceptions described in the book, why are we even having a debate about it, and some of them are even taught in school?
July 26, 2016
Amazing defense of the Church by an atheist no less!
Covers all of the common tropes brought out to attack the church based or spurious historical lies. Written by an atheist this is a fantastic book clearly designed to tell the truth rather than take a side.
Wonderfully written and excellent to read.
Covers all of the common tropes brought out to attack the church based or spurious historical lies. Written by an atheist this is a fantastic book clearly designed to tell the truth rather than take a side.
Wonderfully written and excellent to read.
February 9, 2020
This is a very readable and well argumented book, even though it is not very long.
I was already familiar with all the topics and their common misrepresentation, but it would make a great introduction for many people who have grown up listening to the common, anti-catholic version of the role of the Catholic Church in history and have never questioned it.
I was already familiar with all the topics and their common misrepresentation, but it would make a great introduction for many people who have grown up listening to the common, anti-catholic version of the role of the Catholic Church in history and have never questioned it.
April 22, 2025
Very valuable book. Rodney Stark, not a catholic himself, challenges centuries lasting anti-catholic myths. Spanning from a false notion of “Dark Ages” to a claim that Catholic Church opposed liberating revolutions in Europe and favoured tyrants. Each chapter is quite well-cited and supported by an authority of prominent historians.
Of a particular interest I find chapters on Spanish Inquisition and Scientific figures of Middle Ages. The former arguing that the institution initially functioned as a moderation of a mob rage against Jewish converts and later was it very reluctant in executions. In the latter author tracks roots of scientific method down to early 13th century.
Of a particular interest I find chapters on Spanish Inquisition and Scientific figures of Middle Ages. The former arguing that the institution initially functioned as a moderation of a mob rage against Jewish converts and later was it very reluctant in executions. In the latter author tracks roots of scientific method down to early 13th century.
June 3, 2016
"Nor does it matter at all to the dead whether they receive justice at the hands of succeeding generations. But to the living, to do justice, however belatedly, should matter."
--Garrett Mattingly
This book is a welcome corrective to a number of false narratives, stories that most people accept as common knowledge even though historians have long known them to be anti-Catholic myths. So, for example, centuries before Christopher Columbus was even born, all educated people knew that the earth was a globe. Likewise, the Catholic Church is not now, nor was it ever, anti-Semitic. And the apparent explosion of conversions in the fourth century was not brought about by Christians with political power persecuting rational, tolerant pagans. The Dark Ages if you look a little closer weren't so dark after all. The Spanish Inquisition was actually more fair and mild than the other courts of its day. It used none of the lurid tortures that we see in our movies and novels, and ironically, it SAVED many thousand lives by quickly investigating and shutting down the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries that went unchecked outside of Catholic Spain and Italy. All told, the Inquisition handed over about ten people a year to be executed. In the same period, about 750 people a year were hanged in Protestant England, many for petty theft. The Crusades were not greedy wars of conquest or the vanguard of European colonialism. The Church was a patron of science, not its enemy, and the historical Galileo (as opposed to the mythical one) never spent a day in jail. Far from condoning slavery, the Church worked to abolish it and to uphold the dignity of its victims in the meantime. The Catholic Church was never the friend of dictatorship.
The book is not a case of special pleading nor is it a work of Catholic apologetics. Stark is not himself a Catholic and he takes on all of these myths and responds to them in terms of secular history and using almost exclusively secular historians. In his own words, "I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of History."
Occasionally, the fact that he refrains from using Catholic sources leads him into misstating things. For example, following Ramsay MacMullen, he characterizes Pope Gregory's mission strategy of enculturation as an "assimilation of paganism" which it most certainly was not. He also perpetuates the old chestnut that the date of Christmas was chosen to correspond to the pagan celebration of Saturnalia and even ties Easter to the spring equinox and the Saxon goddess Eostre. Oops.
Catholics might also quibble with his account of the proper relation between the spiritual and temporal powers in the tradition and with his assumption of the narrative of "Progress."
But to do so at any length would begin to seem ungrateful for the really great service he has done for Catholics in the course of confronting the enormous "literature of lies." Professor Stark makes accessible in one book for regular readers what historians have known for a long time but most people (including most Catholics) do not know.
If Mark Twain was correct that "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so," this book will help keep you out of trouble and give you lots of "aha" moments on the way.
--Garrett Mattingly
This book is a welcome corrective to a number of false narratives, stories that most people accept as common knowledge even though historians have long known them to be anti-Catholic myths. So, for example, centuries before Christopher Columbus was even born, all educated people knew that the earth was a globe. Likewise, the Catholic Church is not now, nor was it ever, anti-Semitic. And the apparent explosion of conversions in the fourth century was not brought about by Christians with political power persecuting rational, tolerant pagans. The Dark Ages if you look a little closer weren't so dark after all. The Spanish Inquisition was actually more fair and mild than the other courts of its day. It used none of the lurid tortures that we see in our movies and novels, and ironically, it SAVED many thousand lives by quickly investigating and shutting down the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries that went unchecked outside of Catholic Spain and Italy. All told, the Inquisition handed over about ten people a year to be executed. In the same period, about 750 people a year were hanged in Protestant England, many for petty theft. The Crusades were not greedy wars of conquest or the vanguard of European colonialism. The Church was a patron of science, not its enemy, and the historical Galileo (as opposed to the mythical one) never spent a day in jail. Far from condoning slavery, the Church worked to abolish it and to uphold the dignity of its victims in the meantime. The Catholic Church was never the friend of dictatorship.
The book is not a case of special pleading nor is it a work of Catholic apologetics. Stark is not himself a Catholic and he takes on all of these myths and responds to them in terms of secular history and using almost exclusively secular historians. In his own words, "I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of History."
Occasionally, the fact that he refrains from using Catholic sources leads him into misstating things. For example, following Ramsay MacMullen, he characterizes Pope Gregory's mission strategy of enculturation as an "assimilation of paganism" which it most certainly was not. He also perpetuates the old chestnut that the date of Christmas was chosen to correspond to the pagan celebration of Saturnalia and even ties Easter to the spring equinox and the Saxon goddess Eostre. Oops.
Catholics might also quibble with his account of the proper relation between the spiritual and temporal powers in the tradition and with his assumption of the narrative of "Progress."
But to do so at any length would begin to seem ungrateful for the really great service he has done for Catholics in the course of confronting the enormous "literature of lies." Professor Stark makes accessible in one book for regular readers what historians have known for a long time but most people (including most Catholics) do not know.
If Mark Twain was correct that "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so," this book will help keep you out of trouble and give you lots of "aha" moments on the way.
January 24, 2017
What do the Inquisition, Slavery, Anti-Semitism, and Hatred of Science have in common? If you said "The Catholic Church", you're in for a surprise.
Rodney Stark (Sociologist, Baylor) reviews the current state of the historical science, and thoroughly debunks the commonly held beliefs (rejected by the vast majority of historians) regarding the Catholic Churches scandalous historical behavior.
Chapter 1 looks at anti-semitism in general, and in particular thoroughly debunks the myth of Catholic silence in the face of Nazi-ism, and supposed inaction in the face of the eradication of the Jews. The Pope had a letter condemning nazi-ism smuggled in and read in the parishes throughout
Germany (Mit Brenner Sorge). Pope Pius XII was honored by the World Jewish Council, and his work in saving european Jews was praised by several future Prime Ministers of Israel.
Chapter 7 deals with the (supposed) war on science. The Author notes that universities were created and protected by Church authority, and outlined the progress achieved by Catholic scientists that led to the so-called "Englightenment". He noted that many of the great scientists including Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham (of Ockham's Razor fame) were not only Catholics, but devout members of the clergy. The author completed a quantitative study (charts provided in text) of the Newtonian Era and found that 25% of "famous scientists" were clergy, 60% would be considered "devout Christians". The Author, lacking a bias in favor of Catholics, notes only briefly the Galileo Affair, but notes that Galilgeo was, indeed, charged with heresy and forced to recant, but he was never imprisoned nor tortured, and was instead sentenced to "a comfortable house arrest during which he died at age seventy-eight." The author delves into the story a bit more. His conclusions in the area are unlikely to please Catholics (who are perhaps overly sensitive over the matter) or Secularists (who adversely share the sensitivity of their Catholic confreres).
For me, the most satisfying area of clarification was regarding the Inquisition. Having had the opportunity to study the inquisitorial system under the foremost authority on Roman and Medieval Canon Law in the English speaking world (Dr. Kenneth Pennington, Catholic University), I was pleased to see the historical record so adequately addressed. The author notes that studies have been made of the 44,674 cases that occurred in the Spanish Inquisition (yes, they were professional jurists, and kept detailed records). Far from the hundreds of thousands that propogandists reported, there were on average just 10 people executed by the Spanish state for heresy (the Church didn't execute anyone). Contrast this to England, which a century later was averaging "750 hangings a year, many of them for minor thefts."
Of course, "inquisition" is synonymous with "torture", the Author notes "All the courts of Europe used torture, but the Inquistion did so far less than other courts...Inquisitors themselves were skeptical of the efficacy and validity of torture as a method of conviction." Indeed, any confession given under torture was not given juridic weight until and unless the person confessed it again while not under torture. This hardly meets our contemporary standards, but it is notable that the treatment of the inquisition was known to be so much more lenient than contemporary civil governments that "criminals in Spain purposely blasphe[med] so as to be transferred to the Inquisition's prisons."
All in all a quick read, and a through summary of the state of the question in several areas of the historical sciences related to the Catholic Church.
Rodney Stark (Sociologist, Baylor) reviews the current state of the historical science, and thoroughly debunks the commonly held beliefs (rejected by the vast majority of historians) regarding the Catholic Churches scandalous historical behavior.
Chapter 1 looks at anti-semitism in general, and in particular thoroughly debunks the myth of Catholic silence in the face of Nazi-ism, and supposed inaction in the face of the eradication of the Jews. The Pope had a letter condemning nazi-ism smuggled in and read in the parishes throughout
Germany (Mit Brenner Sorge). Pope Pius XII was honored by the World Jewish Council, and his work in saving european Jews was praised by several future Prime Ministers of Israel.
Chapter 7 deals with the (supposed) war on science. The Author notes that universities were created and protected by Church authority, and outlined the progress achieved by Catholic scientists that led to the so-called "Englightenment". He noted that many of the great scientists including Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham (of Ockham's Razor fame) were not only Catholics, but devout members of the clergy. The author completed a quantitative study (charts provided in text) of the Newtonian Era and found that 25% of "famous scientists" were clergy, 60% would be considered "devout Christians". The Author, lacking a bias in favor of Catholics, notes only briefly the Galileo Affair, but notes that Galilgeo was, indeed, charged with heresy and forced to recant, but he was never imprisoned nor tortured, and was instead sentenced to "a comfortable house arrest during which he died at age seventy-eight." The author delves into the story a bit more. His conclusions in the area are unlikely to please Catholics (who are perhaps overly sensitive over the matter) or Secularists (who adversely share the sensitivity of their Catholic confreres).
For me, the most satisfying area of clarification was regarding the Inquisition. Having had the opportunity to study the inquisitorial system under the foremost authority on Roman and Medieval Canon Law in the English speaking world (Dr. Kenneth Pennington, Catholic University), I was pleased to see the historical record so adequately addressed. The author notes that studies have been made of the 44,674 cases that occurred in the Spanish Inquisition (yes, they were professional jurists, and kept detailed records). Far from the hundreds of thousands that propogandists reported, there were on average just 10 people executed by the Spanish state for heresy (the Church didn't execute anyone). Contrast this to England, which a century later was averaging "750 hangings a year, many of them for minor thefts."
Of course, "inquisition" is synonymous with "torture", the Author notes "All the courts of Europe used torture, but the Inquistion did so far less than other courts...Inquisitors themselves were skeptical of the efficacy and validity of torture as a method of conviction." Indeed, any confession given under torture was not given juridic weight until and unless the person confessed it again while not under torture. This hardly meets our contemporary standards, but it is notable that the treatment of the inquisition was known to be so much more lenient than contemporary civil governments that "criminals in Spain purposely blasphe[med] so as to be transferred to the Inquisition's prisons."
All in all a quick read, and a through summary of the state of the question in several areas of the historical sciences related to the Catholic Church.
August 6, 2018
This book was recommended to me by a young Dominican friar who was enrolled in my course in Church History last semester at DSPT in Berkeley. I began to read it on the flight home from Geneva on 24 July 2018. As usual, I'm reading several books at once, as I prepare conferences for retreats during the summer months.
Stark's study is fascinating -- at least from what I can tell so far in reading the first chapters. Admittedly, many things I have been aware of from other sources, but it is good to see him build the arguments for objective presentations of Church history to an American audience. I hope to complete reading this book soon soon.
Stark, who makes it clear from the beginning that he is not Catholic, tells us that he is not trying to defend the Church, but to defend history. So many attacks on Catholic institutions and practices have become part of the standard narrative in the West since the Reformation and the Enlightenment. How much of that narrative is factual? Stark demonstrates, with primary and secondary sources, that much of what we think is historical fact about Catholics and the Catholic Church is based on purposeful falsehood.
Topics addressed by the author as he faces off with centuries of false accusations against the Catholic Church include: "sins of Anti-Semitism", "Catholic intolerance towards tolerant pagans", "The Dark Ages", "The Crusades", "Religion vs Science", "Catholic inaction in the face of the slave trade and slavery", "Authoritarianism", and "Catholic positions toward modernity". Stark presents an extensive bibliography, and fully documents his research.
For all his critical scholarship, Stark writes in a clear fashion. This is an enjoyable read, for style as well as content. In providing the true story behind many of the scenes that have fueled Anti-Catholic rhetoric since the Reformation and particularly during the Enlightenment, Stark offers a list of resources that could help the reader go more into depth if desirous of going deeper in each of the ten scenarios he explores. And the author states clearly, in the introduction and in the conclusion, that he is not a Catholic. "I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history."
This is a book of historical research that is timely. I highly recommend it.
Stark's study is fascinating -- at least from what I can tell so far in reading the first chapters. Admittedly, many things I have been aware of from other sources, but it is good to see him build the arguments for objective presentations of Church history to an American audience. I hope to complete reading this book soon soon.
Stark, who makes it clear from the beginning that he is not Catholic, tells us that he is not trying to defend the Church, but to defend history. So many attacks on Catholic institutions and practices have become part of the standard narrative in the West since the Reformation and the Enlightenment. How much of that narrative is factual? Stark demonstrates, with primary and secondary sources, that much of what we think is historical fact about Catholics and the Catholic Church is based on purposeful falsehood.
Topics addressed by the author as he faces off with centuries of false accusations against the Catholic Church include: "sins of Anti-Semitism", "Catholic intolerance towards tolerant pagans", "The Dark Ages", "The Crusades", "Religion vs Science", "Catholic inaction in the face of the slave trade and slavery", "Authoritarianism", and "Catholic positions toward modernity". Stark presents an extensive bibliography, and fully documents his research.
For all his critical scholarship, Stark writes in a clear fashion. This is an enjoyable read, for style as well as content. In providing the true story behind many of the scenes that have fueled Anti-Catholic rhetoric since the Reformation and particularly during the Enlightenment, Stark offers a list of resources that could help the reader go more into depth if desirous of going deeper in each of the ten scenarios he explores. And the author states clearly, in the introduction and in the conclusion, that he is not a Catholic. "I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history."
This is a book of historical research that is timely. I highly recommend it.
June 2, 2017
O único defeito deste livro é não ser mais longo! Pois tenho certeza de que havia mais centenas de mentiras a serem denunciadas. O que mais me deixou pasmado foram os requintes de estupidez e crueldade praticados durante a Revolução Francesa, que aliás é um dos eventos mais lamentáveis da história da humanidade.
December 5, 2019
5 zvjezdica za nastojanje oko objektivnosti, dobro popraćeno bibliografijom. Iako se ponegdje i ne slažem, ne mogu ne cijeniti spomenuto pogledamo li pretjerivanja mnoštva drugih koji su o istome pisali, a koja često dosežu razinu bezočnih laži. Preporučam.
January 1, 2019
Kniha vyvracia najväčšie klamstvá o katolíckej cirkvi, venuje sa témam ako antisemitizmus, križiacke výpravy, inkvizícia, apokryfné evanjeliá, odpor voči vede a technickému pokroku, či tzv. temnému stredoveku. Ak o tých veciach čitateľ nič nevie a potrebujete si v nich spraviť základný prehľad, v tom prípade mu môže táto kniha pomôcť, keďže poskytuje základný vhľad do jednotlivých tém a vyvracia zaužívané nepravdy, ktoré sa v spoločnosti v daných oblastiach o katolíckej cirkvi šíria. Navyše, obsahuje množstvo odkazov na ďalšiu literatúru vďaka čomu môže slúžiť aj ako dobrý odrazový mostík pre jazykovo zdatného čitateľa túžiaceho po ďalšom vzdelávaní v niektorej z daných oblastí.
Najväčšou devízou knihy je, že jej autor nie je katolík, ani nepôsobí v žiadnej katolíckej inštitúcií, ale je profesorom na baptistickej vysokej škole, vďaka čomu možno skutočne veriť tomu, že to, čo píše má z vlastnej hlavy, píše to na základe vlastného výskumu a nemá žiadne vedľajšie úmysly.
Na druhej strane, keďže kniha je v zásade rozsiahlym kompilátom vyplýva z toho viacero nedostatkov. Za prvé, nie je veľmi čítavá, čo robí problém najmä pri kapitolách, ktorých téma čitateľa zas až tak nezaujíma (v mojom prípade to bola veda a technika). Za druhé, trpí tým argumentačná stránka, keďže autor často používa argument z autority, kvôli čomu mu skrátka až tak neveríte. Navyše je dosť možné, že vám začne liezť na nervy, že autor sa neustále odvoláva na iných autorov a to či už súhlasne, alebo nesúhlasne. Až máte chuť spolu s Newmanom žasnúť nad učenosťou, ktorú nám autor zanechal a zároveň sa čudovať prečo nám ju vôbec zanechal.
A za tretie, myslím si, že dôsledkom toho je, že kniha nemá veľký potenciál presvedčiť človeka, ktorý všetkým tým klamstvám verí o opaku, kvôli čomu sa trochu míňa svojmu účelu.
Posledná vec, občas ma dosť rušilo aj to, že tá kniha je miestami písaná dosť bulvárnym štýlom. Bulvárny jej jej názov a rovnako bulvárne na mňa pôsobilo podľa mňa zbytočné hrotenie a absolútne odmietanie tvrdení protistrany.
Záverečný rezultát je teda taký, že ak čitateľ nemá o témach rozoberaných v knihe žiadne, alebo len chabé vedomosti môže mu slúžiť ako prvý nástrel. No pre mňa osobne je táto kniha asi skôr sklamaním a myslím, že Postoj mohol preložiť aj niečo lepšie.
Najväčšou devízou knihy je, že jej autor nie je katolík, ani nepôsobí v žiadnej katolíckej inštitúcií, ale je profesorom na baptistickej vysokej škole, vďaka čomu možno skutočne veriť tomu, že to, čo píše má z vlastnej hlavy, píše to na základe vlastného výskumu a nemá žiadne vedľajšie úmysly.
Na druhej strane, keďže kniha je v zásade rozsiahlym kompilátom vyplýva z toho viacero nedostatkov. Za prvé, nie je veľmi čítavá, čo robí problém najmä pri kapitolách, ktorých téma čitateľa zas až tak nezaujíma (v mojom prípade to bola veda a technika). Za druhé, trpí tým argumentačná stránka, keďže autor často používa argument z autority, kvôli čomu mu skrátka až tak neveríte. Navyše je dosť možné, že vám začne liezť na nervy, že autor sa neustále odvoláva na iných autorov a to či už súhlasne, alebo nesúhlasne. Až máte chuť spolu s Newmanom žasnúť nad učenosťou, ktorú nám autor zanechal a zároveň sa čudovať prečo nám ju vôbec zanechal.
A za tretie, myslím si, že dôsledkom toho je, že kniha nemá veľký potenciál presvedčiť človeka, ktorý všetkým tým klamstvám verí o opaku, kvôli čomu sa trochu míňa svojmu účelu.
Posledná vec, občas ma dosť rušilo aj to, že tá kniha je miestami písaná dosť bulvárnym štýlom. Bulvárny jej jej názov a rovnako bulvárne na mňa pôsobilo podľa mňa zbytočné hrotenie a absolútne odmietanie tvrdení protistrany.
Záverečný rezultát je teda taký, že ak čitateľ nemá o témach rozoberaných v knihe žiadne, alebo len chabé vedomosti môže mu slúžiť ako prvý nástrel. No pre mňa osobne je táto kniha asi skôr sklamaním a myslím, že Postoj mohol preložiť aj niečo lepšie.
June 3, 2021
There's probably something to offend everyone in this book. Stark takes on a full range of controversial topics--the Crusades, the papacy and the Nazis, slavery, and more. Stark is not a Catholic, which probably qualifies him to write this book. Although Stark might swing too far sometimes (in the effort to rebut misleading claims about the Catholic church), he bases his work on sound scholarship. For me, as someone who teaches the Medieval period, there was a lot of material here on the advances and progress made by Medieval Christians.
February 7, 2020
A very interesting book! The author writes very convincingly but at points I feel like he falls on straw man arguments and some cherrypicked information. However, I think overall the book well challenged a lot of long entrenched and false impressions of the Catholic Church from history. The book is well referenced and does adress a wide variety of different misconceptions, defeating them all pretty convincingly. Overall, I would heartily recommend this book to anybody wanting to read a good bit of well researched history!
February 19, 2020
This book was very well written and well researched. It systematically goes through the most common things that the Catholic Church is attacked on and refutes them with solid sources and good analysis.
You could write a book on any one of these chapters(and Stark has written several of them), so I often sound myself wanting every more information about the fascinating topics that he discussed to refute false claims.
The chapters are essentially stand-alone. I might re-read individual chapters again if I ever read a good book about Catholics and the Enlightenment, for example, to see how it fits into his broader argument.
Refreshing to see a non-Catholic reassess his false beliefs and now write in support of the Church and the Papacy
You could write a book on any one of these chapters(and Stark has written several of them), so I often sound myself wanting every more information about the fascinating topics that he discussed to refute false claims.
The chapters are essentially stand-alone. I might re-read individual chapters again if I ever read a good book about Catholics and the Enlightenment, for example, to see how it fits into his broader argument.
Refreshing to see a non-Catholic reassess his false beliefs and now write in support of the Church and the Papacy
February 1, 2020
Whenever a person writes an apology for another group, it is always very appreciated by the group being defended.
Professor Stark (who repeatedly reminds the audience that he is not a Roman Catholic) has written a light and easy-to-read defence of the Catholic Church's role in history. He includes ten chapters on ten themes which are frequently used to malign the Catholic Church. The chapters are:
1) The Sins of Anti-Semitism (as the name implies, the Church's role in anti-semitism culminating in the Holocaust)
2) The Suppressed Gospels (the deliberate hiding of the gnostic/apocryphal gospels and the associated conspiracy theory modern Christology)
3) Persecuting the Tolerant Pagans (regarding the forced conversion of the Roman Empire after the conversion of Constantine)
4) Imposing the Dark Ages (the role of the Church in creating the "Dark Ages")
5) Crusading for Land, Loot and Converts (the Church and the Crusades)
6) Monsters of the Inquisition (most specifically the Spanish Inquisition, but with some reference to the Medieval and Italian inquisitions)
7) Scientific Heresies (the Church's role in suppressing science, especially the case of Galileo)
8) Blessed be Slavery (the Church's failure to stop or even mitigate slavery in the New World)
9) Holy Authoritarianism (the Church's support of totalitarian regimes, from Absolute Monarchy, and to Fascism in Italy, Germany and most specifically Spain, and opposition to democratic movements such as the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution or again Spain)
10) Protestant Modernity (the Weberian thesis of the Protestant work ethic and the rise of capitalism)
Many if not all of these themes are familiar to anyone who has spent any time in the west. Many originated as Protestant accusations but were quickly adopted by secular or Marxist historians and have become culturally ubiquitous platitudes. Professor Stark does an admirable job detailing the history of the accusations and then meticulously detailing the current scholarship on the issue to dispel the myth.
That said, three minor critiques:
1) despite the wonderful footnoting of a fairly wide variety of sources, the book is far from academic. Why Professor Stark found it necessary to use exclamation marks is beyond me. The book reads as a series of apologetics articles found in a Knights of Columbus magazine and not as serious scholarship.
2) though I appreciate the defence, Professor Stark vacilates between definitions of "The Church" in order to cherry-pick said defence. At times "the Church" is synonymous with the hierarchy, or the Papacy, or the clergy, or the entire Church militant, a handful of Jesuits could represent the Church at one moment, then a solitary Bishop at another. Often however "the Church's" behaviour is not monolithic and even is self-contradictory.
3) Which leads to the third critique, that sometimes the effort to focus on singular positive aspects results in a disproportionate emphasis on certain episodes at the expense of others. As a correction of the prevailing narrative, this is understandable and necessary, but the whirlwind defence descends into superficiality at points.
All that said, the book is a good collection of sources (Professor Stark even has suggested authors to read in each section) that can lead those interested in deepening their knowledge with more academic books.
Professor Stark (who repeatedly reminds the audience that he is not a Roman Catholic) has written a light and easy-to-read defence of the Catholic Church's role in history. He includes ten chapters on ten themes which are frequently used to malign the Catholic Church. The chapters are:
1) The Sins of Anti-Semitism (as the name implies, the Church's role in anti-semitism culminating in the Holocaust)
2) The Suppressed Gospels (the deliberate hiding of the gnostic/apocryphal gospels and the associated conspiracy theory modern Christology)
3) Persecuting the Tolerant Pagans (regarding the forced conversion of the Roman Empire after the conversion of Constantine)
4) Imposing the Dark Ages (the role of the Church in creating the "Dark Ages")
5) Crusading for Land, Loot and Converts (the Church and the Crusades)
6) Monsters of the Inquisition (most specifically the Spanish Inquisition, but with some reference to the Medieval and Italian inquisitions)
7) Scientific Heresies (the Church's role in suppressing science, especially the case of Galileo)
8) Blessed be Slavery (the Church's failure to stop or even mitigate slavery in the New World)
9) Holy Authoritarianism (the Church's support of totalitarian regimes, from Absolute Monarchy, and to Fascism in Italy, Germany and most specifically Spain, and opposition to democratic movements such as the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution or again Spain)
10) Protestant Modernity (the Weberian thesis of the Protestant work ethic and the rise of capitalism)
Many if not all of these themes are familiar to anyone who has spent any time in the west. Many originated as Protestant accusations but were quickly adopted by secular or Marxist historians and have become culturally ubiquitous platitudes. Professor Stark does an admirable job detailing the history of the accusations and then meticulously detailing the current scholarship on the issue to dispel the myth.
That said, three minor critiques:
1) despite the wonderful footnoting of a fairly wide variety of sources, the book is far from academic. Why Professor Stark found it necessary to use exclamation marks is beyond me. The book reads as a series of apologetics articles found in a Knights of Columbus magazine and not as serious scholarship.
2) though I appreciate the defence, Professor Stark vacilates between definitions of "The Church" in order to cherry-pick said defence. At times "the Church" is synonymous with the hierarchy, or the Papacy, or the clergy, or the entire Church militant, a handful of Jesuits could represent the Church at one moment, then a solitary Bishop at another. Often however "the Church's" behaviour is not monolithic and even is self-contradictory.
3) Which leads to the third critique, that sometimes the effort to focus on singular positive aspects results in a disproportionate emphasis on certain episodes at the expense of others. As a correction of the prevailing narrative, this is understandable and necessary, but the whirlwind defence descends into superficiality at points.
All that said, the book is a good collection of sources (Professor Stark even has suggested authors to read in each section) that can lead those interested in deepening their knowledge with more academic books.
August 7, 2022
This is one of the most appealing and well written historic accounts I’ve ever come across. It’s impossible to put down, each chapter is filled with so many interesting and often curious facts.
One of the most relevant things I can say about this book is that the author, a professor of history, is not catholic, he was raised Protestant and later became a self-described agnostic, so he really has nothing to gain from defending the Catholic Church. He does a superb job of presenting the facts and the historical context they occurred to shed light on the role of the Catholic Church and its actions through history.
He dispels so many myths, some of them I was completely blown away when reading, as with the chapter on the inquisition and on the invention of capitalism.
I wish I had come across this book much sooner. No doubt I’ll be reading it again.
One of the most relevant things I can say about this book is that the author, a professor of history, is not catholic, he was raised Protestant and later became a self-described agnostic, so he really has nothing to gain from defending the Catholic Church. He does a superb job of presenting the facts and the historical context they occurred to shed light on the role of the Catholic Church and its actions through history.
He dispels so many myths, some of them I was completely blown away when reading, as with the chapter on the inquisition and on the invention of capitalism.
I wish I had come across this book much sooner. No doubt I’ll be reading it again.
November 29, 2023
Man, there's some stuff thats great in here (most gnostic texts were dismissed because they are not authentic, the "dark" ages were actually a great period of human advancement, the crusades were about as horrible as any other medieval war, prominent church thinkers came up with the foundations of western logicistical systems) but there's so much glossing over some serious problems people have with church history. Stark claims the church fostered scientific progress, while simultaneously waving away the story of Galileo. He shifts the blame of the church for the many antisemitic crimes of the middle ages as the actions of misinformed mobs. He discusses the abolition of roman-style slavery by the church, but says nothing about the contribution of the church to chattel slavery.
I don't fully understand who his audience is, or even what his thesis is. Of course the catholic church is the foundation of western culture, but it also caused many horrible wrongs in its history, just like any hugely powerful structure in society. Many of the sources he cites as anti-catholic are either obviously not accurate (the DaVinci code, the gospel of judas debacle) or are obviously maliciously motivated (pamphlets published by protestants during the reformation). It seems difficult to parce his claim of widespread anti-catholic misinformation about history when most of his debunkings could be found in any western civ text book.
Honestly, skip it, he's condescending and I learned more reading Diarmaid McCullough.
I don't fully understand who his audience is, or even what his thesis is. Of course the catholic church is the foundation of western culture, but it also caused many horrible wrongs in its history, just like any hugely powerful structure in society. Many of the sources he cites as anti-catholic are either obviously not accurate (the DaVinci code, the gospel of judas debacle) or are obviously maliciously motivated (pamphlets published by protestants during the reformation). It seems difficult to parce his claim of widespread anti-catholic misinformation about history when most of his debunkings could be found in any western civ text book.
Honestly, skip it, he's condescending and I learned more reading Diarmaid McCullough.
July 17, 2018
La obra de Stark, quien no es católico, tiene un propósito claro: alegar en contra de los ataques usuales que recibe el Catolicismo. Esas acusaciones son las del antisemitismo, evangelios suprimidos, persecución de paganos, la imposición de la ignorancia en la Edad Media, las cruzadas, la inquisición, las herejías científicas, la esclavitud y otras.
En cada tema, el autor la explica la acusación para luego mostrar evidencias históricas que la colocan en perspectiva y la ponen en duda o incluso, la niegan. La realidad es mucho más compleja que esas críticas superficiales.
No es un contenido completo y totalmente desarrollado, lo que sería imposible en un solo libro; pero sí es una muy aceptable introducción al tema políticamente incorrecto de mostrar la debilidad de tantas ideas falsas sobre el Catolicismo.
Quien quiera profundizar acerca de cada tema deberá acudir a obras más especializadas, pero quien quiera tener algunas buenas armas para responder a los ataques usuales, la otra le permitirá hacerlo con éxito.
¡Ah, y sí, sí tiene una pequeña parte dedicada a Galileo!
[Nota de sopresa: como en otras ocasiones de otros libros, muchas de las calificaciones dadas a esta obra son de cinco estrellas. Me preguntó cuántas le darían a La Democracia en América, o a Los Miserables. Tres estrellas es una buena calificación en sí misma].
En cada tema, el autor la explica la acusación para luego mostrar evidencias históricas que la colocan en perspectiva y la ponen en duda o incluso, la niegan. La realidad es mucho más compleja que esas críticas superficiales.
No es un contenido completo y totalmente desarrollado, lo que sería imposible en un solo libro; pero sí es una muy aceptable introducción al tema políticamente incorrecto de mostrar la debilidad de tantas ideas falsas sobre el Catolicismo.
Quien quiera profundizar acerca de cada tema deberá acudir a obras más especializadas, pero quien quiera tener algunas buenas armas para responder a los ataques usuales, la otra le permitirá hacerlo con éxito.
¡Ah, y sí, sí tiene una pequeña parte dedicada a Galileo!
[Nota de sopresa: como en otras ocasiones de otros libros, muchas de las calificaciones dadas a esta obra son de cinco estrellas. Me preguntó cuántas le darían a La Democracia en América, o a Los Miserables. Tres estrellas es una buena calificación en sí misma].
August 11, 2019
I grew up in a Protestant denomination that made much of the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. In fact, major doctrines in the denomination were built on badly interpreted texts in these two books full of dreams and predictive prophecy. In attempting to find literal real-world events that "fulfilled" the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation, the Roman Catholic Church was constructed as a worldwide evil power that would play a significant role in events leading to the end of the world, starting way back from its inception. Because of this, the denomination I used to belong to, and many other fundamentalist denominations, have demonised the Roman Catholic Church. There is no doubt that, like all organisations, Roman Catholicism has its problems -- we have seen the incredible evil of child sexual abuse uncovered within the priesthood of the church in recent decades. But much of what has been ascribed to the Roman Catholic Church is complete nonsense. Rodney Stark's book, Bearing False Witness, compellingly demonstrates, with incontrovertible evidence, that the accusations of such things as anti-Semitism, suppression of gospels, persecution of pagans, and support of slavery are either exaggerated or completely false. This book is a must read for anyone who has been seduced by religious or secular anti-Catholic "history".
June 1, 2022
The History That Was Hidden From You
An explosive exposé of the anti-Catholic historical falsehoods perpetuated for long by most historians. First off, the author, Rodney Stark, (who is agnostic) clearly does not have a bias toward Catholicism. In his own words, “I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history.” In each chapter, he debunks the fallacies, which have been presented as historical truth and become part of common culture — including, but not limited to, the beliefs that the Catholic Church condoned antisemitism, suppressed apocryphal gospels, persecuted pagans, imposed the Dark Ages, sent the Crusaders to convert the heathen, wreaked havoc through the Spanish Inquisition, encouraged anti-science attitudes, supported slavery, and opposed capitalism.
The book starts by exploring the oft-misunderstood relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews. It is a little-known fact that Pope Pius XII, pejoratively called as “Hitler’s Pope” helped save the Jews of Italy to the extent of angering the Nazi regime, which labeled him the “pro-Jewish Pope.” As Dr. Stark notes, “the Roman Catholic Church has a long and honorable record of stout opposition to attacks upon Jews.”
For long, Christian Emperors such as Constantine have come under fire for “persecuting pagans.” Nothing can be farther from the truth, given the fact the Constantine supported religious pluralism and there was a “period of relative tolerance and tranquility between Christians and pagans” during his reign.
It’s interesting to learn that it was during the so-called Dark Ages that “Europe took the great technological leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.” Anti-religious intellectuals “invented” the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, thereby promulgating the falsified idea that “religious darkness had finally been dispelled by secular humanism.” Hence, it is absurd to attribute the Renaissance as “the rebirth of intellectual progress following the Dark Ages because there never were any Dark Ages.” What the proponents of the Enlightenment actually initiated was “the tradition of angry secular attacks on religion in the name of science.”
Catholicism was not anti-science but the majority of Catholics “held the notion that science should be welcomed as a faithful handmaid of theology.” Dr. Stark goes on to disprove the falsehood that the central scientific figures of the “Enlightenment” were irreligious. In his research analysis, he identifies the significant scientists of the era and concludes that 60% of them were devout. As he observes, “the rise of science was inseparable from Christian theology, for the latter gave direction and confidence to the former.”
Contrary to popular misconception, “the Crusades weren’t unprovoked, and the Crusaders weren’t barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims.” The irony is that the same intellectuals who lambast the “misery and injustice” imposed by the Crusades “fail to admit any such consequences of Muslim imperialism.” As the author rightfully points out, the Crusades were fundamentally defensive campaigns precipitated by Islamic provocations and motivated by the threat looming over the Holy Land. For most readers, it would come as a surprise that the Crusaders didn’t attempt to impose Christianity on the Muslims and “allowed the Muslims in Crusader-won territories to retain their religion and property, and the Crusader kingdoms contained far more Muslim residents than Christians.” Most Western historians biasedly depicted the Crusaders as “barbaric and bigoted warmongers” while praising the Saracens as “paladins of chivalry.” Such historians not only lionized Saladin while ignoring his ruthless side but also gave little or no coverage to the Baibars, who were behind “the single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era.” Dr. Stark further debunks the belief that “Muslim bitterness over their mistreatment by the Christian West could be dated back to the Crusades” by arguing that the “current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by post-WWI British and French imperialism and the post-WWII creation of the State of Israel.”
Writing about the Spanish Inquisition, he reveals how, after Spain emerged as the major Catholic Power, Britain and Holland launched propaganda campaigns “accusing the Spanish Empire of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities.”
Those who only see the cup half empty turn a blind eye to the hard fact that the Catholic Church opposed slavery, wherein many saints declared that slavery is a sin and multiple Popes issued papal bulls against New World slavery and the enslavement of the natives. The Church’s failure to enforce anti-slavery reform in the New World reflected the “weakness of papal authority at this time, not the indifference of the Church to the sin of slavery.” As the author notes, “The problem wasn’t that the Church failed to condemn slavery; it was that few heard it and most did not listen.”
Dr. Stark criticizes scholars like Voltaire and Bertrand Russell, who vehemently attacked the Church because they loathed religion altogether. Anti-religious thought eventually culminated in disastrous events such as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Another notion dispelled is the misconception that the Church favored tyrannical governments. Rather than opposing freedom and democracy, the Church “opposed tyrants, especially those who attempted to destroy the Church.”
Furthermore, the author refutes the belief that the Catholic Church was anti-capitalist and that “Protestantism gave birth to a unique work ethic that spawned capitalism, and thus it is that modernity is a direct result of the Reformation.” He reasons that the Church played “an active role in the Commercial Revolution.”
What is remarkable is that Dr. Stark debunks all these falsehoods without whitewashing the negative aspects of the Catholic Church. In this polarized age where anti-Catholic sentiment remains rampant, this book sheds light on the truth.
An explosive exposé of the anti-Catholic historical falsehoods perpetuated for long by most historians. First off, the author, Rodney Stark, (who is agnostic) clearly does not have a bias toward Catholicism. In his own words, “I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history.” In each chapter, he debunks the fallacies, which have been presented as historical truth and become part of common culture — including, but not limited to, the beliefs that the Catholic Church condoned antisemitism, suppressed apocryphal gospels, persecuted pagans, imposed the Dark Ages, sent the Crusaders to convert the heathen, wreaked havoc through the Spanish Inquisition, encouraged anti-science attitudes, supported slavery, and opposed capitalism.
The book starts by exploring the oft-misunderstood relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews. It is a little-known fact that Pope Pius XII, pejoratively called as “Hitler’s Pope” helped save the Jews of Italy to the extent of angering the Nazi regime, which labeled him the “pro-Jewish Pope.” As Dr. Stark notes, “the Roman Catholic Church has a long and honorable record of stout opposition to attacks upon Jews.”
For long, Christian Emperors such as Constantine have come under fire for “persecuting pagans.” Nothing can be farther from the truth, given the fact the Constantine supported religious pluralism and there was a “period of relative tolerance and tranquility between Christians and pagans” during his reign.
It’s interesting to learn that it was during the so-called Dark Ages that “Europe took the great technological leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.” Anti-religious intellectuals “invented” the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, thereby promulgating the falsified idea that “religious darkness had finally been dispelled by secular humanism.” Hence, it is absurd to attribute the Renaissance as “the rebirth of intellectual progress following the Dark Ages because there never were any Dark Ages.” What the proponents of the Enlightenment actually initiated was “the tradition of angry secular attacks on religion in the name of science.”
Catholicism was not anti-science but the majority of Catholics “held the notion that science should be welcomed as a faithful handmaid of theology.” Dr. Stark goes on to disprove the falsehood that the central scientific figures of the “Enlightenment” were irreligious. In his research analysis, he identifies the significant scientists of the era and concludes that 60% of them were devout. As he observes, “the rise of science was inseparable from Christian theology, for the latter gave direction and confidence to the former.”
Contrary to popular misconception, “the Crusades weren’t unprovoked, and the Crusaders weren’t barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims.” The irony is that the same intellectuals who lambast the “misery and injustice” imposed by the Crusades “fail to admit any such consequences of Muslim imperialism.” As the author rightfully points out, the Crusades were fundamentally defensive campaigns precipitated by Islamic provocations and motivated by the threat looming over the Holy Land. For most readers, it would come as a surprise that the Crusaders didn’t attempt to impose Christianity on the Muslims and “allowed the Muslims in Crusader-won territories to retain their religion and property, and the Crusader kingdoms contained far more Muslim residents than Christians.” Most Western historians biasedly depicted the Crusaders as “barbaric and bigoted warmongers” while praising the Saracens as “paladins of chivalry.” Such historians not only lionized Saladin while ignoring his ruthless side but also gave little or no coverage to the Baibars, who were behind “the single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era.” Dr. Stark further debunks the belief that “Muslim bitterness over their mistreatment by the Christian West could be dated back to the Crusades” by arguing that the “current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by post-WWI British and French imperialism and the post-WWII creation of the State of Israel.”
Writing about the Spanish Inquisition, he reveals how, after Spain emerged as the major Catholic Power, Britain and Holland launched propaganda campaigns “accusing the Spanish Empire of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities.”
Those who only see the cup half empty turn a blind eye to the hard fact that the Catholic Church opposed slavery, wherein many saints declared that slavery is a sin and multiple Popes issued papal bulls against New World slavery and the enslavement of the natives. The Church’s failure to enforce anti-slavery reform in the New World reflected the “weakness of papal authority at this time, not the indifference of the Church to the sin of slavery.” As the author notes, “The problem wasn’t that the Church failed to condemn slavery; it was that few heard it and most did not listen.”
Dr. Stark criticizes scholars like Voltaire and Bertrand Russell, who vehemently attacked the Church because they loathed religion altogether. Anti-religious thought eventually culminated in disastrous events such as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Another notion dispelled is the misconception that the Church favored tyrannical governments. Rather than opposing freedom and democracy, the Church “opposed tyrants, especially those who attempted to destroy the Church.”
Furthermore, the author refutes the belief that the Catholic Church was anti-capitalist and that “Protestantism gave birth to a unique work ethic that spawned capitalism, and thus it is that modernity is a direct result of the Reformation.” He reasons that the Church played “an active role in the Commercial Revolution.”
What is remarkable is that Dr. Stark debunks all these falsehoods without whitewashing the negative aspects of the Catholic Church. In this polarized age where anti-Catholic sentiment remains rampant, this book sheds light on the truth.
March 3, 2018
There is a lot of interesting information in this book and the author has provided ample footnoting and authorities. Because this a historical, non-fiction book, I was turned off by the writer's personal biases which he proclaimed over and over. Rodney Stark may be doing all of us a service by debunking the major anti-Catholic myths but his staunch religious conservatism and anti-left/liberal/socialist/communist views detract from his message. As a Jewish child in Canada who experienced name-calling, shunning and physical violence from my Catholic peers, I can't believe 100% of Stark's recounting of how good the Church was to Jews. Also, I did not find most of his footnotes added to the narrative and ended up ignoring them.
While I approve of historians bringing us the truth about history, I would like to read about it without snide comments.
While I approve of historians bringing us the truth about history, I would like to read about it without snide comments.
August 8, 2017
Chapters on gnostic gospels, pagan persecution, dark ages, and inquisition are good, but some of the later chapters on authoritarianism and capitalism seem suspect. Why is the idea of the Protestant work ethic anti-catholic history? Stark gets mired in fighting imaginary dragons, making this book ultimately less than I thought it would be.
July 16, 2020
Alcuni temi interessanti dell'anticattolicesimo, con i quali avevo già familiarità, che però sono esposti in maniera sistematica. Estremamente interessante e variegata - specialmente per un anglosassone - la bibliografia, che presenta nomi continentali di assoluto livello.
Continuo a non capire la scelta dell'autore (o dell'editore?) che usa "CE-BCE" per le date.
Continuo a non capire la scelta dell'autore (o dell'editore?) che usa "CE-BCE" per le date.
January 31, 2017
Very informative and written by a Protestant. So it's not one of those apologies for Catholicism.
Stark covers slavery, rise of science, the Dark Ages, the Inquisition and lots more, describing the Christian roots of our culture and dispelling the oft repeated exaggerations and myths.
Stark covers slavery, rise of science, the Dark Ages, the Inquisition and lots more, describing the Christian roots of our culture and dispelling the oft repeated exaggerations and myths.
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