[Paracelsus]

(08-31-2015 09:41 PM)Truth Teller Wrote:  

(08-30-2015 07:49 PM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  

This is an important point to raise. People who sweep the catholic church together with Orthodox and Protestant divisions and call it 'the church' or 'christianity' are making an error. The entire protestant separation happened because people believed that the word of god is contained in the bible, not a man with a funny white hat. The catholic church kept the bible out of normal people's hands and said "oh no, we'll read it all to you in a language that you don't understand and then tell you what it means...and then trump it with the Pope's authority if we need to".

Remember, catholics are the only 'church' that worships Mary, catholics are ones who ran the spanish inquisition...and guess what people were killed for? Being protestant sympathizers, owning bibles, disavowing the pope etc. Catholics are the ones with the global kid fucking scandal...not 'christians' or 'the church' a a whole.

So a few comments, first, Catholics don't worship Mary. Prayers involving Mary center around Mary's intercession with God. Mary is not God. Second, sola scriptura is fairly incoherent. Third, and finally, Jesus tells Peter to found a Church, and he and his successors will have the ability to "bind and loose" (i.e. make doctrinal decisions).

I was not going to start cracking on about this subject, but what the hell.

Let's talk about the Spanish Inquisition in particular. It's one of the first things dragged out to stick one up the Catholic Church, but it only takes the briefest read on Wikipedia to conclude that it was not run by the Pope, i.e. not run by the Catholic Church's hierarchy.

As with Henry VIII's breakaway from the Catholic Church, forming the Church of England, the Spanish inquisition was the brainchild of the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. And it started basically out of paranoia that those Jews who hadn't submitted to forced conversion to Christianity were still practicing Judaism in secret. It was essentially part of the fallout from the Spanish Reconquista: having taken back their country from Islam, the Iberians weren't terribly keen on the idea of multiculturalism, and distrusted Jews as much as anyone else.

Pope Sixtus IV vehemently objected to this. While there was an office of the Inquisition in the Church hierarchy, it hadn't been used for about two hundred years at the time of the Albigensian Crusade. It was meant to be run solely under Papal authority and oversight, and it wasn't meant to be under the control of secular monarchs. The problem being that Ferdinand then blackmailed Sixtus: unless Sixtus gave Ferdinand the power to both control and run the Inquisition in Spain independently of Papal authority, he would withdraw military support from Rome at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome. This was a time period when Islamic power was ascendant: a couple hundred years down the line, only an alliance of Catholic (and Protestant) nations turned back the Turks in southeastern Europe. Sixtus could not do without military support to defend the Catholic Church's capital and therefore issued a Papal bull that handed over power to run the Inquisition to Ferdinand.

The Spanish inquisition then proceeded -- as with the Fourth Crusade, which similarly threw off Papal control -- to go half-mad, burning people left, right, and centre. Sixtus kept trying to get control back, but he was again threatened with withdrawal of military support if he countermanded Ferdinand's demands or (as Innocent VIII later tried) created any right of appeal to Rome from the Inquisition's decisions.

Could the Popes have done a lot more to stop it? There was, of course, excommunication ... eeeexcept that means of controlling Catholic kings was more or less dead and buried from a few hundred years earlier; Henry VIII was excommunicated, and his country survived and thrived; German Holy Roman Emperors had been excommunicated but Germany lived on. But beyond that, the Pope, while a secular ruler, had no army or any feasible means of marching in and stopping the Inquisition personally.