Anti-Catholicism is not only accepted in most institutions in the ‘Western’ world, it is usually assumed. Anti-White racism is not far behind. There is little to dispute this claim in reality. The very institution which created the modern world – the Catholic Church – is routinely defamed and rubbished. The small percentage of pedophile priests who abuse young boys, usually under the moniker ‘sex scandal’, while obviously criminally immoral and egregious is a small fraction of the sexual assaults which occur in the public school system, or public sports systems, in any year. But no one is interested in that. Lurid portrayals of lusty ribald monks, nuns and priests sell more copy. Not much has changed since the 14th century and Gargantua’s impious exaggeration of the Church’s sexual impropriety. No mention is made within the regulated mainstream of the Muslim sex Jihad, the child abuse by ‘Trans’ psychopaths, or the sex slavery within Europe’s ‘districts’ where women are sold as slabs of meat. The modern Sodom and Gomorrah is deemed ‘liberal civilisation’. Its depravity, stupidity and immorality is hardly new and reaches all the way back to the first development of towns and settled existence.
Oddly the most vociferously Cathophobic can be found in the very institutions which were created by Catholics. The Church inter-alia built and developed: universities, charities, international law, science, the maths, legal infrastructure, courts, transport, mechanised agriculture, long-distance trade, international banking, accounting, blast furnaces and industrial revolutions, advanced metallurgy, precursors to modern railroads, mining techniques, architectural revolutions, artistic advancements, libraries, bookbinding and distribution, hospitals, medical innovations, parliaments, assemblies, to name just a few. It is hard to reconcile Cathophobic irrationalism with the modern world.
Western civilisation, now ‘mutating’ into a totalitarianism, was built by the Catholic Church. The legacies of Greece and Rome were saved by the Church and infused into Catholic doctrine, synthesised, categorised, explained and defended by the greatest philosopher in history, St. Thomas Aquinas. Yet in the popular culture, advanced by atheists and ‘enlighteners’, the Church is given no credit for keeping Western Civilisation alive. Without the Church the gradual takeover of Rome by Germanic tribes, would have ended very differently and much to our detriment. The German tribes did not bring or offer anything new, they greedily consumed the legacy of Rome and turned to the Church for the cultivation and management of society.
Recent scholarship is decidedly turning in the favour of Catholics. It is clear that the Inquisition, which handed over to state powers some 3.000 heretics to be burnt, was not nearly as omnipresent or powerful as claimed. By contrast Muslims murder 5.000 Christians a year, just in Nigeria – but few know this. The Galileo affair was not over science but politics, with the Church the largest single supporter of astronomical science in world history, including today’s institutions which fund cosmological investigations. Galileo never offered proof for heliocentricity (offering tides), and was ignorant of the Christian Kepler’s math which provided the logic supporting the theory. The 17th century pagan mystic Bruno was not burnt at the stake for the sake of ‘science’ but because he stated that there were many universes, copies of the world and by extension the divinity of Christ and the authority of the Church were void and irrelevant. Many such myths when analysed implode very quickly.
We do know that Catholic priest Nicholas Steno began modern geological assessments. Father Kirchner is the progenitor of Egyptology. Priest Riccioli was the first person to measure rate of acceleration of a freely falling body (not Galileo). Priest Roger Boscovich designed modern atomic theory. Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology was known as the Jesuit science. We have 35 moon craters named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.
We do know that in all areas of life after the Germanic takeover of Rome, there is scarcely a single endeavour in which monks did not play the central role. Monks created networks of model factories for breeding livestock, centres of academe and scholarship, institutions of spiritual improvement and prayer, pharmacies, hospitals, hospices, libraries, roads, bridges, aqueducts, running water, books, optics and eye glasses, and trade. To name just a few areas. The Benedictines formed by St. Benedict in the mid 6th century really are the generators of civilisation. Their impact on the forward progress of man is the most fantastic story rarely told. The other monkish orders were not far behind in their importance and in many areas of Europe, the Cistercians (12th century) were fundament to the transformation and usage of land and soil.
We do know that Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic professor was the first man to develop international codes of law, in relation to the mistreatment of Ameri-Indians by the Spanish. He speculated and expressed human and natural law rights and the rights of the natives to fair and legal treatment. This is simply following in the general pattern of Western law, a tradition based on Church law. The modern legal system is entirely based on the codes and accumulated and organised legal traditions of the Church which superseded the hodgepodge of local and contradictory legal statutes. Justinian’s codex from the 6th century is the foundation of all Western legal systems. The ‘rights of men’ do not emanate from Locke or Paine, but are found in the far distant past, elevated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, but found in Catholic law dating back to Charlemagne.
We do know that modern economics and economic ‘thought’ was purloined from the medieval Scholastics. Concepts around pricing, free markets, regulation, economic distortions, taxation and other issues are found in Church theological implementations in the 14th to 16th centuries. The extended long-distance terms of trade, in existence since 1000 A.D. necessitated advanced ideas about commercial relationships, commercial laws, proper and moral rates of interest, the relationship between money and inflation, the debasement of coinage (which by itself could trigger a revolt) and how to regulate product quality and honesty in manufacture (an example is substituting flour with sawdust). Guilds and associations formed in part to not only protect access to occupations but to protect consumers from fraud and to guarantee quality and end price gouging and extreme profiteering.
There is much that the Cathophobes don’t know about history or civilisation. Their ignorance is not enlightened, nor scientific. Not every Pope, Bishop or Priest was worthy of praise. Not every action by the Church or its components was moral or good. Not every activity was right or just. Many crimes, follies, and desecrations suffuse Catholic history. But in the main, on balance, it saved civilisation many times, including rolling back and demolishing the Muslim Jihad. Today of course the Catholic Church is a far different and quite inferior imitation of its medieval self.