Hitler's Pope and 9 Other Anti-Catholic Myths Disproven By History

Roman Catholics have gotten a bad reputation: they're responsible for the Dark Ages, the Crusades, and the Inquisition. They're anti-science, anti-Semites, and anti-freedom. Each of these accusations is an oversimplification that perverts history.

According to a new, groundbreaking book by sociologist and historian Rodney Stark, the truth is far more friendly to the Catholic Church, and those who say otherwise are overlooking important developments in the study of history. In Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History, Stark rebuts 10 historical myths that reflect badly on the Catholic church.

Little do many of us know, Catholics actually pioneered capitalism, laid the foundations for science, abolished slavery, and denounced witch hunts. That doesn't sound so dark to me.

Stark is not a Catholic, and neither am I, but these truths are very important for everyone to know. Here is PJ Media's list of the ten anti-Catholic myths Stark debunks.

The Spanish Inquisition is synonymous with bigotry, torture, and book burning. Historians have estimated that between 10,000 and 300,000 were burned at the stake, and one claimed that it condemned 3 million.

These estimates are based on malicious lies. The myth began with "Montanus," the pen name of a renegade Spanish monk who became a Lutheran and fled to the Netherlands. Protestants longed to hear of the horrors of Catholic prisons and tribunals, and Montanus gave them an "inside view."

Luckily, the actual Inquisition kept meticulous records for hundreds of years. The beginning years were poorly documented, and historians agree those were the bloodiest -- about 1,500 people were executed (by the Spanish authorities -- the Inquisition never executed anyone). During the fully recorded period (1480 to 1700), there are 44,674 cases, and only 826 people were executed. This is a travesty, but nothing close to the horrific myths we know and love. This is about ten deaths per year, while English courts averaged 750 hangings a year between 1530 and 1630.

Also compared to other courts in Europe at the time, the Inquisition was more restrained when it came to torture. "Church law limited torture to one session lasting no more than fifteen minutes, and there could be no danger to life or limb," Stark notes. While this still allows a wide range of pain and suffering, torture was only used in about 2 percent of all recorded cases.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Inquisition actually clamped down on witch hunting. In the late Middle Ages and especially in the "Enlightenment," fear of witches led the masses to seize and kill many across Europe. Ironically, the Catholic Church allowed magic (medical science was only in its infancy, and magic seemed to work just as well), and most of those suspected of being witches were trying to use magic sanctioned by the Church.

The Inquisition actually listened to these people, and unlike other courts at the time, they made a distinction between "the implicit and explicit invocation of demons." In Barcelona in 1549, a local branch of the Inquisition ordered 7 suspected witches be burned, but the overarching authority, the Suprema, sent an investigator who ended up pardoning the women and executing those who conducted the witch hunting!

The Inquisition didn't support witch hunting, instead "it was their influence, and especially their discrediting of evidence gained by torture, that brought witch-burning to an end in Catholic areas--an effect that soon seeped into the Protestant areas as well."

More HERE 




Corporate Social Activism Is All About the Dollars
  
In recent years, the NBA has become famously political. During the heyday of the Black Lives Matter movement, the NBA permitted players to wear slogan-printed T-shirts in support, and stars like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul spoke out loudly on the issue. The Sacramento Kings actually announced a partnership with the local branch of the movement. And NBA players have had little problem denouncing President Trump, whom James called a “bum.” In 2017, Commissioner Adam Silver actually tried to blackmail the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, by pulling the All-Star Game, all in an attempt to restore the so-called “bathroom bill” for transgender people.

The NBA has reaped the benefit from its benevolent attitude toward left-leaning social activism, too. Silver, like former Commissioner David Stern before him, has been praised ad infinitum by the press, compared favorably to that alleged corporate hobgoblin Roger Goodell of the NFL. Silver told CNN just last year that “part of being an NBA player” is social activism and a “sense of an obligation, social responsibility, a desire to speak up directly about issues that are important.” Silver stated the league wants players to “be multi-dimensional people and fully participate as citizens.” He specifically explained that the league had a role in ensuring that the situation remains “safe” for players afraid of suffering career blowback.

Then the NBA came up against its own corporate interests.

And the NBA caved.

Late last week, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted an eminently uncontroversial statement: “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” That’s about as milquetoast a statement about Hong Kong as it’s possible to make. But that didn’t matter to the Chinese government, which immediately stated that it would cut relations with the NBA and the Rockets in particular. Speculation quickly ran rampant that Morey might lose his job. Morey was forced to delete his tweet and walk it back: “I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China. I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.” James Harden, star of the team, tweeted, “We apologize. We love China. We love playing there.” Silver’s NBA put out an apology in Chinese saying (as translated), “We are extremely disappointed in the inappropriate comment by the general manager of the Houston Rockets.”

So, what happened to all of that corporate do-gooderism? It simply disappeared upon contact with reality. That’s the sad truth of corporate politics: If it takes kowtowing to the Chinese communist government to earn a quick dollar, corporations will do it. Ask Google. Or Hollywood studios. Or the NBA.

All of which gives the lie to the bizarre notion that corporations are handmaidens for capitalist exploitation. They’re not. They simply follow dollars. If they can grab those dollars through cronyism with governments, they will. In fact, that’s easier than retaining a competitive advantage in a free and open marketplace.

There’s another, more important point at stake. When corporations virtue signal to the left, they’re doing so for the same reason the NBA just bowed to China: dollars. The NBA understands that American leftists are far more censorious than conservatives — and that means that openly pandering to the American left earns product loyalty from that political contingent, without serious consequences from American conservatives. It’s not about pure principle for Adam Silver and company — or for any other newly woke corporations discovering their inner social activists. It’s about the green. It always is.

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Dems' Bigoted Attack on Tax-Exempt Churches

O'Rourke's comments should remind us why the First Amendment exists.

The freedom of religion is literally the first right enshrined by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution. Yet far too many Americans fail to understand that the Constitution does not grant these rights; it protects them. These rights are given to us as children of our Creator. They can only be infringed upon, but never taken away.

Yet today’s Democrats believe these rights are up for debate, with favored rights being protected and disfavored rights being restricted or denied altogether. They claim pornography is protected free speech, but political dissent (unless it is their own) is not. They relentlessly try to repeal the Second Amendment.

But maybe nowhere is leftist loathing of certain rights more evident than with the freedom of religion. From forcing nuns to pay for birth control, to banning Bibles and Christmas carols at VA hospitals, so-called “progressives” file lawsuits at every turn, opposing any display of religion in the public square. Not to mention the Rainbow Mafia’s inexorable efforts to destroy the reputation and livelihood of Christian business owners who decline to provide creative services for same-sex ceremonies.

The Left has long spun its anti-religious bigotry as tolerance for non-Christian religions and atheists. But at a CNN “LGBTQ town hall” event last week, Democrat presidential candidates enthusiastically took the opportunity to vilify people of faith in order to buttress their LGBTQ bona fides.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren decried the “hatefulness” of Christians who believe in the biblical definition of marriage. Openly homosexual South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who claims to be a Christian, lamented that such Bible-believers make “God smaller.” Sen. Cory Booker claimed people “use religion as a justification for discrimination.”

However, it was soon-to-be failed Democrat presidential candidate Robert Francis “Call me Beto” O'Rourke who pulled back the curtain and displayed the dirty truth — Democrats hate Christians.

Referencing his “LGBTQ Plan,” where O'Rourke says religious freedom is a fundamental right but should not be used to discriminate, CNN moderator Don Lemon asked, “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities — should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?”

O'Rourke replied “Yes! … There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us. And so as president, we’re going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

In a follow-up tweet, O'Rourke partially walked back his bigotry, stating, “Anyone can believe what they want — but organizations that discriminate when they provide public services should not be tax-exempt.”

This is deeply disturbing.

First, it essentially reduces the freedom of religion from a constitutionally protected natural right to a grant of privilege by government, revocable if it offends politically favored citizens.

Second, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of why churches are tax-exempt. Churches are tax-exempt because they provide a tremendous benefit for society. As the Washington Examiner editorial board explains, “Churches, like other charities, provide many public goods, educating, feeding, and providing healthcare for believers and nonbelievers alike. They also create community among citizens … particularly among the working class and the middle class.”

Churches also teach honesty, generosity, compassion, tolerance, and virtue, which benefits society as a whole.

Yet even more importantly than the churches’ social good is the Constitution’s prohibition against government intrusion into religion. The Left holds as inviolable the Constitution’s supposed “wall of separation of church and state” (which is not in the Constitution, but in a previously obscure letter from President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut). Yet they have it exactly backwards.

The wall is meant to be one way; a wall prohibiting government interference in religion, but NOT from religious influence on government. President George Washington called religion and morality the “indispensable supports” of the republic and warned it is folly “to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Few Democrats were quick to oppose O'Rourke’s bigotry. Buttigieg later offered a tepid rebuke, saying, “I agree that anti-discrimination law ought to be applied to all institutions, but the idea you are going to strip churches of their tax exempt status if they have not found their way toward blessing same-sex marriage — I’m not sure he understands the implications of what he’s saying.”

In other words, Buttigieg is not opposed in principle, but enforcement would create political headaches.

The target of the Left’s ire is Christians and Jews, but such a prescription would unavoidably draw in Muslims, with which the Left has allied itself. It would be fascinating to see Democrats try to enforce such punitive measures on mosques that refuse to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies. People have been murdered for drawing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. We shudder to think of the reaction to the forced defilement of a mosque.

For Democrats, power lies in destroying the nuclear family and traditional social norms, creating a broken society that looks to the government as its savior. Conversely, a moral, religious, self-reliant people would be the death knell for the Democrat Party.

It’s no surprise that Democrats seek to vilify, suppress, and destroy religion. But to do so would mean the end of our experiment in self-government. Such efforts must be opposed and rejected at every turn.

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LAPD told to be less active in crime prevention

By Jack Dunphy, who served with the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 30 years. Now retired from the LAPD

As one might have predicted, the Los Angeles Times has prevailed in its latest campaign against the Los Angeles Police Department. Mayor Eric Garcetti being the kind of man he is, which is to say, not particularly blessed in the spine department, it was only a matter of time before he and his equally invertebrate police chief, Michel Moore, acquiesced to the activist demands engendered by the Times’s latest hit job.

Two writers at the Times, Cindy Chang and Ben Poston, have made it their mission to rid the LAPD of the bias they believe they have proved through analysis of stop data. Their premise is that because the department’s “stop rate” for all racial and ethnic groups does not precisely mirror each group’s share of the city’s population, something sinister is surely afoot. An article appearing under their bylines from January 24, 2019, made this accusation about the officers from Metropolitan Division, 200 of whose officers are deployed to various areas of the city to address each area’s unique crime trends.

Here on PJ Media, I wrote critically of the January piece, pointing out among its defects the fact that the benchmark Chang and Poston used to reach their conclusion was the racial and ethnic breakdown of the overall population of Los Angeles rather than its pool of criminal offenders. They neglected to include in their story the salient fact that though blacks make up 9 percent of the city’s population, they commit 43 percent of its violent crime, including 52 percent of its robberies, 34 percent of its homicides, and 36 percent of its aggravated assaults. It is on these types of crimes that proactive policing of the type they decry is most focused.

Chang and Poston followed up with a story published October 8, this time expanding their examination to the LAPD’s entire patrol force, which they conclude exhibits the same type of bias. Again I took them to task here on PJ Media, pointing out that though they grudgingly acknowledge the racial disparities in crime data, the story followed a scripted formula in dismissing them while blaming the skewed stop data on bias.

Succumbing to activist pressure, Chief Moore has announced changes to the way Metropolitan Division officers are deployed, with the changes to include far fewer vehicle and pedestrian stops. On Oct. 13, Chang and Poston wrote another story in which they crowed about their accomplishment.

“In a major shift prompted by a Times investigation,” the story begins, “the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Metropolitan Division will drastically cut back on pulling over random vehicles, a cornerstone of the city’s crime-fighting strategy that has come under fire for its disproportionate impact on black and Latino drivers.”

The error of their premise is on display from this very first sentence. Police officers do not conduct “random” stops. Every stop, whether of a car or a pedestrian, must be based on articulable reasonable suspicion, something that is relentlessly emphasized to LAPD officers, none more so than those working Metropolitan Division. And note that in this most recent Times article, the authors revert to their previous deception of referring to the racial breakdown in the overall population rather than in the offender pool.

Predictably, Chief Moore buckled. “Is the antidote or the treatment itself causing more harm to trust than whatever small or incremental reduction you may be seeing in violence?” he asked. “And even though we’re recovering hundreds more guns, and those firearms represent real weapons and dangers to a community, what are we doing to the tens of thousands of people that live in those communities and their perception of law enforcement?”

With this Moore acknowledges that he is willing to accept an increase in violence, which is to say, more dead people, so as to change people’s “perception” of the LAPD and appease the staff at the Los Angeles Times. And how many more shooting victims are Chief Moore and his puppet master Eric Garcetti willing to tolerate in the name of better public relations? That a rise in violence is “incremental” is small comfort if you or a loved one is part of the increment.

In condemning the LAPD as it does, the Times takes note of the fact that though whites are searched less frequently that blacks and Latinos, they are more often found with contraband leading to arrests. This, say Chang and Poston, is further proof of differential treatment.

I grant that Chang and Poston are ignorant of the realities of police work and may therefore be excused for exhibiting that ignorance, but some education is called for here. As noted above (and in many, many of my previous columns), the demographics of crime do not reflect those of the overall population, not in Los Angeles, not in any city you could name. In L.A. as elsewhere, blacks commit far more than their share of crime, whites and Asians far less; Latinos commit crimes in numbers roughly proportionate to their share of the population. This disproportion results in more blacks and Latinos than whites or Asians being on probation and parole and therefore subject to search conditions. (People on parole and most on probation are subject to search at any time; reasonable suspicion is not a requirement.)

Metropolitan Division officers, and those from the LAPD’s divisional gang units, know they may stop many gang members, or one gang member many times, before they find someone with a gun, but it is the knowledge that they may be stopped and searched that inhibits many gang members from acting out on the neighborhood grudges that have claimed thousands of young lives since the birth of L.A.’s street gangs in the 1970s.

I know from my experience working the streets in South Los Angeles that when a squad of Metro officers was in my division, things were most often very quiet. It’s impossible to quantify how many shootings they may have prevented over the years. We can only count the shootings that do occur, and it’s all but certain that soon we’ll be counting more than we have been.

What will Michel Moore and the Los Angeles Times say then?

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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