Category: History

Catholicism is probably the only religion that so perfectly fits human nature. You might say that if God hadn’t given it to us, we might have had to invent it. I say this because so much of Catholic sensibilities and customs are mirrored in secular life, often by those who would be horrified to be considered crypto-Catholics.

For example, there are rumors that relic-hunting scientists in Austria have found the skull of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and will reveal the results of DNA testing in an Austrian television documentary commemorating Mozart’s 250th birthday:

"In a documentary entitled Mozart: The Search for Evidence, researchers will reveal the conclusions of tests carried out on the skull at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck last year. DNA from shavings from the skull was compared with genetic material from the thigh bones of Mozart’s maternal grandmother and niece.

"Until now, tests on the skull, which belongs to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, have proved inconclusive, but today Dr. Walther Parson, the forensic pathologist who led the analysis said his team had ‘succeeded in getting a clear result.’

"Dr. Parson said the result had been ‘100 percent verified’ by a US Army laboratory but declined to elaborate."

GET THE STORY.

By the way, anyone planning a birthday party for Mozart should consider sending an invitation to Pope Benedict, who is known to be a great admirer of the composer and once said of Mozart’s music, "His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the whole tragedy of human existence."

A reader writes:

On Thursday there will be a Diane Sawyer special about the evidence for a female Pope Joan.  Are there any holes in the historical record that could account for this or is it a completely rediculous claim?  Where could I find some information on this?

I normally recommend J. N. D. Kelly’s book The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, because Kelly is a Protestant historian and he has an appendix in this book that totally slams the Pope Joan myth.

Unfortunately, most couldn’t consult this book before the broadcast, so I suggest these sources:

WIKIPEDIA ON POPE JOAN.

THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA ON POPE JOAN.

The fact that ABC is dumping this story on Thursday in the week between Christmas and New Years (a LOW viewership time) suggests that they don’t have confidence in it, which only increases their culpability in broadcasting it.

OUTRAGE MAY BE EXPRESSED HERE.

Incidentally, a number of years ago I was at my desk at Catholic Answers when I was routed a call from a major Hollywood producer (who shall remain nameless, but who was quite famous and had a lot of credits to his name) who wanted to ask me about sources for Pope Joan to help his upcoming TV/movie project on her.

He was quite alarmed when I told him that Pope Joan was a myth, and he indicated that he was going to go back to the people who had pitched the idea to press them about this fact.

The project never got made.

I wish all producers had as much integrity as this guy did!

Unfortunately, they don’t, and there is a Pope Joan movie coming out of Germany next year.

"Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?" has a much more controversial answer than "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?"

In fact, numerous facts about the Bard continue to be hotly disputed, almost three hundred years after his death.

One of the controversies is whether Shakespeare himself may have been a Catholic.

In his day English Protestants were putting tremendous pressure on Catholics to accept the newly imposed faith, and laws were passed against those who would refuse to attend Protestant services (known as "recusants").

The result was that many people hid their Catholicism but continued to consider themselves Catholic and, when possible, to practice Catholicism in secret (e.g., by aiding and hiding priests who would covertly say Mass and hear confessions).

Others were more bold and openly declared their Catholicism.

Among those were Shakespeare’s father and his daughter, both of whom recused themselves from Protestant services.

In fact, Shakespeare was in the middle of a hotbed of secret and not-so-secret Catholics.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW BY AN AUTHOR ARGUING THAT SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS CONTAIN COVERT CATHOLIC MESSAGES.

HERE’S WHERE YOU CAN BUY HER BOOK.

HERE’S SOME ADDITIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE QUESTION FROM WIKIPEDIA.

What a great history of Thanksgiving food the NYT has today!

EXCERPTS:

The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would
have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist – the
colonial minister Charles Woodmason called it "exceedingly filthy and
most execrable." Our comfort food, in short, was the bane of the
settlers’ culinary existence.

The reason is fairly simple. Hale and her fellow writers seem to
have forgotten that their Puritan forebears migrated to New England
with strict notions about food production and preparation. Proper
notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be
domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated
in gardens and orchards.

Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering
that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain
haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. Squash, corn, turkey
and ripe cranberries might have tasted perfectly fine to the English
settlers. But that was beside the point. What really mattered was that
the English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing
short of barbaric. Indeed, the colonists saw it as the essence of
savagery.

No matter how hard [the colonists] tried, no matter how carefully they tended
their crops and repaired their fences and fattened their cattle and
furrowed their fields, colonial Americans failed to replicate European
husbandry practices. Geography alone wouldn’t allow it.

The adaptation of Indian agricultural techniques not only sent
colonists deep into the woods galloping after game and grubbing corn
from unbound, ashen fields, it also provoked severe cultural
insecurity. This insecurity turned to conspicuous dread when the
colonists were mocked by their metropolitan cousins as living, in the
words of one haughty Englishman, "in a state of ignorance and
barbarism, not much superior to those of the native Indians."

This hurt. And under the circumstances no status-minded English
colonist would have possibly highlighted his adherence to native
American victuals – even if the early Thanksgiving holiday had been a
genuine culinary event. Indeed, it wasn’t until after the Revolution,
when the new nation was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the
Old World, that these foods became celebrated as a reflection of
emerging ideals like simplicity, manifest destiny and rugged
individualism.

GET THE (DELICIOUS) STORY!

 

In Europe in 1914, when Christmas was still considered to be a holy day and an occasion for peace rather than an excuse to party, the combatants of World War I observed a truce in honor of the holiday. The last surviving Allied veteran to witness the 1914 Christmas Peace has died at the age of 109.

"Alfred Anderson was the oldest man in Scotland and the last known surviving Scottish veteran of the war.

"’I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,’ he was quoted as saying in the Observer newspaper last year, describing the day-long Christmas Truce of 1914, which began spontaneously when German soldiers sang carols in the trenches, and British soldiers responded in English.

"’All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machinegun fire and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning across the land as far as you could see.’

"’We shouted "Merry Christmas" even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again.’"

GET THE STORY.

May Mr. Anderson and all of the witnesses of that Christmas Peace finally be reunited this holiday season to witness the everlasting peace of heaven.

One of the last remaining Australian veterans of World War I died on Monday, October 17. He was just 14 when he left to defend his country; he was 106 when he died.

"William Evan Allan enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy at the outbreak of the war when he was just 14. He served as a seaman on the HMAS Encounter from 1915 to 1918.

"’With his passing, we have lost an entire generation who left Australia to defend our nation, the British Empire and other nations in the cause of freedom and democracy,’ Veteran Affairs Minister De-Anne Kelly said in a statement.

"’Mr. Allan was just a boy when he went to war, much younger than most. His sacrifice is remembered and we honor him for his service,’ she said.

"Allan, born in the southeastern town of Bega in July 1899 and a resident of Melbourne, also was Australia’s sole surviving veteran of both world wars. In World War II, Allan served on an armed merchant cruiser and as pier master of a naval base."

GET THE STORY.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it amazingly uplifting and hopeful that in a day and age where parents kick out freeloading adult children on a "reality-TV" series that we are still within living memory of an era when young people, now considered minors, were mature enough to take on the adult responsibility of serving their country with honor. Perhaps we can still reclaim that heritage of raising self-sufficient and heroically-inclined children (although, of course, we should wait until they are eighteen before calling them up for war).

May William Evan Allan and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace through the mercy of God.

A reader writes:

Putting aside all the paranoid conspiracy nonsense,
what is the modern church’s view on the supression of the Templars?
Especially since we now know that confessions made under torture are
essentially useless.  Let’s be honest this is not one of the shining
moments in church history, if for no other reason than Pope Clement
V’s moral cowardice in the face of King Philip’s bullying.

The Church doesn’t really have an official view on historical incidents like this–at least not usually. Normally the Church leaves the evaluation of particular historical incidents to the conscience of the individual and to historians.

It does, however, comment in a general way on historical events that raise the considerations that the Church would bring to bear on the question if it were to comment on particular events (as it does on some occasions).

Some of the principles that the Church brings to bear in evaluating historical events are spelled out in the document

MEMORY AND RECONCILATION: THE CHURCH AND THE FAULTS OF THE PAST.

In general, the Church tries to acknowledge objectively wrong moral behavior but it also tries to evaluate the behavior against the character of the time and not hastily condemn individuals whose consciences, ultimately, are known to God alone. It thus tries to hold in tension the need to acknowledge the moral truth about particular behaviors alongside the need to acknowledge the historical factors affecting individuals and the fact that we cannot know their hearts.

One can see these being played out in the following passage from the Catechism, which addresses the subject of torture:

Respect for bodily integrity

2297 . . . Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. . . .

2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

This establishes the Church’s general take on such historical realities without juding particular cases (in which individuals may have been more culpable or less culpable). It would be up to historians and private individuals to apply these principles to particular cases like what happened with the Templars and see how they stand up.

For an informed Catholic indivual’s attempt to do just that, SEE THIS ARTICLE. It was written almost a hundred years ago, and the author has a very negative view of what happened to the Templars (including the torture). I doubt if very many today would take a positive view of the situation.

 

An ancient Christian church, possibly dating to the founding of Christian monasticism, has been found near the Red Sea:

"Workers from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities found the ruins while restoring the foundations of the Apostles Church at St. Anthony’s Monastery. The remains are about 2 or 2 1/2 yards underground, said the head of the council, Zahi Hawass.

"The monastery, which is in the desert west of the Red Sea, was founded by disciples of St. Anthony, a hermit who died in A.D. 356 and is regarded as the father of Christian monasticism. A colony of hermits settled around him and he led them in a community.

"The remains include the column bases of a mud-brick church and two-room hermitages."

GET THE STORY.

Stories like this remind me of an observation made by the tour-guide priest during a pilgrimage I went on to the Holy Land in the Jubilee Year 2000. He noted that visiting the Christian sites in the Holy Land is a visible testimony to the antiquity of the Church. All of the major Christian sites in the Holy Land are claimed either by the Catholic Church or by Orthodox churches whose ancient communities in the Holy Land broke off communion with the Catholic Church. On the other hand, the Protestant presence at Christian sites in the Holy Land is negligible because Protestantism didn’t enter the scene until over a millennium-and-a-half after the founding of Christianity. While this isn’t "proof" against the claims of Protestantism, it is a historical reminder that Protestantism is a Johnny-come-lately phenomenon.

Today, August 6, back in 1991, was the day the first web page went online.

HERE’S AN ARCHIVED COPY.

The World Wide Web was the brainchild of Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, who proposed it back in 1980.

MORE ON HIM.

That was presumably sometime after Al Gore invented the Internet.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Sixty years later, Hiroshima remembers the atrocity:

"Though Hiroshima has risen from the rubble to become a thriving city of 3 million, most of whom were born after the war, the anniversary underscores its ongoing tragedy.

"Officials estimate about 140,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months after the Enola Gay dropped its payload over the city, which then had a population of about 350,000.

[…]

"The true toll on Hiroshima is hard to gauge, however.

"Including those initially listed as missing or who died afterward from a loosely defined set of bomb-related ailments, including cancers, Hiroshima officials now put the total number of the dead in this city alone at 237,062.

"This year, about 5,000 names are being added to the list."

GET THE STORY.

On August 9, Japan will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on another Japanese city, Nagasaki, which has been the epicenter for Catholicism in that country. For a Catholic perspective on the atomic bombings of Japan, see this e-letter by Karl Keating, written to commemorate the anniversary last year. For an overview of Catholic principles of just war, see Catholic Answers’ Answer Guide: Just War Doctrine.