Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History.  By Rodney Stark, Templeton Press, 2016.

 

Everything you know is wrong.  That may be an exaggeration.  A better way to describe the presentation of history in Rodney Stark’s Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History is to say that the lens through which much of society views world history is horrifically flawed and distorting.  In this book, Stark takes aim at several assumptions about history and the role that the Catholic Church played in major events.

 

Stark opens his book by pointing out that he is not a Catholic himself– he claims that his primary concern is with the truth, and with stopping the spread of lies and misconceptions.  In his introduction, he writes:

 

“While growing up as an American Protestant with intellectual pretensions, I always wondered why Catholics made such a fuss over Columbus Day.  Didn’t they see the irony in the fact that although Columbus was a Catholic, his voyage of discovery was accomplished against unyielding opposition from Roman Catholic prelates who cited biblical proof that the earth was flat and that any attempt to reach Asia by sailing West would result in the ships falling off the edge of the world? 

 

Everybody knew that about the Catholics and Columbus.  We not only learned it in school, the story of Columbus proving the world to be round also was told in movies, Broadway plays, and even in popular songs.  Yet, there they were every October 12: throngs of Knights of Columbus members accompanied by priests, marching in celebration of the arrival of the “Great Navigator” in the New World.  How absurd.

 

And how astonishing to discover many years later that the whole story about why Catholic advisors opposed Columbus was a lie.”

 

Stark points out that in 1492, all educated individuals in Europe already knew that the world was round.  Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed over a century and a half before Columbus’s famous voyage, clearly describes the Earth as a sphere.  This was common knowledge, as was a roughly accurate estimate of the circumference of the world.  What was not known was the existence of the Americas.  The authorities of the time were concerned that a long journey between Europe and Asia (a stretch that was not known at the time to contain any other land) would lead to the deaths of the crew, since insufficient provisions and fresh water could be brought along for the journey, and there was no guarantee that a location for replenishing supplies could be found along the way.  Resistance to Columbus’s journey was therefore based on a justifiable concern that such a journey was a suicide mission.

 

Stark explains the true state of affairs further, writing that:

 

“Amazingly enough, there was no hint about Columbus having to prove that the earth was round in his own journal or in his son’s book, History of the Admiral.  The story was unknown until more than three hundred years when it appeared in a biography of Columbus published in 1828.  The author, Washington Irving (1783-1859), best known for his fiction– in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow– he introduced the Headless Horseman.  Although the tale about Columbus and the flat earth was equally fictional, Irving presented it as fact.  Almost at once the story was eagerly embraced by historians who were so certain of the wickedness and stupidity of the Roman Catholic Church that they felt no need to seek any additional confirmation, although some of them must have realized that the story had appeared out of nowhere.  Anyway, that’s how the tradition that Columbus proved the world was round got into all the textbooks.”

 

Columbus’s voyage is not the only myth that is debunked in this book.  Other topics Stark addresses include the following issues:

 

1.     Anti-Semitism– While Stark acknowledges that anti-Semitism has long been a problem in Christian history, the reality is more complex and that there are many instances of the Catholic Church looking out for Jewish people through its two-millennia history.  Stark also cites examples of anti-Christian bias by Jews to argue that bigotry was not a one-way street.

 

2.     The Suppressed Gospels– Some scholars of antiquities have discovered manuscripts that purport to be alternative accounts of Jesus’s life and the history of early Christianity.  Stark illustrates the evidence that these documents are not unvarnished truth suppressed by a censorious Church, but in fact these writings are fictions and frauds.

 

3.     Persecution of Pagans– There is a widespread perspective that the ancient Romans were a tolerant group, that accepted the mysterious new monotheistic Christian sect, but their kindness was repaid with nastiness when the Christians took control.  Stark rejects the theory that the pagans were open-minded towards religion, and argues that accusations of Christians attempting to annihilate remaining pagans are blown out of proportion.

 

4.     The Dark Ages– Everybody knows that for centuries, a superstitious Church blotted out all scientific and intellectual achievement, right?  Wrong!  Stark and many other historians contend that the Dark Ages is a misnomer and an utter misrepresentation of the past, citing many intellectual advancements, and noting that this smearing of the era is the work of so-called “Enlightenment” figures who built themselves up by tearing people from the past down.

 

5.     The Crusades– Stark attacks the contention that the Christians were the villains of the Crusades, pointing out that much of the conflict was a form of self-defense.

 

6.     The Spanish Inquisition– During the Inquisition, the Church and the State were at odds– and the Church was fighting the violent evils and excesses of the state.  To turn the Monty Python skit on its head, nobody expects to learn the real complexities of the Inquisition!

 

7.     Science and Heresy– If you think you know the story of Galileo, think again.  The canard that the Church and science have been at loggerheads is utterly evaporated by the historical evidence.

 

8.     Slavery– The Church has long been one of the major forces in the fight against slavery, as opposed to the common assertion that the Church actually perpetuated the slave system.

 

9.     Authoritarianism– Stark rejects the contention that the Church was a leading partner in fascism.

 

10.  Protestant Modernity– The thesis that Protestantism brought about everything good in the modern world is utterly demolished by Stark.

 

Stark is quietly disgusted by the fact that so many seemingly reputable scholars (dubbed “distinguished bigots”) have spread these false statements and perpetuated a warped vision of the past, and traces the ways that figures in high intellectual places shaped popular interpretations of history:

 

“But it wasn’t only angry Protestants who invented and embraced these tales.  Many of the falsehoods considered in subsequent chapters were sponsored by antireligious writers, especially during the so-called Enlightenment, whose work was condoned only because it was seen as anti-Catholic rather than what it truly was– although more recently such scholars have paraded their irreligion as well as their contempt for Catholicism.  In his day, however, Edward Gibbon (1737-94) would surely have been in deep trouble had the bitterly antireligious views he expressed in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not been incorrectly seen as applying only to Roman Catholicism.  But, because in the days of the Roman Empire Catholicism was the only Christian church, Gibbon’s readers assumed his attacks were specific to Catholicism and not aimed at religion in general.

 

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 Cromwell, 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.”

 

If Stark’s revisionist history is accepted, then that means that the history of Western Civilization needs to be substantially revised.  The Church’s history is not perfect, but as the evidence from historians from many different perspectives and beliefs shows, many of the allegations against the Church’s behavior are either false, distorted, or missing relevant information that can put certain events in perspective.  Stark’s book is emblematic of a paradigm shift that indicates that the Catholic Church is one of the most unjustly maligned institutions in history.

 

–Chris Chan