Arius did not teach that Christ was divine, he taught that Christ was the first creation, but neither equeal nor co-eternal with the Father, he did say Christ was a supernatural being, but not that he was truely divine.

In any event, supernatural or divine, the Arianist sect was the largest and most notable group that divided itself from mainstream doctrine on the issue of Christ. In the end, only the Visigoths, whom Arius sent missionaries to, embraced that doctrine to any large extent.

Sligo County 1940's, dunno the order.
Funnily enough there are no statistics for percentages of preists who were rapists or peadophiles or Nuns who used the cane at the drop of a hat.Its AFAIK never been reserched.
Two out of each thousand are proven sexual child abusers. Thats thousands of preists.



Leaving me with no evidence other than a flood of stories and testements and apologies by the catholic clergy, and rehab hospitals for Catholics who have sinned this way.

It's my sincere beleif that the catholic church practiced institutionalised cruelty
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/...308150302/1023
http://ericstoller.com/blog/2006/03/30/lakota-woman/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_C...ex_abuse_cases
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003...hildprotection


I could fill the whole page with links. No point. You either accept that there is a big problem in catholicism or you dont. Accepting it leads to change. Failing to accept leads to more tragedy.

Barney, accepting that there was and still is a big problem within the Catholic Church is NOT the same as saying that there is or ever was institutionalized cruelty. To claim that would be to claim that it was not just the actions of the individuals, but the actual intention of the church as a whole to be cruel. Even in objecting to the permissiveness that allowed some of these abuses to take place and the institutional structures that covered them up, I have a hard time believing it was a goal to be cruel.

Exactly, I have stayed in monestary, and know plenty of laymen and religious from before Vat II, and I know that the cruelity described here was not the norm. I don'treally care to get into this with him as he has no actual proof to support that there was widespread, institutionalized cruelity, and I have no real evidence to reute it, and arguments based on alegorical data rarely go anywhere

Not really Grace. It is just saying that the church did nothing to stop it and put its fingers in its ears. The Church diddnt intend to be cruel, but the doctrine it taught and still teaches includes cruelty.

Peace be upon those who follow the guidance,

well, Gene, i thus claim!

the inquisitions (the link is on the what is Christianity thread):


Having divorced herself from Biblical absolutes, Catholicism adopted a theology in which she sees herself as the church founded upon the Apostle Peter by Jesus Christ, and alone empowered to bring salvation to the world. Further, she believes herself assigned the daunting task of bringing Christ's kingdom to fruition on earth. With those dogmas forming her philosophical foundation, she seeks her power in the political sphere as well as the religious realm. To whatever degree she achieves political power, to that degree she feels compelled to use her secular influence as a weapon against her spiritual adversaries. Thus, down through the centuries, we see that in those countries in which Catholicism had achieved absolute power, the pope's followers have not hesitated to brutally subdue the enemies of "the Church". Although Jews, Muslims, pagans, and others have felt the wrath of Rome, her special fury has always been reserved for her bitterest and most effective challengers -- Bible believing Christians. Only as the political climate changed in recent centuries did the Catholic hierarchy see it expedient to change tactics and appear to be more tolerant. Yet, to this day we see persecution continuing in those places on the globe dominated by Catholicism. The degree of the persecution is determined by the degree of control.

To what lengths is the Catholic hierarchy prepared to go in its drive to repress opposition and achieve its goal of instituting the kingdom of Christ on earth? To find the answer, one must look to the pages of history.

When the Roman Catholic Church was founded by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., it immediately achieved expansive influence at all levels of the imperial government. As Bible believing Christians separated themselves from the Church of Rome, which they saw as apostate, they represented a formidable potential threat to the official new imperial religion. Persecution in varying degrees of severity was instituted over the centuries following.

By the 11th century, in their zeal to establish Christ's kingdom, the Roman popes ("pope" is an ecclesiastical office that is the very antithesis of the New Testament ideal of a local church pastor) began utilizing a new tool -- the Crusades. At first, the Crusades had as their object the conquering of Jerusalem and the "Holy Land". Along the crusaders' paths, thousands of innocent civilians (especially Jews) were raped, robbed, and slaughtered. In time, however, the crusade concept was altered to crush spiritual opposition within Europe itself. In other words, armies were raised with the intent of massacring whole communities of Bible believing Christians. One such group of Bible believing Christians were known as the Albigenses.

[Pope] Innocent III believed that Bible believing dissidents were worse than infidels (Saracens, Muslims, and Turks), for they threatened the unity of ... Europe. So Innocent III sponsored 4 "crusades" to exterminate the Albigenses. Innocent (what a name!) called upon Louis VII to do his killing for him, and he also enjoined Raymond VI to assist him.

The Cistercian order of Catholic monks were then commissioned to preach all over France, Flanders, and Germany for the purpose of raising an army sufficient to kill the Bible believers. All who volunteered to take part in these mass murders were promised that they would receive the same reward as those who had sallied forth against the Muslims (i.e., forgiveness of sins and eternal life).

The Albigenses were referred to in Pope Innocent's Sunday morning messages as "servants of the old serpent". Innocent promised the killers a heavenly kingdom if they took up their swords against unarmed populaces.

In July of 1209 A.D. an army of orthodox Catholics attacked Beziers and murdered 60,000 unarmed civilians, killing men, women, and children. The whole city was sacked, and when someone complained that Catholics were being killed as well as "heretics", the papal legates told them to go on killing and not to worry about it for "the Lord knows His own."

At Minerve, 14,000 Christians were put to death in the flames, and ears, noses, and lips of the "heretics" were cut off by the "faithful."

This is but one example from the long and sordid history of Catholic atrocities committed against their bitter enemies, the Bible believing Christians. Much worse treatment of Bible believers was forthcoming during that stage of bloody Catholic history known as the Inquisition.

It is vital, though, that we here define what is meant by the term "heretic". According to Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary, this is a heretic: "One who holds or advocates controversial opinions, esp. one who publicly opposes the officially accepted dogma of the Roman Catholic, Church." Or, as one author has put it, "Heresy, to a Catholic, is anti-Catholic truth found in the Bible."B Another summarized the official stance as this: "Every citizen in the empire was required to be a Roman Catholic. Failure to give wholehearted allegiance to the pope was considered treason against the state punishable by death."

From 1200 to 1500 the long series of Papal ordinances on the Inquisition, ever increasing in severity and cruelty, and their whole policy towards heresy, runs on without a break. It is a rigidly consistent system of legislation: every Pope confirms and improves upon the devices of his predecessor. All is directed to the one end, of completely uprooting every difference of belief... The Inquisition ... contradicted the simplest principles of Christian justice and love to our neighbor, and would have been rejected with universal horror in the ancient Church.

Pope Alexander IV established the Office of the Inquisition within Italy in 1254. The first inquisitor was Dominic, a Spaniard who was the founder of the Dominican order of monks.

The Inquisition was purely and uniquely a Catholic institution; it was founded far the express purpose of exterminating every human being in Europe who differed from Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. It spread out from France, Milan, Geneva, Aragon, and Sardinia to Poland (14th century) and then to Bohemia and Rome (1543). It was not abolished in Spain until 1820.E

The Inquisition was a terrifying fact of life to those who lived in areas where it was in force. That domain would eventually include not only much of Europe, but also the far-flung colonies of Europe's Catholic powers.

The Inquisition, led by the Dominicans and the Jesuits, was usually early on the scene following each territorial acquisition of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the 16th and 17th centuries. The methods used, which all too often were similar to those used by Serra in California or the Nazi-backed Ustashis in Croatia, sowed the seeds of reaction and aversion that have proved to be a barrier for true missionaries ever since.

Albert Close writes of the Jesuit mission to Indonesia in 1559 that "conversion was wonderfully shortened by the cooperation of the colonial governors whose militia offered' the natives the choice of the musket ball or of baptism."

Everywhere it existed, the "Holy Office" of the Inquisition spread its tentacles of fear.

When an inquisitor arrived in an area he called for reports of anyone suspected of heresy, sometimes offering rewards to spies who would report suspected heretics. Those suspected were imprisoned to await trials. The trials were held in secret and the inquisitor acted as judge, prosecutor, and jury. The accused had no lawyer. It was often simpler to confess to heresy than to defend oneself, especially since torture was often employed until the accused was ready to confess.

Because church and state had not been kept separate, the church powers could call upon the government to use its power against the convicted heretics. Anyone who fell back into heresy after repentance was turned over by the Inquisition to the regular government to be put to death. Most of those condemned to death were burned at the stake, but some were beaten to death or drowned.

The Inquisition was called the sanctum officium (Holy Office) because the church considered its work so praiseworthy.

Even after the death of a victim, his punishment was not ended. The property of condemned heretics was confiscated, leaving his family in poverty.

It is important here to emphasize Rome's role in the brutality of the Inquisition. Roman Catholic apologists are quick to point out that it was the state that put heretics to death. This is an alibi meant to excuse the Vatican's role in the atrocities. However, Dollinger, the leading 19th century Catholic historian, stated: "The binding force of the laws against heretics lay not in the authority of secular princes, but in the sovereign dominion of life and death over all Christians claimed by the Popes as God's representatives on earth, as [Pope] Innocent III expressly states it."

In other words, the secular arm of the state acted only as it was pressured to do so by the popes. Even kings who hesitated to commit genocide on their own populaces were spurred into action by their fear of papal excommunication or subversive Catholic activities within their kingdoms.

Dollinger continues: "It was the Popes who compelled bishops and priests to condemn the heterodox to torture, confiscation of their goods, imprisonment, and death, and to enforce the execution of this sentence on the civil authorities, under pain of excommunication,"

Will Durant informs us that in 1521 Leo X issued the bull Honestis which "ordered the excommunication of any officials, and the suspension of religious services in any community, that refused to execute, without examination or revision, the sentences of the inquisitors." Consider Clement V's rebuke of King Edward II: "We hear that you forbid torture as contrary to the laws of your land. But no state law can override canon law, our law. Therefore I command you at once to submit those men to torture.

The methods used by the Inquisition ranged from the barbaric to the bizarre.

When the inquisitors swept into a town an "Edict of Faith" was issued requiring everyone to reveal any heresy of which they had knowledge. Those who concealed a heretic came under the curse of the Church and the inquisitors' wrath. Informants would approach the inquisitors' lodgings under cover of night and were rewarded for information. No one arrested was ever acquitted.

Torture was considered to be essential because the church felt duty-bound to identify from the lips of the victims themselves any deviance from sound doctrine. Presumably, the more excruciating the torture, the more likely that the truth could be wrung from reluctant lips. The inquisitors were determined that it was "better for a hundred innocent people to die than for one heretic to go free".

"Heretics" were committed to the flames because the popes believed the Bible forbade Christians to shed blood. The victims of the Inquisition exceeded by hundreds of thousands the number of Christians and Jews who had suffered under pagan Roman emperors.J

methinks you can call that institutionalized cruelty, at the very least!

If that was what Barney was talking about.

Peace be upon those who follow the guidance,

rather than post on Barney, i was responding to this part of your post:

just saying there was...

Fine, but by responding only to my comment in isolation, you rob it of the context in which it was made for I was not speaking to the whole of the history of the Catholic church, but only to that situation which Barney was speaking of.

I think it is time for me to go silent again, as these sorts of conversations are meaningless and profit no one anything for there seems little attempt at understanding only justification of previously held beliefs.

I was talking about recent Catholicism, say 1900 +.
Before then it just gets nastier and nastier.

Catholicism IMHO concentrates on the sin and not on the mercy, on the punishment not the forgiveness. The rapture is pure supremecist in one of the worst ways.

Good stuff? Well charity, obedience, chastity. Having said that only the first of those are useful to society.

We wont touch on flagellation here methinks, though its interesting how the commonality of actually starving yourself to the point of death and beating yourself to a pulp, has, over the centuries turned to
denying yourself Sex,
then to giving up talking for a year,
to missing out on ciggies for a week
to telling yourself that that fifth cream bun you'll miss out on in remembrance of the fast.

Todays catholic schools simply concentrate on mental domination rather than the physical.

Hello Grace Seeker

I agree that there seems often very little willingness amongst members here to truly engage with other beliefs, or even to try to understand any beliefs/views outside their own.
Perhaps not so surprising, since this is an Islamic forum, with a very strong emphasis on upholding the Islamis view, and nothing else!

I have always admired the patience and perseverance with which you have explained the Christian faith, Grace Seeker, and the care you have taken to respect other views and not to offend others.

I also want you to know that your explanations have helped me to grow my own faith tremendously, and for that I am truly grateful.
Who would have thought that I would find a Christian mentor and friend of your calibre in an Islamic forum!

May God keep you always.