Abstract
The intent of this volume is clear on its cover, where the first and last letters of the title – BS – are picked out from the rest in size and colour. Thus, for the sociologist Rodney Stark the great array of prejudices peddled about Catholicism across the centuries and even to the present day is, as we now say, so much ‘fake news’. Stark has been uncovering these historical distortions and falsehoods for a long time, in close pursuit of their authors. Here he brings them all together. He exposes the historical myths about the Church and science, the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, and much more. Not only are the charges laid demonstrably false, but the Church’s actual record is – in the great majority of instances, he says – a positive one.
The book is packed with ‘for instances’. For instance: the Crusades were not, as some allege, colonial exploitation; the flow of wealth was to, not from, Palestine; and their purpose was not a holy war against Islam but to protect Christian pilgrims under attack. For instance: slavery was not condoned but condemned by the Church from early on, by popes as well as theologians; and it had virtually disappeared from Christendom until its reappearance after the European expansion into the Americas, to be condemned once again, most clearly by Pope Paul III, and opposed by religious orders such as the Jesuits in Paraguay. For instance: the Spanish Inquisition was not the bloody terror alleged. Rather than being about hunting down heretics (the conversos, former Jews and Muslims), it ‘replaced mob violence against them with due process’ (p. 128); and fewer than 2 per cent of all those brought to trial between 1540 and 1700 were executed – five or six per year – a total of 626, compared with the 750 per year hanged in England between 1530 and 1630 (pp. 121–2).
Scholarly evidence of the falsity of much of the standard historical account of Catholicism has been mounting for a long time. Stark summarizes it and references it and goes into great and convincing detail, using both his own research and a wide range of contemporary historians. What is presented here, however, is not itself new scholarly investigation, but more a polemic. It’s all good stuff. Exploding the (lazily) received views of how things were is always satisfying – at least to those against whom myths are used as sticks to beat them. But the pleasure wears thin. One looks for some explanation of why falsehoods took hold in the first place and were then found sufficiently credible to become the standard account.
The explanation offered here is a simple one: the bitter animus of anti-Catholic propagandists whose lies were ‘repeated ever after by malicious or misled historians’ (p. 119) intent on bolstering the narrative of the dawn of rationality in modernity, overcoming the darkness of the preceding Christian-inspired ages. The villains of the piece for Stark are Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon – originators of the Enlightenment, ‘that utterly misnamed era’ (p. 94). As explanation, however, this is but another competing, and itself well-rehearsed, narrative.
Beyond the polemics, however, there is the issue of who can rightly lay claim to modernity. Stark rejects (not entirely fairly, in my judgement) Max Weber’s portrayal of its (capitalism’s) Protestant provenance. Charles Taylor, on the other hand, has recovered ‘Catholic modernity’. Modernity itself has now become newly and freshly contested as a construct. Perhaps the historical animosities might be more clearly explained if they were set in some such new interpretative framework.