Cheese
Bitter lover
Bit of a simplification maybe ?
Fascism is back
- Thread starter davidsrsb
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PaulMB
pfm Member
A simplification, perhaps, but with a basis of truth. In Protestant Christianity and Judaism an individual is responsible for his sins to God, and for his social behaviour to the community. In Catholicism the clergy has the power to give absolution and forgiveness. Also, while Protestants and Jews have always been made to read and study for themselves, in Catholicism everything is transmitted and interpreted by the clergy. Till recently, for instance, Catholics were told not to read the Bible (Old Testament), because that should only be interpreted and used by the clergy, but to only read the four approved Gospels.
A gross simplification, based on very little study, I’d suspect.
There has never been a prohibition on reading the Bible within the Catholic church, only one against using quotations from scripture to promote "heresy" (i.e., whatever disagreed with the Church’s official doctrine - but the Protestant Churches have no high ground to stand on here, when you consider how the text of the Old Testament has been abused to persecute pretty much everyone who wasn’t a straight white Protestant at some point or other).
The truth is that the Bible itself is just not that important within the Catholic faith - certainly not to the extent that it informs Protestant belief. The Vulgate (the Latin translation used since the 5th Century) was always freely available in Latin (or as freely as you could get any book before widespread printing), as were many translations into vernacular languages. The difference was that those translations were for study, not worship, and the Latin Vulgate, the Church’s official bible, was always the source - for better or worse, the Catholics thought that only the Latin Vulgate was sufficiently accurate and “holy” for use in worship.
The Protestant Bible translators (Tyndale in English - Henry VIII’s Great Bible and the King James so beloved of Americans are mostly Tyndale’s work) went to the earlier texts that had been translated into Latin to produce the Vulgate for what they believed would strip away the errors of the Catholic Vulgate. It was an interesting exercise, but it didn’t reveal any grand conspiracy on the part of the Catholics to distort the (reported) word of God - when it comes to instructions for believers, there’s piss-all difference between what the Vulgate said and what the direct translations did.
I was raised Catholic, but I am Athiest/Humanist.
I recommend A History Of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch if anyone wants a good, but sometimes dense, account of how the various branches of The Jesus Club ended up where they are.
Sometimes when people lie to you at a young age, you never think to revisit what they’ve said. This one is a particular piece of bullshit that Protestant ministers tell kids in school to explain why their brand of invisible-man-in-the-sky is better than Rome’s brand of invisible-man-in-the-sky.
There has never been a prohibition on reading the Bible within the Catholic church, only one against using quotations from scripture to promote "heresy" (i.e., whatever disagreed with the Church’s official doctrine - but the Protestant Churches have no high ground to stand on here, when you consider how the text of the Old Testament has been abused to persecute pretty much everyone who wasn’t a straight white Protestant at some point or other).
The truth is that the Bible itself is just not that important within the Catholic faith - certainly not to the extent that it informs Protestant belief. The Vulgate (the Latin translation used since the 5th Century) was always freely available in Latin (or as freely as you could get any book before widespread printing), as were many translations into vernacular languages. The difference was that those translations were for study, not worship, and the Latin Vulgate, the Church’s official bible, was always the source - for better or worse, the Catholics thought that only the Latin Vulgate was sufficiently accurate and “holy” for use in worship.
The Protestant Bible translators (Tyndale in English - Henry VIII’s Great Bible and the King James so beloved of Americans are mostly Tyndale’s work) went to the earlier texts that had been translated into Latin to produce the Vulgate for what they believed would strip away the errors of the Catholic Vulgate. It was an interesting exercise, but it didn’t reveal any grand conspiracy on the part of the Catholics to distort the (reported) word of God - when it comes to instructions for believers, there’s piss-all difference between what the Vulgate said and what the direct translations did.
I was raised Catholic, but I am Athiest/Humanist.
I recommend A History Of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch if anyone wants a good, but sometimes dense, account of how the various branches of The Jesus Club ended up where they are.
albireo
pfm Member
This and other Max Weber theories have been debunked ages ago. Protestant countries are on average poorer than Catholic countries.
Sadly the theory still lingers on in the English-speaking world possibly because of the American example. Americans tend to use the USA-South America case as the only valid one, because it's largely the only one they're familiar with.
To those who still insist in suggesting a link between wealth/intellectual independence and religion, I would suggest moving for a few years to Bavaria, or Lombardy, or Piedmont. Traditionally Catholic strongholds in Europe, with vastly higher standards of living and productivity than much of Protestant Europe.
You actually don't need to spend a lot of time there. A quick visit will do. Here's an anecdotal example. I am Italian and have lived for many years in the UK. Scotland, Northern England, South East. My sister is married to a Dutchman and lives in the Netherlands. We both travel and work extensively through a lot of Northern Europe. Loved my time in the UK, especially in Scotland, which was about to become my home. But I'm glad I left to come back to continental Europe on the runup to Brexit.
Anyhow - I was truly astounded Bavaria, and most of Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and Veneto make some regions of the UK (again, a country full of wonderful people I dearly miss and am nostalgic about) and of protestant Netherlands look positively second (verging on third) world.
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AmadeusMozart
R.I.P.
What do you know about living in the third world? I spend 6 years of my life in the third world, devout Catholic and one of the poorest countries in the world.
droodzilla
pfm Member
And then you tried to generalise from your own experience to a grand, unevidenced, claim about the difference between Protestants and Catholics (Muslims too, apparently), and how that accounts for the global distribution of wealth. That's what people are objecting too.
@albireo
I agree there’s no real link between religion and wealth: your point stands even when you look at other Protestant regions. Bayern is wealthy and Catholic, but the other—very much Protestant—parts of Germany also make the UK look like a poor relation, and I don’t think anyone returning from a stay in Protestant Sweden or Denmark would say that these were poor countries either. In Italy, as you know, there’s a big difference between Milan and Naples, yet both are bastions of Catholicism.
Political, rather than religious, ideology is what makes a place rich or poor. The UK’s shabbiness is due to decades of cutting public spending. The UK is actually a wealthy nation - it’s just that, compared to its peers, relatively few people get to experience that wealth.
I agree there’s no real link between religion and wealth: your point stands even when you look at other Protestant regions. Bayern is wealthy and Catholic, but the other—very much Protestant—parts of Germany also make the UK look like a poor relation, and I don’t think anyone returning from a stay in Protestant Sweden or Denmark would say that these were poor countries either. In Italy, as you know, there’s a big difference between Milan and Naples, yet both are bastions of Catholicism.
Political, rather than religious, ideology is what makes a place rich or poor. The UK’s shabbiness is due to decades of cutting public spending. The UK is actually a wealthy nation - it’s just that, compared to its peers, relatively few people get to experience that wealth.
kensalriser
pfm Member
What I think is that Meloni is the real deal, an actual neo-fascist who will push the envelope as far as she thinks she can get away with. You need only watch her screaming identitarian demagoguery to understand that. By contrast, the contemporary PD is a mildly left of centre technocrat social democratic party.
PaulMB
pfm Member
Thank you for the very interesting post!
My only quibble is that I have been told several times over the years that Catholics were told not to read the Bible (OT) for themselves, but only listen to the passages read by the priest during mass, just before or after the passage from the Gospels. But this may be an Italian thing.
albireo
pfm Member
I still remember, during my time in Edinburgh, together with a few fellow students we were driving back from a group retreat in the Highlands. My supervisor (an English neurobiologist originally from Kent) was at the wheel, driving us back home. We were almost within Edinburgh's city limits. At some point we drive through a large road with large stately trees and what I thought were pretty nice, well built large semidetached houses on both sides of the road. Similar architectural style both side of the road, both looked like pleasant neighbourhoods, plenty of green, nice roofing from what I could tell. My supervisor then says:
"See those houses on the left? A flat there will cost you 10x as much as a flat in one of those houses on the right. Why is that?".
None of us knew. One German, one Italian, one Finn. We muttered something about likelihood of flooding, or perhaps the presence of a large unwanted immigrant community, or say a prison with particularly ineffective outer walls, or a railway hub. The supervisor then says:
"In the left you're within the catchment area of an extremely desirable Public School. If you live on the right side you're in the catchment area of a local state school nobody wants to attend".
I never bothered to double check this, and there might have been a certain amount of hyperbole involved, but I thought this was interesting if true.
PaulMB
pfm Member
I don't know how fascist Meloni is. When she was younger she was a junior minister in one of Berlusconi's governments, which was corrupt and right-wing, but hardly fascist. My hope, I say my hope, is that rather than pushing the "fascist" envelope she will keep the evident fascists among her supporters on a tight leash and put together an internationally respectable and acceptable government of the moderate right combined with a strong accent on social welfare.
The PD at the moment is a mess. There are no even mildly charismatic leaders of the under-70 generation and the old guard, the ex-communists, are making their senile voices heard. What you say about it being a mild, left-of-centre party is quite true. But it is all so vague and grey (I voted for them). It is as if they never acquired a coherent identity after they stopped being "Communists," even if it was a very liberal brand of communism.
sean99
pfm Member
The GOP are just utterly disgusting in their current incarnation and it boggles my mind that anyone will vote for them.What the fascists around here are saying as the mid-term elections near:
Not something I’ve ever heard. Maybe this was referring to a missal, a book containing all of the Bible readings used in Catholic services, in order of delivery, along with prayers and the text of the mass.
A normal Catholic mass has two non-Gospel readings from the Bible, followed by one from the Gospels. The first reading is normally from the Old Testament (except at Easter, when it is drawn from the Acts of the Apostles), the second from the New Testament. The exact readings for each mass are set centrally, but over the course of a three year cycle, pretty much the whole Bible will be read out. All of this has been the case since the reform of the Catholic mass in the mid-1960s, and the adoption of mass in the vernacular. Prior to this, mass was in Latin, there was only one extra reading, and the Old Testament was rarely read as part of it. Even when readings were delivered in Latin, the congregation would have had written translations at hand, or the priest would follow the readings with an approved translation. (Greek had a long-standing exception to the “Latin-only” rule by virtue of being the language used to write most of the New Testament, so those texts pre-dated the Latin Vulgate). So, pre-1965, a Catholic missal wouldn’t contain much of the Old Testament; post 1965, it’s basically the whole Bible, just in a different order.
I think the confusion here is really due to a different emphasis on the Bible between the two sects. In most Protestant denominations, believers are exhorted to read the book, and thus reading the Bible is central to being a Christian. In Catholicism, there’s no such command, but saying “you don’t have to read this yourself” is in no way the same as saying “you must not read this yourself”. Such petty differences have been used to kill millions of people over the centuries, clearly ignoring the large sections of common ground involving Jesus telling various people not to be such assholes to each other.
PaulMB
pfm Member
In that case, since you obviously know what you're talking about, I must have been thinking of before the Second Vatican Council, when the OT may have been considered not material for laymen at parish level, but only for the church's intelligentsia. It was also before the Jews, who wrote it, were let off the charge of having murdered Jesus and the prayer for their conversion was deleted from the Easter (?) serivices. I wonder if the two changes were linked.
Finnegan
I like a bit of a cavort
Raised as Catholic- never come across any proscription on the Old Testament. Furthermore your formulation regarding the socially conservative nature of Catholicism is, dare I say, somewhat dogmatic. You’re disregarding the progressive role Catholic Liberation Theology played in Latin America vis a vis the military juntas, and to a lesser extent how opposition to Jaruzelski in Poland coalesced around both Catholicism and Solidarinosc.
The people who wrote the New Testament were also, for the most part, Jews, as was Jesus himself - Christianity began as a Jewish sect; the early books were written in Greek, but that’s because Greek was the common language of the era - it didn’t mean that the authors were actually Greek.
Basically, if you want to hate someone, you’ll find any number of hooks to hang that hate on, and it doesn’t matter if they make no sense. Of course “Jews” betrayed Jesus - but that’s just probability at work: if you take a Jewish man with Jewish acquaintances, preaching throughout a predominantly Jewish country, to Jews, then any random selection of people who’d ever come into contact with him would be 99% Jewish. It would be startling if his downfall was not caused by someone who was of the Jewish faith. Statistics, sadly, post-dates the Bible by several centuries...
But I will agree that Anti-Semitism is the longest black stain on Christian history, and it crosses all strands. The “Good Friday prayer for the Jews” article on Wikipedia has lots of historical detail about the particular slice of Anti-Semitism you mention. Plus the fact, which I didn’t know, that the Church of England’s Easter service used an even more offensive form of words well into the 1920s, claiming that Jews were not just faithless, but also held Christianity in contempt.
Basically, if you want to hate someone, you’ll find any number of hooks to hang that hate on, and it doesn’t matter if they make no sense. Of course “Jews” betrayed Jesus - but that’s just probability at work: if you take a Jewish man with Jewish acquaintances, preaching throughout a predominantly Jewish country, to Jews, then any random selection of people who’d ever come into contact with him would be 99% Jewish. It would be startling if his downfall was not caused by someone who was of the Jewish faith. Statistics, sadly, post-dates the Bible by several centuries...
But I will agree that Anti-Semitism is the longest black stain on Christian history, and it crosses all strands. The “Good Friday prayer for the Jews” article on Wikipedia has lots of historical detail about the particular slice of Anti-Semitism you mention. Plus the fact, which I didn’t know, that the Church of England’s Easter service used an even more offensive form of words well into the 1920s, claiming that Jews were not just faithless, but also held Christianity in contempt.
PaulMB
pfm Member
I don't think I said Catholicism was socially conservative in nature. Although it is true, I think, that it often has been politically and socially conservative. At the same time, I am aware that historically on a local level Catholic clergy have done great things, often with self-sacrifice, to assist the oppressed. I remember Liberation Theology in the Latin American dictatorships, and also that most of what little opposition to Nazism there was in Germany was among Catholics. But, I also remember that Liberation Theology was quickly outlawed by the Vatican because it sailed too close to the wind of communism. As for Germany, there was Catholic hostility to Hitler over euthanasia, but also over the choice of bishops being made in Germany or in Rome.
Finnegan
I like a bit of a cavort
Agreed, I lapsed in my early teens but my impression was always that the Catholic Church worships its own rituals and tenets that differentiate it from other denominations- transubstantiation, papal infallibility and the cult of the Virgin Mary (which is a Goddess cult however much the Vatican denies it)- rather than actually worshipping Jesus as the Messiah.