medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dennis Martin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Quite frankly I find the tone and content here offensive.
whatever.
i quite agree.
i find a lot of the stuff put out by the contemporary church to be offensive.
especially when it has a direct bearing on my own, contemporary, Budhist
life.
but, as George councils, the appropriate topic for this list is medieval
religion, and i have no particular interest in discussing contemporary
politics in this forum, but *do* happen to think that Great Minds Run in the
Same Ruts and certain patterns of thought and behavior just might be
observable in both our own era and in ces temps la.
>The Vatican conference presumably involved scholars working along the same
lines as those who have produced a body of revisionist studies on the various
inquisitions (Peters, Kamen, Tedeschi and others) over the last three decades.
The revisionism was long overdue because of the distorted and exaggerated view
of the inquisitions that had become conventional in the 18th and 19th
centuries and is now endemic in popular culture. WIthout having seen the
papers, why mock the conference or its proceedings?
i don't know the work of the scholars you mention, but assume that these
"revisionists" are seperate from the "revisionists" whom the *Vatican*
assembled for this conference which is resulted in the present, self-serving
drivel which is the subject of the NYT piece.
all i know about the "scholars" at the Vatican conference is what i read in
the NYTimes article :
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Vatican-Inquisition.html
which i took the trouble to find on-line because i suspected that it might
contain more of the story than the snippet which Al Magary sent to the list,
his source being the International Herald Tribune (which publishes a lot of
abridged NYT articles).
only two conference members are mentioned by name :
"Agostino Borromeo, a professor at Rome's Sapienza University."
clearly an unbiased source.
who
"denied the Vatican was playing down the wrongs of the Inquisition. 'I don't
want to say that the Inquisition was an ethical institution,' he told
Associated Press Television News. 'It doesn't change the nature of the problem
-- people were tried for their religious beliefs. But for historians, numbers
have a significance.'"
and
"Italian Renaissance history professor and Inquisition expert, Carlo
Ginzburg", who
"...had his doubts about using statistics to reach a judgment about the
period."
which raises the question in my mind: At what point do the statistics matter,
when making an "historical judgement"?
if
If
> a conference convoked by one of our professional societies or one of our
> major universities had announced the publication of its proceedings with
> similar generalizations, would you not at least have reserved judgment
> until you had seen the volume? And what does contemporary geopolitics
> (and ecclesial-politics) have to do with any of this? The joke works
> only if one asumes that everyone on the list shares the same
> geopolitical assumptions.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Al Magary
>
> Vatican Downsizes Inquisition
>
> By Jason Horowitz
>
> NY Times (in IHT), June 17, 2004
>
> VATICAN CITY--The Vatican said Tuesday that fewer witches were
> burned at the stake and fewer heretics tortured into conversion
> during the dark centuries of the Inquisition than is generally
> believed, but it also sought renewed forgiveness for sins
> committed by Roman Catholics in the name of church doctrine.
> .
> In a statement, Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the
> Inquisition was widely viewed as one of the church's bleakest
> periods and that it loomed as a symbol of scandal.
> .
> But he also asked, "To what degree is that image faithful to
> reality? Before seeking forgiveness it is necessary to have
> precise knowledge of the facts."
> .
> To better understand the causes and damage of the Inquisition,
> the Vatican published a collection of scholarly essays on
> Tuesday about the Inquisition, stitched together from a 1998
> symposium of leading theologians and scholars.
> .
> Two years after the symposium, the pope made a sweeping apology
> for the church's errors over the last 2,000 years.
> .
> "We cannot not recognize the betrayal of the Gospel committed by
> some of our brothers, especially in the second millennium," he
> said.
> .
> The Inquisition is widely considered to be among the deepest of
> those betrayals.
> .
> It began in 1231 under Pope Gregory IX as a legal procedure to
> root out heretics, but in later decades and centuries, the Roman
> Catholic authorities began employing torture and execution to
> enforce orthodoxy.
> .
> The Inquisition wreaked particular havoc in Spain, where
> thousands were burned at the stake during the 15th and 16th
> centuries.
> .
> But Agostino Borromeo, who edited the 783-page volume of essays
> published Tuesday and who teaches history at Sapienza University
> in Rome, said at a press conference here that of Spain's 125,000
> heresy trials, only about 1 percent of the defendants were
> condemned to death.
> .
> "Resorting to torture and sentences of death were not as
> frequent as have long been thought," Borromeo said.
> .
> He and the cardinals who also participated in a panel on Tuesday
> afternoon referred to hundreds of pages of research and tables,
> including one that broke down the number of witches burned, per
> capita, in European countries.
> .
> They said the numbers were relatively modest and countered what
> they described as a widespread misconception about the extent of
> Inquisition violence.
> .
> "You can't ask forgiveness for images that have been spread
> throughout public opinion, that are more myth than reality,"
> said Cardinal Georges Cottier, a Vatican theologian.
> .
> While many experts agree that the number of executions commonly
> attributed to the Inquisition is inflated, some wondered if the
> Church was practicing a sort of damage control on a
> centuries-old blemish.
> .
> "Common perception is always exaggerated in terms of numbers,"
> said Henry Kamen, author of the study "The Spanish Inquisition"
> and a visiting history professor at the University of Chicago.
> .
> "But there are those who in reaction and self-defense
> deliberately downplay the figures," he continued. "The Vatican
> clergy might be in that category."
> .
> Other Cardinals present at the news conference said that it was
> hard to judge the events of history from the perch of hindsight
> and argued that getting to the fact of the matter was no easy
> task.
> .
> "We are looking for a truth that has never fully been known,"
> said Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, a high-ranking member of the
> Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
> .
> "Historical truth," he added, "is not easy to grasp in one's
> hands."
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