Posted on 12/31/2007 6:35:51 AM PST by LowCountryJoe
Catholic Church bishops, priests and other Church leaders in Latin America were once a reliable ally of the left, owing to the influence of "liberation theology," which tries to link the Gospel to the socialist cause. Today the Church is coming to recognize the link between socialism and the loss of freedom, and a shift in thinking is taking place.
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Russia, Germany, Romania, Serbia, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Vietnam, France have all succumbed to one degree or another in their history to dictatorship . . . while the Protestant lands have been largely untouched by totalitarian dictatorships. Wideawake pointed to Cromwell, a disputable point, and Prussia, which is not, except that I think Germany divided pretty evenly between Protestant and Catholic. I don’t understand Wideawake’s Norway and Belgian examples — I assume it was a Vichy type government after NAZI occupation in Norway and I thought Belgium was a mixed population. I think it’s the training and thinking of the people through their religion. In the Protestant tradition they can read the Bible and decide on their own . . . the individual is more “important” within the religious tradition . . . while in the Catholic tradition there is heirarchy ingrained in the population.
Understand that I don’t think that this points to an inherent superiority of Protestantism. The historical jury is still out regarding whether this freedom is a brief moment in history and the Protestant tradition is under constant and effective assault from the secular culture and the collapse of churches (as are Catholics in Catholic lands). The stability of the Catholic heirarchy is remarkable. How do you combine that with individual initiative and thought in the church and politically? That’s the long term question where you can get the best of both . . . reverse the question and ask how the Protestant gets the stability and staying power of the Catholic church . . .
Not Judas but rather Jesus’ brother (to follow some recent news reports).
First, the Greco-Roman world is a world where tyranny and absolutism were the standard and popular government was intermittent.
Second, the Anglo-American world picture - where the executive is subordinate to a legislature and the people have specific rights and remedies against the executive - was formed in Catholic Europe. Protestantism did not introduce the Magna Carta or habeas corpus or parliamentary government to Britain. These were innovations created by Catholics.
In medieval Italy, Switzerland and the Low Countries, various forms of republican and popular government were introduced. Entirely by Catholics.
Protestantism did introduce the aforementioned dictatorship of Cromwell and the protofascist regime of the kingdom of Prussia, however. It also introduced the doctrine of the divine right of kings.
If anything is to blame for the decline of free institutions in continental Europe in the modern era it is the Thirty Years' War: an initially religious war waged by Protestants against Catholics that turned the continent into one large armed camp.
An entire generation raised in a militaristic, embattled atmosphere created the conditions for Europe's subsequent lack of liberal institutions.
The British navy and the English Channel, not British religion, kept Britain free by isolating it from the continental devastation.
All right you are persuading me. What of the correlation in the 20th Century with fascism and totalitarianism in Catholic cultures?
Ignoring China is easy, after all it's not like a lot of communists live there or anything.
As for ignoring things I see where the Catholic Church's major roll in the end of the U.S.S.R. and the freedom of many of the Eastern Block countries conveniently slipped through your in depth analysis.
I guess connecting the Catholic Church with the Nazis has become too cliché and there's a need to branch out to a different sort of drivel.
Mary's reign only lasted for 5 years. Elizabeth reigned for 45 years & she was a Protestant. (Catholics call her Bloody Bess.)
Besides, the Anglican established church was not completely Protestant, but a hybrid of Protestant and Catholic traits.
They answered to the Crown, not the Pope. The CoE was completely Protestant, just not the version of Protestantism they wanted.
There was a constant threat that Catholic influences would get the upper hand in England, and with the Anglican Church enjoying a state monopoly, that was intolerable to strongly Protestant believers.
The threat came mostly from the Monarchy, which is why there was the big shuffle about who was gonna wear the crown. Mary became Queen, she brought Roman Catholicism bank into England. She died, Elizabeth reestablished the Protestant CoE & persecuted the Catholic Church. Elizabeth locked up Mary, Queen of Scots & eventually had her executed, because she was a foot in the door for Rome again. James I was a Protestant, as was his wife. He was considered to be too tolerant toward Catholics at home, but too harsh on them abroad.
Charles I married a Catholic wife and it was under him that the CoE became "too Catholic". He got into a battle over power & religion with Parliament (they tried to arrest his wife) & lost his head in 1649. After his death, Puritans were in charge of England & Puritan emigration to the new world continued.
To get their religious freedom, the Pilgrims had to leave their own country and expose themselves to an alien culture. That certainly doesn't alter the fact that they were persecuted. Obviously they preferred to go to the New World and start a culturally English Protestant colony.
Right, *their* religious freedom, for which they persecuted non-Puritans in their American colonies. Only about half of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower were religious & they were Separatists, a form of Puritanism. Their colony was combined with a much larger Puritan colony that had grown with the help of John Winthrop, a Puritan who was involved in shipping.
Greg - I think this argument of Catholic vs Protestant is a bit simplistic. It would be more accurate to say that modern democracy and modern republicanism had strong beginnings in England with the Magna Carta, and that happened long before the Catholic-Protestant devision came about.
A more truthful analysis would be to give the Anglo-Saxon nobility & a few Normans too, some credit for insisting on representation before King John, who was a true despot. Somehow to get the religious thing in here seems a bit silly. Democracy certainly spread forth from England and it’s colonies and grew in wisdom and governing principles.
As an American with mostly German-Catholic ancestors, I can say that neither the Rheinland or Bavaria ever were militaristic or particularly repressive with Protestants. Of course, the Treaty of Westphalia was the primary mover of forward thinking!
Historically since the Thirty-Years War the Prussian Kingdom was the oppressor of other German lands and faiths. Not only Catholics and Jews, but more traditional Lutherans as well came under the oppressive laws of the Kaiser! Hence, the huge emigration out of Germany in the mid and late 19th century.
Heck yeah.
Yah, I think the fact that the Magna Carta came about in a Catholic England is a very good point. It’s the Anglo-American tradition of freedom, not a particular expression of a religious divide, unless the form of Catholicism in England began to change before the split with the Catholic church. That said, in the Christian cultures, those that have in the 19th and 20th century (modern times) succumbed to totalitarianism have not been Protestant lands. I still think there is something there in the connection of Protestantism and political freedom.
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