User:Pseudo-Richard/Role of the Roman Catholic Church in civilization

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The role of the

Church history
, the Church has been a major source of schooling, of scientific and economic advancements, and of social services in many countries throughout the world.

Cultural influence

The cultural influence of the Catholic Church has been vast, particularly upon western society.

Fathers of the Church and Scholastic theologians perpetuated a notion that female inferiority was divinely ordained.[11]

Roman Empire

Social structures at the dawn of Christianity in the Roman Empire held that women were inferior to men intellectually and physically and were "naturally dependent".[3] Athenian women were legally classified as children regardless of age and were the "legal property of some man at all stages in her life."[10] Women in the Roman Empire had limited legal rights and could not enter professions. Female infanticide and abortion were practiced by all classes.[10] In family life, men, not women, could have "lovers, prostitutes and concubines" and it was not rare for pagan women to be married before the age of puberty and then forced to consumate the marriage with her often much older husband. Husbands, not wives, could divorce at any time simply by telling the wife to leave. The spread of Christianity changed women's lives in many ways by requiring a man to have only one wife and keep her for life, condemning the infidelity of men as well as women and doing away with marriage of prepubescent girls.[3] Because Christianity outlawed infanticide and because women were more likely than men to convert, there were soon more Christian women than men whereas the opposite was true among pagans.[10]

Latin America

Aztecs were practicing human sacrifice, which ended with the spread of Christianity to the region by Catholic missionaries.[12]

While the Spanish military was known for its ill-treatment of Amerindian men and women, Catholic missionaries are credited with championing all efforts to initiate protective laws for the Indians and fought against their enslavement. In December 1511,

Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria which led to debate on the nature of human rights[14] and the birth of modern international law.[16][17] Enforcement of these laws was lax, and some historians blame the Church for not doing enough to liberate the Indians; others point to the Church as the only voice raised on behalf of indigenous peoples.[18]

Slavery and human sacrifice were both part of Latin American culture before the Europeans arrived. Indian slavery was first abolished by Pope Paul III in the 1537 bull Sublimis Deus which confirmed that "their souls were as immortal as those of Europeans" and they should neither be robbed nor turned into slaves.[19][20][21]

Africa

Slavery and the

In Supremo Apostolatus, and approved the ordination of native clergy in the face of government racism.[9]
The United States would eventually outlaw African slavery in 1865.

By the close of the 19th century, European powers had managed to gain control of most of the African interior.[25] The new rulers introduced cash-based economies which created an enormous demand for literacy and a western education—a demand which for most Africans could only be satisfied by Christian missionaries.[25] Catholic missionaries followed colonial governments into Africa, and built schools, hospitals, monasteries and churches.[25]

Doctrine and science

Map of mediaeval universities established by Catholic students, faculty, monarchs, or priests

Historians of science have argued that the Church has had a significant, positive influence on the development of civilization. They hold that, not only did monks save and cultivate the remnants of ancient civilization during the barbarian invasions, but that the Church promoted learning and science through its sponsorship of many universities which, under its leadership, grew rapidly in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries.

St.

Cauchy one of the mathematicians who laid the rigorous foundations of calculus
.

This position is the reverse of the view, held by some

enlightenment philosophers
, that the Church's doctrines were superstitious and hindered the progress of civilization. It is also used by communist states in its education and propaganda for giving a negative view of catholicism to its citizens

In the most famous example cited by these enlightenment philosophers critics,

31 October 1992, publicly expressed regret for the actions of those Catholics who badly treated Galileo in that trial.[28] Cardinal John Henry Newman, in the nineteenth century, stated that those who attack the Church can only point to the Galileo case, which to many historians does not prove the Church's opposition to science since many of the churchmen at that time were encouraged by the Church to continue their research.[29]

Recently, the Church has been both criticized and applauded for its teaching that

embryonic stem cell research
is a form of experimentation on human beings, and results in the killing of a human person. Criticism has been on the grounds that this doctrine hinders scientific research. The Church argues that advances in medicine can come without the destruction of humans (in an embryonic state of life); for example, in the use of adult or umbilical stem cells in place of embryonic stem cells.

Art, literature, and music

Main article:
Art in Roman Catholicism

Several historians credit the Catholic Church for the brilliance and magnificence of Western

C.S. Lewis, and William Shakespeare,[31] and of course, the patronage of the Renaissance popes for the great works of Catholic artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, Borromini and Leonardo da Vinci. In addition, we must take into account the enormous body of religious music composed for the Catholic Church, a body which is profoundly tied to the emergence and development of the European tradition of classical music
, and indeed, all music that has been influenced by it.

Economic development

Francisco de Vitoria, a disciple of Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic thinker who studied the issue regarding the human rights of colonized natives, is recognized by the United Nations as a father of international law, and now also by historians of economics and democracy as a leading light for the West's democracy and rapid economic development.[32]

Historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse, says that the Church spearheaded the development of a hospital system geared towards the marginalized.

Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the twentieth century, referring to the scholastics, wrote, "it is they who come nearer than does any other group to having been the ‘founders’ of scientific economics."[33] Other economists and historians, such as Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and Alejandro Chafuen, have also made similar statements. Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University said the Catholic Church is "at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws, and institutions which constitute what we call Western civilization."[34]

Social justice, care-giving, and the hospital system

The Catholic Church has contributed to society through its social doctrine which has guided leaders to promote social justice and by setting up the hospital system in Medieval Europe, a system which was different from the merely reciprocal hospitality of the Greeks and family-based obligations of the Romans. These hospitals were established to cater to "particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age," according to historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse.[35]

On November 14 2006, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also issued the document Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination to provide "guidelines for the pastoral care of people with a homosexual inclination".

Education

Missionary activity for the Catholic Church has always incorporated education of evangelized peoples as part of its social ministry. In evangelized lands, the first people to operate schools were Roman Catholics. In some countries, the Church is the main provider of education or significantly supplements government forms of education. Presently, the Church operates the world's largest non-governmental school system.[36]

Europe

Monasteries preserved classical craft and artistic skills while maintaining intellectual culture within their schools, scriptoria and libraries. As well as providing a focus for spiritual life, they functioned as agricultural, economic and production centers, particularly in remote regions, becoming major conduits of civilization.[37]

Monasteries introduced new technologies and crops, fostered the creation and preservation of literature and promoted economic growth. Monasteries, convents and cathedrals still operated virtually all schools and libraries.[38][39]

The Franciscan and Dominican orders also played a large role in the development of cathedral schools into universities, the direct ancestors of the modern Western institutions.[40] Notable scholastic theologians such as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas worked at these universities, his Summa Theologica was a key intellectual achievement in its synthesis of Aristotelian thought and Christianity.[41]

Latin America

Education in Latin American began under the direction of missionaries who were sponsored by the Spanish crown. Royal policy stipulated that the Amerindians had to accept missionaries but they did not have to convert. Indians who agreed to listen to the missionaries were not subjected to work for

encomenderos some of whom were notorious for brutal conditions.[42]

Africa

By the close of the 19th century, European powers had managed to gain control of most of the African interior.[25] The new rulers introduced cash-based economies which created an enormous demand for literacy and a western education—a demand which for most Africans could only be satisfied by Christian missionaries.[25] Catholic missionaries followed colonial governments into Africa, and built schools, hospitals, monasteries and churches.[25]

The Church is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else.[43] It also operates a greater number of Catholic schools per parish here (3:1) than in other areas of the world.[44]

India

References

  1. ^ Orlandis, preface
  2. ^ a b Bokenkotter, p. 56.
  3. ^ a b c d Noble, p. 230.
  4. ^ Noble, p. 445.
  5. ^ Stearns, p. 65-66.
  6. ^ Hastings, p. 309.
  7. ^ Chadwick, Owen p. 242.
  8. ^ Noll, p. 137–140.
  9. ^ a b Duffy, p. 221 Cite error: The named reference "Duffy221" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  10. ^ a b c d Stark, p. 104.
  11. ^ Bokenkotter, p. 465
  12. ^ Noble, p. 446, quote: "The most chilling tribute, however, was in humans for sacrifice. When the wars of expansion that had provided prisoners came to an end, the Aztecs and their neighbors fought 'flower wars'—highly ritualized battles to provide prisoners to be sacrificed. Five thousand victims were sacrificed at the coronation of Moctezuma II (r. 1502–20) in 1502. Even more, reportedly twenty thousand were sacrificed at the dedication of the great temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlan." p. 456, quote "The peoples living in the Valley of Mexico believed that their conquest was fated by the gods and that their new masters would bring in new gods. The Spaniards' beliefs were strikingly similar, based on the revelation of divine will and the omnipotence of the Christian God. Cortes, by whitewashing former Aztec temples and converting native priests into white-clad Christian priests, was in a way fulfilling the Aztecs' expectations about their conquerer."
  13. ^ Woods, p. 135.
  14. ^ a b c Koschorke, p. 287.
  15. ^ Johansen, p. 109, 110, quote: "In the Americas, the Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas avidly encouraged enquiries into the Spanish conquest's many cruelties. Las Casas chronicled Spanish brutality against the Native peoples in excruciating detail."
  16. ^ Woods, p. 137.
  17. ^ Chadwick, Owen, p. 327.
  18. ^ Dussel, p. 45, 52, 53 quote: "The missionary Church opposed this state of affairs from the beginning, and nearly everything positive that was done for the benefit of the indigenous peoples resulted from the call and clamor of the missionaries. The fact remained, however, that widespread injustice was extremely difficult to uproot ... Even more important than Bartolome de Las Casas was the Bishop of Nicaragua, Antonio de Valdeviso, who ultimately suffered martyrdom for his defense of the Indian."
  19. ^ Chadwick, Owen, The Reformation, p. 190
  20. ^ Johansen, p. 110, quote: "In the Papal bull Sublimis deus (1537), Pope Paul III declared that Indians were to be regarded as fully human, and that their souls were as immortal as those of Europeans. This edict also outlawed slavery of Indians in any form ..."
  21. ^ Koschorke, p. 290
  22. ^ Ferro, p. 221.
  23. ^ Historical survey > Slave-owning societies, Encyclopædia Britannica
  24. ^ Thomas, p. 65-6.
  25. ^ a b c d e f Hastings, p. 397–410.
  26. ^ Pope John Paul II (September 1998). "Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), IV". Retrieved 2006-09-15.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  27. ^ Catholic Encyclopedia
  28. ^ Choupin, Valeur des Decisions Doctrinales du Saint Siege
  29. ^ "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization". Catholic Education Resource Center. May 2005.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  30. ^ Boffetti, Jason (November 2001). "Tolkien's Catholic Imagination". Crisis Magazine. Morley Publishing Group.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  31. ^ Voss, Paul J. (July 2002). "Assurances of faith: How Catholic Was Shakespeare? How Catholic Are His Plays?". Crisis Magazine. Morley Publishing Group.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  32. ^ de Torre, Fr. Joseph M. (1997). "A Philosophical and Historical Analysis of Modern Democracy, Equality, and Freedom Under the Influence of Christianity". Catholic Education Resource Center.
  33. ^ Schumpeter, Joseph (1954). History of Economic Analysis. London: Allen & Unwin.
  34. ^ "Review of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas Woods, Jr". National Review Book Service. Retrieved 2006-09-16.
  35. ISBN 0-19-505523-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link
    )
  36. ^ Gardner, p. 148
  37. ^ Le Goff, p. 120.
  38. ^ Woods, p. 40–44.
  39. ^ Le Goff, p. 80–82.
  40. ^ Woods, p. 44–48.
  41. ^ Bokenkotter, p. 158–159.
  42. ^ Noble, p. 450–1.
  43. ^ Froehle, p. 46.
  44. ^ Froehle, p. 48.

Bibliography

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