transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 3:
[01:00] The church taught that the earth was flat.

Speaker 4:
[01:02] No, that's definitely a myth. The problem with Galileo was that he was also a bit of a jerk.

Speaker 3:
[01:06] All the popes have been holy throughout the last 2,000 years. How was the Inquisition not a medieval reign of terror?

Speaker 4:
[01:13] The medieval Inquisition actually saved lives. It saved people from being burned at the stake.

Speaker 3:
[01:19] Explain yourself. All right, Dr. Thomas Madden, we hear many myths about the Catholic Church, and I've got five here that I'm going to throw at you. I'm going to completely stump you, and you are going to have to abandon the holy Catholic faith.

Speaker 4:
[01:38] I'm set.

Speaker 3:
[01:39] Or you can just destroy them for the rest of us. Myth number one, the church taught that the earth was flat.

Speaker 4:
[01:46] Oh, yes. No, that's definitely a myth, yes. Actually, people knew that the world was round since the ancient Greeks. In fact, the ancient Greeks knew how big the world was. This was commonly known in the Middle Ages. If you look at any map of the world from the Middle Ages, they're all round. There's not a single one. They have Christ holding the globe, but it's always the globe. The Venerable Bede wrote about this. You think about it, Catholics during the Middle Ages, they had to be able to figure out Easter, which is hard. It's an astronomical to figure out when the Easter is going to be there. They had to make various observations. They knew this. Thomas Aquinas wrote about this. In fact, he used it as an analogy that you could come to the truth by different means. For the globe, he says, everyone knows it's a ball, but you can do this either by astronomy, by seeing the shadow of the earth on the moon during the eclipse, or you could do it by the fact that gravity always goes straight down, rather than off to a side, which it would if it was flat. So, it's been commonly known that the myth comes, it's, in part, it's related to the Galileo myths, but it's basically this idea that Protestants developed much later, that the church was directly opposed to reason, and that the only way that they were able to keep power during the Middle Ages was by keeping people stupid, and that when the Protestants came in, they accepted reason, and the church fought against it. That, and so they said that the world was flat. That then got morphed into Columbus. So, you had, it's really, it's interesting, the big proponent of this was Washington Irving, who was an American author. He wrote Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But he wrote a history of Columbus. And in his romantic retelling of it, he has Columbus meeting with all the Catholic scholars at the University of Salamanica and saying that the world is flat. If you sail, you'll sail off of it. Wow. And Columbus saying, no, the world is round.

Speaker 3:
[04:24] Huh.

Speaker 4:
[04:25] And Columbus never said anything of the sort because everyone knew that the world was round. Now, Columbus said that the world was small and that he could get to Asia because it was very small. He was wrong. But that's what he said.

Speaker 3:
[04:39] So I think it was Decelo by Aristotle where he gives three arguments for why the earth is spherical. One of them, I think, if memory serves, people can correct me in the comments, is you see a ship sailing off and it sinks into the distance.

Speaker 4:
[04:52] Yeah. And that's true. They would do that sometimes where they would put fires on the ship, on the masts and then watch. But the real thing that every Greek sail, if you've ever sailed in the Aegean at all, you'll see this, the coastline in Greece, in the Aegean and the islands, they're very mountainous. So if you sail away from them, the mountain doesn't go farther and further away, it sinks below the water. You can literally watch the mountain sink as you get further away from it. So it was plainly obvious.

Speaker 3:
[05:23] All right, fine. But this next one, I'm going to get to this. You're ready? Speaking of Galileo, the church opposed science and progress. The Galileo affair proves this.

Speaker 4:
[05:34] Yeah. Poor Galileo. I mean, Galileo was a great scientist. There's no doubt about it. He definitely discovered important things. The problem with Galileo was that he was also a bit of a jerk. He was one of these kinds of people who became famous as a scientist. Then, and I'm sure we've never met anyone like this in our lifetime, but he started to think that he was science, and that if you disagreed with him, you were just an imbecile. Not everything that he thought was true was true. He became a very big proponent of Copernican model. This is the heliocentric model of the universe, that the sun is in the center, and that the earth revolves around the sun, which is true. Copernicus, I should say, is a devout Catholic, who devoted, he dedicated his work on the revolution of the spheres to the Pope. So the Catholic Church was completely in favor of all of these things. They were in favor of finding out, because the more you learn about God's creation, the more you know about God. So, this was not, there was nothing that the Church was opposed to in regards to a heliocentric model. But the problem that the Church had, and particularly the scientists in Rome, and by scientists, I mean Jesuits. These are people like St. Robert Bellarmine, Great Minds. Their problem with this was the Copernican model didn't work. It didn't match the observations that you would see in the sky. The only state in Europe that had a state observatory was the Papacy. They had armies of scientists who examine these things. So Galileo said, no, it's the Copernican model. That's the way it is. They said, okay, well, it doesn't work. We're not opposed to the idea of the sun being in the center, but it has to predict what we see in the sky. Because the Copernican model has everything is in circles, perfect circles, and that's not the way the solar system is. It's ellipses. So it didn't predict what they could actually observe. Galileo was not willing to debate. He just insulted everyone. Then the worst came when he decided to write theology and decided to get into what his truths now mean for the truths of the Catholic Church. That's the point in which he ran afoul of the Inquisition because if you're going to teach things which are false, and honestly, they gave him a number of warnings. They said, just stay out of the theology. Just focus on science. He just wouldn't. Then finally, in fact, the Pope, Pope Urban VIII gave him a chance and said, look, why don't you publish a fair minded view of both sides of this issue, of whether this earth is in the center of the universe or the sun is, and give a pro and con, so that people can fairly decide. And so he wrote the book and he treated everyone who held that the earth was at the center. In fact, the person who argues for it is called Simplicious or Simpleton. And then he also insulted, very clearly insulted everyone that he didn't like in Rome, including the Pope.

Speaker 3:
[09:04] How did he do that?

Speaker 4:
[09:05] He just made him look like a buffoon.

Speaker 3:
[09:07] Did he make him a character?

Speaker 4:
[09:08] Yeah, he made him a character. He made all of them characters in this and made them buffoons. So at that point, he had lost his friends. Even still, the Inquisition did not convict him of heresy. They basically convict him of what they called vehement suspicion, which meant that he just had to spend time in his very lavish villa for the rest of his life. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[09:31] That's very different to a dungeon.

Speaker 4:
[09:33] Yes, rather. But as I say, he got into trouble not because of science. In fact, when you think about it, 50 years before Galileo, the Catholic Church had re-figured the calendar, the Gregorian calendar, the calendar that the whole world uses today, that is still precise because the calendars had all got out of whack. You can only do that if you're doing observations. The calendar that we use today is a product of the Catholic Church. It was clear that they were not opposed to any of these things. They were opposed to bad science. Galileo, unfortunately, particularly later in his career, he would just get positions on things like tides or comets. He would hold these positions and they were just wrong. He wouldn't listen to the other sides.

Speaker 3:
[10:33] All right, so just like the lie that the Catholic Church taught that the earth was flat, where did this idea that the Galileo was terribly mistreated by the church?

Speaker 4:
[10:46] Yeah, initially it came out mostly in the late 16th century, early 17th century as part of the confessional fights between Protestants and Catholics.

Speaker 3:
[10:56] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[10:56] The argument was that Galileo had, because the thing with Protestants is they were more opposed to the heliocentric model and Copernicus than the Catholics were. Because remember, they're basing everything on the Bible. Yeah. On the literal word of the Bible. While the Catholics are willing to see this allegorically or in other ways. So they were the ones that were the most critical of it. But by the 18th century, this became a useful play because the argument by that time was that they were looking at the Roman Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition and saying, well, that's what keeps these areas backward. They don't let people think. They don't let reasons survive. So the natural way forward, they took credit for everything that happened during the Middle Ages. The natural way forward is Protestantism and free thinking. So.

Speaker 3:
[12:03] Funny how these things get into the water and then.

Speaker 4:
[12:06] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[12:06] And then they're hard to eradicate.

Speaker 4:
[12:08] Yeah. And this gets written up. The one thing that the English and the Dutch and the Protestant groups, is they had lots of printing presses, and they printed all of this stuff a lot. And it fused into American society through England, and became part of American Protestant culture.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 4:
[15:53] Yeah, the medieval Inquisition was, here's the punch line, the medieval Inquisition actually saved lives. It saved people from being burned at the stake. Here's why.

Speaker 3:
[16:10] Explain yourself.

Speaker 4:
[16:12] The church's position on heresy is what Christ said. If your brother sends against you, go and bring another so there'll be a witness. If he doesn't listen to them, then take him to the church. If he doesn't listen to the church, treat him as you would a tax collector. So the church's position always was, if you're really determined not to believe what we believe, then you're out. You're not part of us anymore. You're excommunicated. That's the sum total of the church's penalty for heresy. The state, however, the royal governments and the state in Western Europe considered heresy to be a capital offense. The reason is not hard to see. Kings base their authority that they are king by the grace of God. Their authority is given to them in coronations that are done by the church. Therefore, if you say that the church is completely wrong, then you are attacking their authority, and that's treason. Okay. Also, people didn't want heretics around them because they knew. It was seen as a disease, and they didn't want that around them. In medieval Europe, up until about 1000, the normal thing if somebody found a heretic, is they would bring them to the local lord, who would sit in his seat of judgment. He's illiterate and doesn't know the faith that well himself. I mean, if someone comes to him and says, hey, this guy stole my pig, then he'll have a reasonable idea of what to do. But if he comes and says, this guy has this view on the blessed sacrament, he's not going to really know what's the right answer. So in most cases, when a heretic was brought before them, these lords, local lords, would just listen to what was being said. And then just to be on the safe side, they would usually just burn her at the stake, because you don't want to put a heretic around for sure. So the problem of heresy continued to grow into the 12th century. And in 1184, Pope Lucius finally set up an institution in which he said, okay, from now on, we don't want people who are accused of heresy just going in front of judges, state judges who have no training in theology or even Roman laws of evidence. We want to have an actual inquiry using Roman law, and done by knowledgeable jurists and theologians, who can then ask these people, that's what inquisitio is, questionings. Ask them some questions before it even goes to trial. And we still do these things, we call them things like inquests, we don't want to use the word inquisition anymore. But so ask the questions and find out. That way, you can find out if this person's actually a heretic. More importantly, though, is that the vast majority of heretics in the Middle Ages were, particularly before the 12th century, didn't mean to be heretics. They just didn't know. Someone were just loud mouths or whatever, they thought they knew what the answer was. But if they were actually presented and someone told them, what you're saying is not true. Here, I'm going to tell you the truth. Here's the faith. They would say, Oh, okay, thank you. I didn't know that. All right. And then that way, they could say, Okay, now say it back to me. And they could respond and they'd say, Okay, fine, you're good. And they would be let go. In fact, that's what happened in all the vast, vast, well over 90% of the cases. People would just say, Oh, I didn't know, I'm sorry. And that would be the end of it. That meant that not only could you ensure that the person was a heretic or not before they went to the courts, but you could also give them the opportunity to get out of it and to amend their ways or just make correct an error. That meant that what the Inquisition was doing was it was interposing itself between the accused and the court. And they then could examine the issue. It was very, very, very rare in the Middle Ages for somebody to actually be moved on. Almost all of them were acquitted. In fact, royal courts were constantly complaining about how the Inquisitors were a bunch of softies that let everybody off. And nobody would ever get through to their courts. There was only a few ways that you could get passed through. The most common would be if you were what's called a relapsed heretic, which meant you are a real heretic. And when you came before this court, you lied to us. And then as soon as you left, you just went back and did the exact same thing, even though you know it's not true. Even still, the church's position is not that the church never burned anyone at the stake. It's not them burning people. What they're saying is, okay, look, the only thing standing between you and that pyre is us. So if you're really going to tell us you're a heretic, we're just going to get out of the way. There's nothing more we can do for you. In fact, the term that the Inquisition would use was called relaxing to the secular arm. So they would just, okay, we're what's preserving you. If you don't want our help, we get out of the way. You go over there. There's the judge waiting for you. He's stoking the flames and ready to burn you at the stake. So yeah, that was the purpose of the Inquisition. Later on, when the Dominicans became part of the Inquisition, they became a little bit more organized, then frequently it was often seen as a kind of way of creating a kind of spiritual hygiene. In fact, frequently people in towns, if the Dominicans arrived in their town, we're talking about the Medieval Inquisition, not the Spanish Inquisition. That's later and different. But the Medieval Inquisition, if the Dominican Inquisitors came to town, they would go through a whole process. And it was kind of, it was seen as hygienic. It was a way of getting everyone together, praying together, telling everyone, if you know somebody who is confused about something or even real heretics, come and talk to us. And then they would investigate all of that. And then once they had found out if anyone was a heretic and if they wanted to come back to the church and all the rest of it, then there'd be big celebrations in which they would celebrate the health of the community. The only time that we have any evidence of communities rising up against inquisitors is when they didn't do their job. When they came and they were just lazy. Okay. They came into town and they just went through the motions and never really did anything. And then they decided to leave. And then you had people rise up and say, wait a second, you guys didn't check anything. You didn't talk to anyone. There's all kinds of people here who are heretics. You need to look into this more. So, it was, as I said, this was a medieval world. It's a different kind of world. Every society has heresies. And the nature of those heresies are that people don't want them around.

Speaker 3:
[23:39] Have you looked into what happened to Joan of Arc? I'm told that the Catholic Church approved of her being burned.

Speaker 4:
[23:45] No, that was a complete travesty of justice. It was mainly done by the English who had captured her. And it was done contrary to all procedures for the Inquisition. All of it was reexamined after her death, unfortunately. It was reexamined and the popes and the masters at the University of Paris all concluded that the whole thing was rigged. It was that she was not supposed to have been burned to the stake. But it was the English who had basically got hold of her. They knew that she was the one that had rallied the French against them.

Speaker 3:
[24:26] Were they English clerics who stood?

Speaker 4:
[24:28] Yeah, English and nobles too, who were fighting the war in the Hundred Years War.

Speaker 3:
[24:34] Doesn't this seem like a get out of jail free card for Catholics though? Whenever Catholics are accused of having doing something, they can just say, well, the pope was technically against it even though some priests were. Well, it's actually the state's fault.

Speaker 4:
[24:45] What do you say to that? Yeah, but that's the truth for everything. I mean, the church is made up of fallible people. I mean, they're going to, and every one of them is a sinner. So they're all going to sin. What makes, what's the glory of the church is that it is founded by Jesus Christ and it will protect and defend the true faith. So it's not that you're not going to have bad Christians. You'll have plenty of them. In fact, they're the ones who need it the most.

Speaker 3:
[25:17] Let me throw in a different type of myth, okay? And this myth comes from the other side. And I don't think anyone's ever really said this, but just to kind of ferret this answer out, I would, here's a myth. There's never been a bad pope. All the popes have been holy throughout the last 2,000 years.

Speaker 4:
[25:32] No, there's been some very, very bad popes. In fact, I always say that one of the greatest evidence of the Holy Spirit moving through the church is the fact that as bad as some of those popes were, none of them ever taught error and faith and morals. I mean, their pope, they could have literally said almost anything they wanted to, but none of them did. I mean, the worst of them, the worst days of the papacy were primarily in the 10th century and parts of the 9th century. All of Europe was in a bad situation then. It was all being attacked by outsiders. Vikings are everywhere. You have Muslim brigands who are attacking everywhere. One of the popes is almost captured by Muslim attackers in Rome. So it's a very difficult time. The quality of life throughout Europe goes down and the popes now increasingly just become the rulers of the city of Rome. And that means they're fought over by various families during that period. And so you have a number of popes who essentially are just, you know, they're kind of like mafioso bosses who end up getting control. Some of them, you have a couple in the 10th century, one who actually was responsible for the death of his predecessor. You have one infamous case at the end of the 10th century, where you have a pope who basically decided he didn't want to be pope anymore, and sold the office and left town, and then a reformer came in, and then his other job didn't work out, so he came back and claimed to be pope still. So there's a lot of that. There's also a period known as the Pornocracy, where you basically have the, which Pornocracy means rule by prostitutes. It's not really prostitutes, but there's a couple of noble women who basically control a series of about three popes, either because they're the lovers or because it's their sons. So it definitely has some really bad periods there. But they tend to be mostly constrained to that period of the 10th century and the early 11th century. That's what leads to the 11th century reform movements, where you get real reform popes who really reformed the whole church, starting with Leo IX and Gregory VII. You have to get some non-Italians in there for a while. You get some good German popes in there.

Speaker 3:
[28:17] I don't know if we could find any good German popes today.

Speaker 4:
[28:19] That's true.

Speaker 3:
[28:21] All right. Final myth, or at least is it? That's the question. The church burned all the pagan books and kept the Bible from the people. I've been told by Protestants they would even chain it to pulpit so that the laity couldn't have access.

Speaker 4:
[28:38] Well, they did chain it, yes.

Speaker 3:
[28:40] What?

Speaker 4:
[28:41] But the reason was because, well, first of all, there were no Bibles on the pulpit. The missiles would be up there. But the thing is in the Middle Ages, books are extremely expensive. There's no paper in the Middle Ages, and there's no printing press. So everything that is written down has to be written by hand, and by professionals. And because there's no paper, it means that every leave in a book is parchment, which is animal skin. It takes vast herds of animals to produce a single book. So they are immensely expensive. For that reason, you often would chain them place because otherwise someone would steal them and sell them off. I mean, they're worth a fortune. It also means that the vast majority of people in the Middle Ages, well over 90% of the people in the Middle Ages, were illiterate, including nobles, because there was nothing for them to read. I mean, the writing is...

Speaker 3:
[29:48] There's no point learning how to read.

Speaker 4:
[29:49] No, right. Yeah, there's nothing for them to read. I mean, when you think of the feudal system, it's all swearing to God. It's oral oaths. You're not writing anything down. So, the literacy was primarily constrained to the clergy, at least outside of Italy where they're doing business. But in rest of Europe, if you needed something read, you'd go to your parish priest and he would read it. Even if you gave a peasant and you taught him how to read the letters, the Bible, he still wouldn't be able to read it because it's in Latin. There's only one written language during the Middle Ages until about the late 13th, early 14th century and that's Latin. It's the only language for which there are rules for writing it down. So if you don't know Latin, it's not going to help you to open the book because you're not going to know what it says. So they weren't trying to keep the Bible from anyone. It's just that the Bibles are rare and expensive, and people don't have the education to be able to read them. If you notice, the big thing of Protestants saying the Bible is everything, something that was new, all comes well after the printing press when books are cheap.

Speaker 3:
[31:07] Yeah, very convenient.

Speaker 4:
[31:08] Yeah. So you need that technological innovation to be able to allow for something like that.

Speaker 3:
[31:13] Yeah, for solo scriptura to be practically viable.

Speaker 4:
[31:15] Right. Otherwise, you'd never see a scriptura.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 4:
[33:56] As far as the pagan works, the only reason that for most pagan work, the only reason that any of them survive is because monks somewhere copied them. The ancient world, they wrote on papyrus. In the best of climates, the papyrus in Europe at least will last about three centuries before it just is brittle and dissipates. So the vast majority of things that were written in the ancient world turned into dust. At some point, starting at about the eighth and ninth centuries, when you had these brittle scrolls, someone needed to take them and copy them down on parchment. Now, parchment, even though it's animal skin, it lasts forever. I don't know how, I'm not a scientist, I don't understand it, but when I work in the archives in Venice, the documents they bring me are all original documents. They're all 1,000 years old and they're all parchment and they're fine. So if you can get it on parchment, then you're good. And that's what they did, particularly under the Carolingians, you had this whole kind of movement to try to preserve what they could, even the profane texts. Now, of course, they're doing this devotionally, so they're going to favor Augustine and one more Bible and things like that because they're monks. But they also would do profane texts. They do Cicero, they would do even kind of body stuff, Plautus, Terence, basically Roman sitcoms, and these would be preserved. So the only reason we have those pagan books is, again, because the Catholic Church preserved them. We wouldn't have them otherwise.

Speaker 3:
[35:48] Dr. Thomas Madden, thank you very much for being here on Last Call. If people want to learn more about you, where would they go? If you had a book recommendation, perhaps one that you've written, what would you suggest?

Speaker 4:
[36:00] Yeah, come to my website, thomasmadden.org. You can find there all of my various books that I've written. I have a new book actually coming out in June, so about a completely different subject. It's about the how republics fall, how historical republics fall.

Speaker 3:
[36:15] How long do we have here?

Speaker 4:
[36:16] A little while. Yeah?

Speaker 3:
[36:17] More than five years?

Speaker 4:
[36:18] Yeah. Enough for me to get royalties on the book.

Speaker 3:
[36:22] Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much for watching Last Call. Do us a favor, if you have heard of another myth that you think is worth debunking about our blessed Lord or our holy mother, the church, put it in the comment section below, share what the myth is and share why it's false. Thanks for watching.