Holy Money

[locks]

Aljazeera America's documentary "Holy Money" shown tonight (and also on CBC's Compassionate Eye) is a mind-blowing expose of the criminal corruption at the Vatican, it's bank, and the Catholic Church in the US. It shows that the love of money and power which we know corrupts governments around the world, including our own, has turned many of our religious institutions into dens of iniquity. We know this is nothing new and what Francis is up against!

You may want to read The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, about the complete corruption of the Church and the papacy after the fall of Rome and conquering of the "pagan world" and how the great philosophers struggled long before and during the Renaissance to bring light to a very dark world.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. After you read The Swerve, get a good translation of On the Nature of Things

by Lucretius and read that. You start to get a glimpse of just what a pit of ignorance the church enforced for the thousand years after the collapse of the ancient world.

[edhopper]

2. "The Dark Ages"

is not an arbitrary name. And it was squarely due to the Churches dominance in Europe.

[okasha]

3. Wrong.

The Dark Ages--roughly 420-800 CE--were the result of social collapse in Western Europe, which was itself an effect of large-scale migrations of "barbarian" tribes into the territories of the Western Empire after the fall of Rome.

The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, managed to fight off the invaders. Consequently they did not experience a Dark Age.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. I avoided the term dark ages as it is

problematic. However the eastern empire was part of the problem as well, freezing knowledge at circa 400 or so, destroying the ancient centers of academia, such as Alexandria, overlaying classical civilization with the crippling orthodox Christian theology.

The Arab conquest of North Africa and Iberia, contrary to your assertion of the negative effects of the societies that replaced the empire, was the only flicker of light, the only region where civilization and knowledge advanced significantly until the beginnings of the renaissance.

[edhopper]

5. Wasn't it the Arab people

who preserved the writings of the Greeks, and these writings, rediscovered in Europe helped lead to the renaissance.

[Warren Stupidity]

6. partly. Also Constantinople famously did a book dump before the end.

And there were lots of texts being copied in the west by various monasteries, for which the roman catholic church does get credit, although they were destroying at least as many ancient texts as they were preserving.

[Leontius]

7. Not the whole story. There were periods of supression of ' pagan philosophical schools'

most notable under Justinian I but the schools and classical education survived until the fall of Constantinople.

[locks]

8. Thanks for the helpful information

Much of the time I can see how far we have come in the "modern age" but the it sounds like the Vatican (and most religious institutions) are sunk in the dark ages. Do you think there is hope that Francis can make enough difference to bring the church out of the systemic swamp? Or that we will ever see a time when our politicians and leaders will not be bought off and bow to wealth and power?