It was full of factual errors and malicious conjecture.In fact it was typical of more routine anti-catholic tracts and attacks by hard-core Christian Fundamentalist sects…you can read it for yourself here; http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0727/1224301446703.html
”You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts”
US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Vincent Browne in this case believes that he is entitled to ”his own facts” as well as his own opinions.That is quite ambitious even in the current antagonistic climate.
I aim to challenge ”Vincent’s facts” and later to shed some light on the bogus sources and shadowy groups associated with promoting material like we find in the heart of Vincent Browne’s article.I aim to challenge ”Vincent’s facts” with the real historical facts and context.
This is a partial rebuttal of Vincent Browne’s charges regarding the historical facts and the integrity of the evidence that he places so much trust in.The rebuttal of the other theological woppers that Browne commits are work for another day;
Vincent Browne’s historical critique of the Catholic Church (Opinion & Analysis, July 27th) falls into the trap of relying on lazy English translations of obscure 15th century Papal documents. The Papal Bull Dum Diversas from 1452 was originally published in ecclesiastical Latin and it is difficult enough to find a copy of the original Latin text never mind a modern English translation that reaches a consensus among serious scholars. It is thus prime raw material for polemicists to draw upon.
In the original text Dun Diversas from 1452 Pope Nicholas V is replying to an appeal by King Alfonso V of Portugal. In the article Vincent Brown betrays the faulty translation by also referring to the King of Spain. The first King of a united Spain was Charles I who was only crowned in 1516.Ferdinand of Castile and Isabella of Aragon only married in 1469. This was a personal union and their two kingdoms retained separate identities.Indeed it was only in 1492 that the Saracen Kingdom of Granada fell and for the first time in over 700 years of bloody attrition the Iberian Peninsula was under Christian rule. In issuing the 1452 Bull to the King of Portugal to oppose the enemies of Christ, namely the Saracens; Pope Nicholas V was sounding a rallying call to vacillating Christian rulers to oppose the onward march of Islamic conquest. Christian Europe was in a state of crisis heightened by the cries for assistance coming from the fast fading Christian Byzantine Empire. During the spring and early summer of 1453 the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II approached and laid siege to Constantinople which finally fell on 29th May 1453.This was a shattering event for Christian Kingdoms all over Europe. The Papal Bull of 1452 was more like a 15th century version of modern rules of engagement ; which outlined certain rules for a Just War against aggressor nations, including the treatment of prisoners and proposing an extended POW type status rather than the common secular alternative of summary execution on the battlefield. The term perpetual slavery is not an accurate translation of the ecclesiastical Latin phrase. It betrays a modern Anglo-American bias rather than reflecting the historical reality. The historical reality of a weak, pre-Columbian,15th century Christian kingdom like Portugal under constant attack from the Saracens .The same dilemmas in the humane treatment of prisoners of war taken in asymmetric conflicts still haunt modern nation states, even one as powerful and democratic as the USA. Indeed many of the captured prisoners could have been originally themselves captured by the Saracens as children; as the document Dum Diversas refers to returning certain peoples to the Christian faith. After the Christian re-conquest of Granada, North African based Saracen slavers continued to raid Europe for centuries and even reached Baltimore in West Cork in 1631 when over 100 men, women and children were taken into slavery on the Barbary Coast. This was not an era of polite diplomacy between civilised nation states where the United Nations could step in to arbitrate disputes over prisoners or territory.
Vincent Browne’s article then jumps 368 years to North America in the 1820s and makes claims about the great influence of Papal Bulls in a society where Catholics themselves faced widespread prejudice and only gained full citizenship rights in some states in the 1830s. Joel Panzar’s book The Popes and Slavery outlines the Papal Bulls, Encyclicals and other documents from 1493,1497,1537,1639,1741,1839,1866 and so on where slavery of all races and the slave trade itself were condemned in the strongest language. Pope Paul III alone made three major pronouncements against slavery in 1537.
Indeed in 1435 nearly sixty years before the Europeans were to find the New World and seventeen years before Nicholas V and Dum Diversas; Pope Eugene IV issued his Bull Sicut Dudum which started the long battle to condemn the enslavement of free peoples.
This Bull commands on the explicit threat of excommunication; that within fifteen days of the publication of these letters that they (the Spanish traders) restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of the Canary Islands who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free and to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money.
In subsequent centuries Christians of all denominations ignored Gospel principles and paid only lip service to Papal commands. Powerful individuals, organisations and ‘’States’’ used the Church’s prestige when it suited them to gain power, leverage influence and to manipulate their own populations. They generally suited themselves and protected their own interests with pragmatic expediency as a priority rather than following Jesus Christ’s command to love thy neighbour as thyself. Recent events in Ireland only go to prove that political hypocrisy, human nature and our propensity for selfish actions which steal other’s innocence never changes.
To be continued; There are other charges that Vincent Browne lays against the door of the Papacy and the Church in his article concerning the native peoples of North America and the expropriation of their lands. After approximately five minutes of research I could prove that Vincent Browne’s charge in this case is even more debased and totally and completely without any justifciation.It is in fact a self-contradictory set of ”facts” and premises that he lays out for himself once the evidence he presents is examined in any way at all never mind in a forensic fashion.A forensic fashion for presenting evidence and substantiating claims that one would expect from our national ”paper of record” the Irish Times and its new editor.Vincent Browne’s presentation of these ”Vincent facts” and associated claims extending from these ”Vincent facts” are the tell-tale signs of a hubristic personality palgerising polemical internet sources in a blatantly lazy fashion….To be continued soon…
Irish Times letters 30th July 2011 from Dr KEVIN E O’REILLY;
Sir, – At last I can enter the debate concerning the Cloyne report. Up to now, I was seemingly disqualified from so doing as I had actually read part of the report.Like Vincent Browne (Opinion Analysis, July 27th), however, I have not read the papal bulls he quotes. The slightest acquaintance with academic scholarship will, however, lead one to suspect that one-liners from documents written in Latin and obtained from some other source other than the original documents are unlikely to offer an accurate interpretation.Needless to say, Mr Browne fails to mention all the papal writings that condemn slavery, and the great figures, such as the Dominican, Bartolemé de las Casas, who fought for its abolition. – Yours, etc,
Dr KEVIN E O’REILLY, Carpenterstown Road,Dublin 15.
Irish Times Letters 29th July 2011 from RAY COMERFORD;
Sir, – Vincent Browne’s rant against the Catholic Church (Opinion & Analysis, July 27th) was so vitriolic that I was a little stunned. He started with a papal bull issued 502 years before I was born and hinged his entire tirade on it and similar utterances. He failed to show any balance or to present any of his arguments in the context of the prevailing culture and values at those particular times. Unfortunately, we cannot always view history, even church history, from a 21st-century perspective. – Yours, etc,
RAY COMERFORD, Bray, Co Wicklow.
Tony Allwright on August 2, 2011 at 10:23 am said:
Browne writes, in his customarily sneering manner, that “crusades instigated and sponsored by the church, specifically authorised by another papal bull, and massacred Muslims, in one instance hundreds of defenceless men, women and children in the mosque at Jerusalem”.He chooses to hide that Pope Urban II’s sole reason for launching the crusades in 1095 was to protect Christians in the Middle East from its Muslim conquerors and to repel the invading Muslim Seljuq Turks from Anatolia. Christians across North Africa, the Levant and Western Asia had been under Islamic subjugation and brutalisation for more than 400 years.If the Church is to be criticised for launching the Crusades, it is because it sat on its hands for so many centuries before trying to protect its flock. As for massacres, well that was the way war was conducted in those days, unenlightened by today’s touchy-feeliness. You fought to win and destroy the enemy. Just like WW2 actually
