From Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

With apologies to my Protestant friends, here is my response — slightly different from yours — to your Protestant reader’s remarks concerning Catholicism.

The Eastern Orthodox and Catholic versions of Christianity were formed in the cradle of Greco-Roman, Classical civilization, in parallel with Pagan forms of ethical Monotheism related to a longstanding philosophical tradition.  In absorbing elements of Paganism, Greco-Roman Christianity was simply absorbing civilization, at the same time that, through its doctrines, it was raising the moral level of that civilization.  To someone with little understanding of history and tradition – and Protestantism is and always has been hostile to history and tradition – Catholicism might appear “pagan,” but this is an error originating with the point of view.

Indeed, in rejecting the elements of religion that Medieval Christianity had inherited from the ancient Pagan civilization, Protestantism, in effect, rejected civilization.  Protestant iconoclasm, which depressingly resembles Islamic iconoclasm, expressed a startling hostility to art and beauty, which Medieval Christianity was delighted to incorporate.  Moreover, iconoclasm was violent – and that in the name of the Prince of Peace!  It was not merely the iconoclasm, but the persecution, including the physical abuse and murder of priests, monks, and nuns, which was violent.  The Thirty Years War looks like a type of domestic Jihad in Northern Europe.  Before the War there were twelve million inhabitants in the Germanic North; at its end there were four – or in some estimates as little as three – million.

The repression of Catholicism in Sweden under the Gustavians was brutal.  The repression of Catholicism in England under Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth was equally brutal.  In both instances massive, grisly violence was the instrument of “conversion.”

Despite these horrors, the Catholic Church strove to reconcile itself in the aftermath with the dissenters; but the dissenters, the Protestants, have never shown any similar tendency.  Perhaps this too is a Pagan quality of Catholicism; pre-Christian Pagans recognized the variety in cult, the articulate explanation of which was that whereas the images of God might differ, Godhead remains a single principle and is transcendent.

The reader’s comment implicitly describes Protestantism as scientific (saintly images and rosaries are to him unscientific).  This claim is an egregious category-error that verily takes the breath away.  But witch-burning, which is about as unscientific as a society can get, was overwhelmingly a Protestant phenomenon – its most famous incidence belonging to the ultra-Protestant Puritans of the Salem Colony.  Moreover, every evil regime, from the Revolutionary Directorate in France to the Twentieth-Century totalitarian regimes, while rejecting Christianity and murdering its practitioners, has declared that it is scientific.  Please, God, deliver us from scientific regimes.

To your reader, Catholicism looks Pagan, unscientific, and gaudy.  But what does Protestantism look like?  It looks like the Puritans of Salem; it looks like the members of the Directorate; it looks like the dour judges of the Dutch Supreme Court who keep putting Geert Wilders’ on trial for standing up to those other Puritans.

I could go on, but this seems enough to me.

— Comments —

Wheeler writes:

Dr. Bertonneau makes some good points, but I must interject a small correction. No witches were burned in Salem. Nineteen were hanged, and one was crushed to death with stones.

But his observations about the Puritan mentality, etc. are quite correct.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

Thanks to Wheeler, I stand technically corrected. I should have written of “witch-immolations” – a generic way of describing the numerous specific forms. Of course, it is of no consolation to the victim whether she is about to be burned at the stake or crushed with boulders. I concede in advance to the inevitable someone who makes the object that one may find instances of heretic-execution in the Catholic countries. Famously a Papal Inquisition burned Joan of Arc at the stake, and another Papal Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno; but the Church acknowledged its error in both cases, by canonizing Joan and issuing an apology for the extreme, brutal treatment of Bruno.

Bruce B. writes:

In partial defense of Sean C.’s denomination, the violence of iconoclasm and the violent repression of Catholicism is largely associated with the Protestant state churches e.g. Anglicanism and Lutheranism. The English Baptists, I believe, were generally proponents of religious freedom and separation of church and state and had little (that I’m aware of) to do with what Dr. Bertonneau is describing. Baptists often do not identify strongly with the Protestant label or other Protestant churches like the Anglican church, Lutheran church, New England Congregationalists, etc.

 Dr. Bertonneau writes:

Then, as my Swedish-Baptist grandmother, on my mother’s side, would have said: More power to the Baptists!

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