But yet in Europe I am struck by the opposite: by the absence of history and the knowledge of this chapter of Christian history. ibid.
There had already been attacks on power-crazed bishops, ignorant priests, and fake holy relics. Luther targeted a set of corrupt documents called Indulgences. In 1517 he made them the launch pad of his religious rebellion. Ann Widdecombe, Christianity: A History: Reformation s1e5
What Luther was unleashing was one of the greatest political and religious revolutions in history. ibid.
For me this is the triumph of the Reformation: the Luther Bible. With his own notes hand-written in the margin. ibid.
The Pope was the official head of the Church in England. And gave Henry the title Defender of the Faith for his loyal zeal. Yet it was this same Henry that eventually brought the Reformation to England. ibid.
It continued for five days. The River Seine ran red with blood and copy-cat attacks occurred throughout France ... The Reformation had led ordinary Christians to butcher one another. ibid.
Christianity needed a reformation, but I think the way it worked out in practice was the most appalling tragedy. ibid.
For more than 1,500 years Christians saw the Bible as the primary source of knowledge. But in the seventeenth century a new movement emerged that challenged the Christian view of the world. What we now call science emerged about 400 years through the work of a group of European thinkers who discovered new ways of interpreting the world. They no longer relied on the delivered word of God. The scientific revolution put individual curiosity, enquiry, reason, and experiment above religious dogma. And to my mind science is quite simply the biggest challenge that Christianity will ever have to face. Professor Colin Blakemore, Christianity: A History: God and the Scientists s1e7
The Vatican realised that Capurnicus’s speculations contradicted the Biblical view that the Earth is stationary. At the centre of the universe. But it was willing to tolerate his ideas for now. Capurnicus’s new theory soon pitted Christianity and science against itself. In the scientific revolution’s darkest hour. ibid.
Galileo Galilei was one of the most respected scientists. He helped the Vatican set up its first observatory in Rome and taught astronomy at the finest universities in the Catholic world. ibid.
Thinkers such as Isaac Newton and John Lock realised that the laws of the universe were there to be discovered not read about in the Bible. It was the Age of Enlightenment. Democracy, freedom and science replaced religion at the heart of society. For me the person who epitomizes the Enlightenment is an American: Benjamin Franklin. ibid.
Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. H G Wells
The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the Earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die in extremest agony than that one soul, I will not say will be lost but commit one venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth or should steal one farthing without excuse. Cardinal Newman, Apologia
The way to get people back to the Church is to tell them they’re going to burn in Hell for eternity if they use contraceptives. Spitting Image s1e1, Pope, ITV 1984
If all the bones of all the victims of the Catholic Church could be gathered together, a monument higher than the pyramids would rise. Robert G Ingersoll
At the bottom of the ladder is Catholicism and at the top is Science. Robert Green Ingersoll
The Vatican this week attacked America’s nuns for spending too much time working to help the poor and fight poverty, and not spending enough time attacking same-sex marriage. The criticism, considered formal disciplinary action against the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents over 55,000 nuns in the United States, also labeled as ‘grave and a matter of serious concern’ that the nuns are not sufficiently denouncing abortion ... and women’s ordination. The Washington Post article 19th April 2012, Vatican Attacks US Nuns For Fighting Poverty Instead of Gay Marriage
I think members of the Catholic Church who were pro-Nazi helped people escape after the war. Guy Walters, author Hunting Evil
They call it the Rat Line: it’s an espionage train, a system of evacuation, a whole system of continents and monasteries that were set up linking Germany, then it would cross over the alps into Italy. John Loftus
They were Hitler’s henchmen, officers and foot soldiers of the Nazi war machine. Many committed war crimes during the holocaust. A few were tried and punished. Was post-war chaos to blame? Or was there a vast conspiracy that allowed the guilty to escape justice? Perhaps the latest technology can track alleged war criminals. And is there evidence the Catholic Church helped Nazis fade into obscurity? Conspiracy Test s1e3: Fugitive Nazis, truTV 2007
After the war the Church recommended forgiveness and amnesty, even for unrepentant war criminals. ibid.
They were allowed to flee, and they fled with the International Committee of the Red Cross ... And with the help of Pious XII and the whole organisation within the Catholic Church and the Vatican. A Fourth Reich in the Sun? 21st Century Wire, Gerrard Williams
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up. George Orwell
The Catholic Church is almost uniformly the enemy of liberty. Gardner Spring, Presbyterian minister
The Pope says AIDS may be bad but condoms are worse. What kind of moral teaching is this? And how many people are going to die for such dogma? Christopher Hitchens v Reverend Al Sharpton
[Mother Teresa] was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions. Christopher Hitchens, Mommie Dearest, cited Slate 2003
Widely and uncritically accepted … the saintliness of an Albanian nun … extravagant adulation … so how did this auction of hyperbole and credulity get started? Christopher Hitchens, Hell’s Angel: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Channel 4 1994
This profane marriage between tawdry media hype and media superstition. ibid.
Mother Teresa’s cult of death and suffering depends for its effect on the most vulnerable and helpless. ibid.
For someone whose kingdom is not of this Earth Mother Teresa has an easy way with thrones, dominions and powers. ibid.
An ally of the status quo … a trusted ally of the conservative forces. ibid.
The Vatican, and its vast network of dioceses, has in the past decade alone been forced to admit complicity in a huge racket of child rape and child torture, mainly but by no means exclusively homosexual, in which known pederasts and sadists were shielded from the law and reassigned to parishes where the picking of the innocent and defenseless were often richer. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p51
The Catholic Church was generally sympathetic to fascism as an idea ... Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. Under the terms of this deal, Catholicism became the only recognized religion in Italy, with monopoly powers over matters such as birth, marriage, death, and education, and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini’s party. ibid. p235
Across southern Europe, the church was a reliable ally in the instatement of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal, and Croatia. ibid. p236
In central and eastern Europe ... the extreme right-wing military coup in Hungary, led by Admiral Horthy, was warmly endorsed by the church, as were similar fascist movements in Slovakia and Austria. (The Nazi puppet regime in Slovakia was actually led by a man in holy orders named Father Tiso). The cardinal of Austria proclaimed his enthusiasm at Hitler's takeover of his country at the time of the Anschluss. ibid. p236
When the German conquest of France arrived, these forces eagerly collaborated in the rounding up and murder of French Jews, as well as in the deportation of forced to forced labour of a huge number of other Frenchmen. ibid. pp236-237
Parish records were made available to the Nazi state in order to establish who was and who was not ‘racially pure’ enough to survive endless persecution under the Nuremberg laws. ibid. p238
None of the Protestant churches, however, went as far as the Catholic hierarchy is ordering an annual celebration for Hitler’s birthday on April 20. ibid. p238-239
Studying the war, one can perhaps accept that 25 per cent of the SS were practising Catholics and that no Catholic was ever even threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes. ibid. p240
The collusion continued even after the war, as wanted Nazi criminals were spirited to South America by the infamous ‘rat line’. It the Vatican itself, with its ability to provide passports, documents, money, and contacts, which organized the escape network and also the necessary shelter and succour at the other end. ibid. p240