Re: Catholics in Space!

Well, let's put it this way... the Mongol Empire under the Khans got a
lot
of refugees seeking asylum from the Catholic Church during the Middle
Ages... because under the Mongols, nobody cared what god you worshipped
as
long as you bent knee to the Khans.

Meanwhile, the Lutherans were hardly permitted to go quietly away from
Rome,
and Elizabeth I had a very real struggle just to stay alive long enough
to
take the throne after Bloody Mary's purges (which were heartily
supported by
the Pope), much less survive as a Protestant Queen.  It was not until
the
Spanish Armada was defeated that England became safely Protestant.

Under the Catholic Church, even an idea so simple as stating that the
earth
was not the center of the universe was a heresy punishable by death.
Copernicus did not dare publish his book theorizing that the earth
orbitted
around the sun until he was on his deathbed.  Galileo underwent quite a
bit
of pressure from the Church to repudiate his theories under threat of
being
burned at the stake.  It's only been in the last ten years that the
Church
has finally conceded that Galileo's theories were right.

The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages has easily as much blood on its
hands
as any religious institution of the last millenium.  The Turks (when
they
converted to Islam rather fanatically and were motivated to forge the
Ottoman Empire in blood) and the Aztecs (with a rather brutal and
sacrificial spiritual belief set in general) give them a run for their
money, but the Catholic Church has been far from a peaceful
organization.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard and Emily Bell" <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2001 8:17 PM
Subject: Re: Catholics in Space!

>
>
> Laserlight wrote:
>
> > From: Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
> > > Hordes of starships stamping out heresy is a Puritan (protestant)
> > thing, more
> > > likely to spring from a tightly knit group of born-again
christians,
> > than from
> > > Roman Catholics.
> >
> > Beg your pardon?  The Catholic Church preached the original crusades
> > right after Manzikert, and continued to stamp out heretics (eg the
> > Albigensians) for quite a while.  The Papal States sent ships to
> > Lepanto and IIRC had their own troops until mid 1800's or so.
>
> The power of the Papacy went into a nosedive once there was more than
one
> christian church in western europe.  Once Martin Luther's ninety-nine
> theses were nailed to that door, the temporal power of the Papacy was
> doomed.  The Vatican City does have a small self-defence force of
Swiss
> troops (formerly mercenaries, but now the volunteers from the Swiss
army)
> [useless trivia: by treaty, the Pope's Swiss guard are the only swiss
> men-at-arms allowed outside the border of Switzerland].  If stardrives
had
> been invented in the fifteenth century, ravaging spacefleets bent on
> exterminating heresy were possible, but the succeeding centuries did
not
> leave the Church with the strength to field large forces of any sort.
>