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One of my favourite Sunday columnists, Anna Mallia, who is consistently objective and correct, is advised to brush up her history and check facts before rushing into certain innuendoes as she did in her contribution of 19 February headed ‘Thank God I’m Catholic’.
Since when, I ask, has the Catholic religion become the champion of freedom and tolerance? One does not have to leave the shores of Europe for examples of intolerance and suppression of freedom that actually lasted hundreds of years. Evidently it is in the recent past that the Catholic Religion has assumed a more humane and humble outlook.
For centuries, Christian kings, emperors, dictators and sometimes Popes have waged long wars against each other. Whether the issue was religion or greed, a pretext to start a war presented no difficulty. To these characters, the message of love and peace ascribed to their Catholic religion seems to have fallen on deaf ears! For centuries the Holy Inquisition resorted to the most ignoble type of violence and persecuted its own Christian adherents, using torture to extract confessions, very often absurd allegations from innocent human beings. After the confessions the poor souls were in many cases burnt alive at the stake.
Mercy, tolerance, freedom of expression and love for thy neighbour were unknown luxuries to the sick minds of the Holy Inquisitors. The Holy Inquisition was launched in the year 1233 when the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars was at its height. The Cathars, generally a decent law-abiding people living in relative peace and prosperity in the South of France, were mercilessly persecuted and finally destroyed by the Catholic religion in the 13th century, a sinister page from history that lasted nearly 50 years and in which hundreds were burnt at stake and thousands, including a large number of women and children, were put to the sword by Christian armies.
Of course the Holy Inquisition is just one aspect of the Catholic religion, probably its worst. However, since history cannot be erased and the past cannot be consigned into oblivion, one must tread carefully before admonishing the other side of the great divide, wether they are Muslim or whoever else. Often victims are conveniently labelled enemies! In Iraq alone the number of innocent Muslims men, women and children killed as a result of the recent, endless embargo runs into millions. The Christian nations who authorised the sanctions must bear on their conscience this terrible genocide.
Of course one could carry on and on because unfortunately the list of cases in the world around us is long and tedious and so Dr Mallia, before I finish, please allow me the liberty to borrow what you stated in your article, changing just one name in the process: ‘It is so sad that the teachings of Christ have still not reached the souls of many of his followers’.
Vladimir Cini
Paola
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