Book Review
Defensive Lapses
Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History
by Rodney Stark
Templeton Press, 2016
(216 pages, $27.95, hardcover)
reviewed by R. V. Young
When I was in the third grade in a public school in Angola, New York, a small town outside Buffalo, my class was shown an "educational" film to mark Columbus Day on October 12, a holiday still innocently celebrated in those benighted days. Columbus was depicted reassuring terrified seamen that the earth is "round, like an orange" (which he helpfully held up as an illustration), and expostulating with scowling black-garbed clerics that he would not fall over the edge of the earth if he sailed west to reach the Indies. I am not certain that I was completely disabused of this nonsense until I read Dante and C. S. Lewis, years later in college. Rodney Stark's Bearing False Witness would have been helpful to me, because he makes short work of this particular fabrication in the opening pages of his introduction, "Confronting Distinguished Bigots."
Effective Debunking
The author of many best-selling books taking a contrarian stand against the politically correct consensus on controversial topics of the day, Stark has undertaken a refutation of ten popular accusations against the Catholic Church, which continue to bedevil her after numerous refutations. Stark is not a Catholic, and, he says, "I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history" (7). It is difficult for any lover of historical truth, but especially for a Roman Catholic (as I am), not to be pleased that so eminent a writer should turn his considerable skills and prestige to dismantling a number of the more egregious falsehoods that have circulated about the history and teaching of the Catholic Church for many decades, even centuries, and that have gained a specious credibility by dint of mere repetition. There is, in fact, much to admire and, for Catholics, much worthy of gratitude in the book. Nevertheless, there are some significant lapses in the scholarship and dubious methods of argument that dampen a careful reader's enthusiasm.
In addition to the brief introduction and a postscript, the book comprises ten chapters, each devoted to one of the falsehoods about the Catholic Church promulgated by ignorance or learned malice and widely credited by the public. In order, Stark debunks the notion that the Church has been virulently anti-Semitic throughout most of her history; that the flurry of "gospels" that have been recently discovered or become prominent are valid alternative accounts of Christianity suppressed for centuries by the Church; that cosmopolitan, tolerant paganism was rapidly and utterly stamped out by Christian authority immediately after Constantine recognized the new religion; that the period between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Renaissance was uniquely primitive, violent, and ignorant; that the Crusades were an act of barbaric aggression motivated largely by lust for the spoils of war; that the Inquisition was a uniquely oppressive institution, which used torture and terror and was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths; that the Church has long attempted to suppress science, which only burst forth during the Renaissance and Reformation because her authority was weakening; that the Church was, until very recently, an enthusiastic supporter of slavery; that Catholic teaching is fundamentally incompatible with republican or democratic government and always supports absolute monarchy; and, finally, that the characteristic features of the modern world—capitalism, the industrial and technological revolutions—were vigorously opposed by the Catholic Church and only occurred and flourished because the Protestant Reformation diminished the Church's authority.
In order to assess Stark's success in justifying his claims, it is important to take into account the book's aims and procedures. He candidly admits that his method is largely derivative of other scholars, specialists in the various fields relevant to each particular issue. His purpose, he avers, is "to make the work of these fine scholars widely available," because "most of these experts write only for one another" (6–7).
In much of his book, Stark does exactly what he promises here, but in a number of instances he fails to document primary sources adequately, and, while acknowledging secondary sources, he sometimes misrepresents them. Further, it is not wholly correct that fine scholars have neglected to share their work with the wider reading public: Stanley Jaki, Philip Jenkins (Stark's Baylor colleague), Henry Kamen, Régine Pernoud, and Jonathan Riley-Smith, among others, come immediately to mind.
The opening chapter takes up "Sins of Anti-Semitism," and the author is largely successful in demonstrating that the Church's animus against Jews in the course of its 2,000-year history has been grossly exaggerated, and that the accusations of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies leveled against Pope Pius XII in modern times are groundless. Stark avails himself of a number of fine scholarly studies to show that the often painful history of Jewish-Christian relations is more complex than we are usually led to believe; that the Church has often protected Jews against pervasive anti-Semitism, which goes back to ancient times; and that Catholicism can by no means be faulted for the Holocaust. Stark makes an especially good case, based on an acquaintance with numerous sound studies, against the egregious calumnies directed against Pius XII.
Chapters two and three deal with the contemporary longing for an alternative religious history more suited to the predilections of modern man. "The Suppressed Gospels" demolishes the case for accepting the continual discovery or rediscovery of accounts of Jesus' life and teachings not included in the canon of the New Testament as evidence for the existence of a more "tolerant" and "inclusive" (and self-indulgent!) version of Christianity. All of these documents, mostly of a Gnostic cast and so cherished by such scholars as Elaine Pagels, are much later than the canonical texts, totally devoid of historical reliability, and, above all, not really good news.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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