Totalitarian Church: from Theodosius to Henry VIII

All this history makes clear that from its very beginning Christianity was a political movement that appropriated Jewish, Greek and Gnostic ideas that were then current and adopted them to best suit its propaganda purposes. Christianity triumphed because of the political skill of its leaders, notably Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. Thanks to Eusebius’s political skills, Constantine allowed his version of Christianity, known as Nicene Christianity to be recognized as the official Christianity.

By giving official recognition to Christianity, Constantine sounded the death knell of the Roman Empire. It soon lost its liberal and inclusive character and became a narrow theocracy unsuited to hold together a diverse people over a vast area. Constantine’s blunder found its fulfillment in Theodosius who banned all other forms of worship. This was the beginning of the end of the unified Roman Empire. Beginning with Theodosius, the liberal and pluralistic Roman Empire became a theocratic totalitarian state. Its breakup leading to the Dark Ages was all but inevitable. The Huns led by Attila delivered the coup de grace to the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD.

The next thousand years saw the Roman Empire in Europe break up into a number of smaller principalities engaged in continual wars. The Bishop of Rome, later known as the Pope, claimed power over these kingdoms as a gift from Constantine. The authority for this was a forged document known as the Donation of Constantine. It claims that the Donation was Constantine’s gift to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith, baptizing him and miraculously curing him of leprosy. The Catholic Encyclopedia admits as much about the Donation:

“By this name is understood, since the end of the Middle Ages, a forged document of Emperor Constantine the Great, by which large privileges and rich possessions were conferred on the pope and the Roman Church… It is addressed by Constantine to Pope Sylvester I (314-35) and consists of two parts... Constantine is made to confer on Sylvester and his successors the following privileges and possessions: the pope, as successor of St. Peter, has the primacy over the four Patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem, also over all the bishops in the world.

“The Lateran basilica at Rome, built by Constantine, shall surpass all churches as their head, similarly the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul shall be endowed with rich possessions. The chief Roman ecclesiastics (clerici cardinales), among whom senators may also be received, shall obtain the same honors and distinctions as the senators. Like the emperor the Roman Church… The pope shall enjoy the same honorary rights as the emperor, among them the right to wear an imperial crown, a purple cloak and tunic, and in general all imperial insignia or signs of distinction…” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, the Pope in addition to being the head of all the churches in Christendom gets all the power and privileges of the Emperor. Thank to this daring forgery Roman Church becomes the Roman Empire with the Pope as its emperor! This is not the only forgery by the Church, only the most famous. While the Donation has little relevance today, the Decretum by Gratian of Bologna continues to exercise its influence over Church policy and practices. Peter de Rosa, a Catholic scholar and former priest has this to say about it:

“… the documents forged in Rome at this time [before 1100 AD] were systematized in the mid-1100s at Bologna by Gratian, a Benedictine monk. His Decretum or the Code of Canon Law was easily the most influential book ever written by a Catholic. It was peppered with three centuries of forgeries and conclusions drawn from them, with his own fictional additions. Of the 324 passages he quotes from Popes of the first three centuries, only eleven are genuine.” (Emphasis added.)

As an example we may again quote the Catholic Encyclopedia: “A list of sixty… letters or decrees attributed to the popes from St. Clement (88-97) to Melchiades (311-314) inclusive. Of these sixty letters fifty-eight are forgeries;… This correspondence was meant to give an air of truth to the false decretals…”  

No wonder the Greeks for centuries called Rome the home of forgeries. The thousand years from Theodosius to the beginning of the European Renaissance conveniently dated to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 is called the Dark Ages. This period saw religious wars in Europe, the Crusades, the persecution of thinkers like Galileo and Giordano Bruno (who was burnt at the stake), the Inquisition, witch hunts and other such acts in the name of God and Christ.  

This period saw incessant struggles between the Church and the state, due to the Vatican’s efforts to control the kingdoms that had emerged from the remains of the Roman Empire. There was also a self-styled Holy Roman Empire, led by an elected emperor usually from the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was constantly at loggerheads with the Church. Voltaire dismissed the Holy Roman Empire as “neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.”

The popes excommunicated several of its rulers, notably Emperor Frederick II. Frederick was a complete disbeliever in the Vatican’s divine claims, and in fact a disbeliever in all religion. He is famous for the statement: “World has known three imposters - Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.” No wonder he was excommunicated by the Pope, but the real reason was Frederick asserted his political authority and refused to bend to the Pope’s demands.

It was a similar story in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Once Christianity became the state religion, its leaders went on a rampage destroying centers of Greek learning in places like Alexandria and Athens. The great Greek civilization that gave sages like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and a host of others over a thousand years was totally destroyed. The murder of the neo-Platonic scholar Hypatia in 415 AD by a Christian mob led by ‘Saint’ Cyril may be seen as the beginning of the Dark Ages in the east. The Eastern Roman Empire, known as the Byzantine, was unable to check the expansion of Islam and finally disappeared.

However, the eastern or orthodox Church is older than the western or Roman Catholic church that was not really organized until the time of Charlemagne in the eighth century. The orthodox churches today, which include the Greek, Russian, Armenian, Egyptian and Syrian do not accept the Pope, the mass and other pillars of the Roman Catholic church.

Most if not all progressive movements in Europe were anti-Church; most of them were battles waged by the people and rulers to free themselves from the Church’s stranglehold. These include the Renaissance, the Reformation (led by Martin Luther and John Calvin) and the Enlightenment, which sought to place reason ahead of faith and superstition. The Church was opposed to all these and created the Inquisition to suppress free thinking. Gradually, European kingdoms broke free of the Vatican’s control and evolved into nation states. It culminated in England’s break with the Roman Church with King Henry VIII declaring himself head of the Church of England.

The Protestants rejected the pope and the church, the use of icons and even the figure of the Virgin Mary. Unfortunately they turned the Bible into the literal word of God which brought in another form of intolerance into their thinking, which remains to the present day in Evangelical groups.

Thanks to England’s break with the Vatican, the US, Canada and Australia are progressive countries with democratic governments. Those colonized by the Catholic powers Spain and Portugal - Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and others countries in the Americas - are mired in military rule and Church tyranny. In spite of being rich in natural resources, these countries are poor because the Catholic Church controls much of their wealth. Essentially, Christian expansion for these countries brought only plunder and genocide.

Christianity and colonialism: Columbus, St. Xavier and Gandhi

While the people and the princes of Europe were struggling to free themselves from the hold of religion, Christianity found the means to expand in newly discovered lands. So, while the Roman Empire had collapsed centuries earlier, a new world empire, Christian Empire, was about to begin. Its founder was a mariner of genius and a ruthless mass murderer known as Christopher Columbus. He was to revive the Christian theocratic empire and plant it in the Americas. It was colonialism in the name of God and Christ. In his letter to his sponsors Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus wrote:

“I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manner and religion are very different from ours…  and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen your Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries.”

And this was to be in the name of Christ. According to his letter to ‘Their Christian Majesties,’ Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain: “Your Highnesses have an Other World here by which our holy faith can be so greatly advanced from which such great wealth can be drawn… And I say that Your Highnesses ought not to consent that any foreigner does business or sets foot here [in America], except Christian Catholics, since this was the end and the beginning of the enterprise, that it should be for the enhancement and glory of the Christian religion…”

This Christianization of the Americas was followed by the greatest genocide in history, surpassing the Islamic record in India and even the horrors inflicted by Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Whole civilizations of Native Americans were exterminated. Historians estimate that 85 per cent of the native populations in the Americas were wiped out. Bartolome de Las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus and an eyewitness to the massacres wrote:

“As for the vast mainland [Mexico and its neighbors] which is ten times larger than Spain, …we can be sure that our Spaniards with their cruel and abominable acts, have devastated and exterminated the rational [non-Christian] people who fully inhabited it. We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself, that the number of slain is more like fifteen million.”

Indian Christian leaders who shed crocodile tears over the treatment of the tribal people in India - why are they silent about the genocide of Native Americans? Textbooks in Europe and America freely mention these. Las Casas, a Christian priest himself, made no bones about Christian greed being the culprit:

“Their reasons for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies.”

The Portuguese were every bit as rapacious as the Spaniards, but their scope in India was checked because of the presence of powerful kingdoms like the Vijayanagar. Still, ‘Saint’ Xavier instituted the Goa Inquisition which was worse than anything in Europe. Thousands were burnt at the stake. It is no coincidence that of all the regions in India only Goa has no culture to speak of. It comes into the news only when there is some atrocity.

Such rapacity is by no means limited to the Catholic Church. Protestant British missionaries also played an active role in advancing imperial interests. The staunchly Protestant missionary David Livingston who is projected as a great humanitarian was a British imperial agent. He let out the truth in a letter to a close friend:

“All this machinery had for its ostensible objective the development of African trade and promotion of civilization; but what I can tell to none but such as you, in whom I have confidence, is that I hope it may result in an English colony in the healthy high lands of Central Africa.”

The Kenyan freedom fighter Jomo Kenyatta put it in more colorful language: “When the missionaries came, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray’. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible!”

This is not limited to Africa. In India also, in most cities, prime properties are owned by the Churches, thanks to the generosity of the British rulers. The maharajas have lost their privileges like the privy purses, but the churches have kept their colonial benefits. They have also retained their links to foreign institutions like the Vatican, Church of England and the like. The British rewarded the missionaries for supporting their colonial rule.

Of late, with Hindus objecting to aggressive missionary activities, Church leaders, including the Pope, have begun invoking Gandhi and his nonviolence. This is like the Devil quoting scripture. The Pope failed to mention that Gandhi also said: “If I had the power to legislate I would outlaw conversions.” Nor did he ask his flock to follow Jesus’s teaching to turn the other cheek. The churches’ record during the colonial period leaves no doubt they were colonial institutions fiercely opposed to the national movement. Hardly any Christians participated in the Freedom Movement. They had their faces turned to Europe; today, little has changed.

The missionaries went much further than ordinary Britishers in supporting such brutal laws as the Rowlatt Act and even the Jallianwalah Bagh Massacre. In 1920, the Christian Missionary Review described Gandhi as an “unscrupulous and irresponsible demagogue”. It said that unless put down, Gandhi and his nationalism would emerge as “one of the dangerous phenomena of present day politics in India”.

The Madras Christian College Magazine (October 1921 issue) declared, “We have always regarded the doctrines he has been preaching and the policy he has advocated as pernicious.” The journal then went on to offer a homily: All those who want “peace and sobriety of life and progress” should reject the “sophistry of non-violence”. It is strange now that the Pope should be invoking the same Gandhi and his “sophistry of nonviolence”!

Bishop Henry Whitehead not only supported the Rowlatt Act but went on to denigrate the nationalist agitation and its leaders as irresponsible and ungrateful. Another missionary publication, The Young Men of India, heaped praise on Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the brutal Lt Governor of Punjab, who forced Indians to crawl before white women saying that he was “the strongest and best ruler the country has had in modern times”.

The Harvest Field, another missionary journal, was quick to point out that during the nationalist uprising against the Rowlatt Act, Indian Christians were not found “wanting in loyalty to the (British) Government”. The International Review of Missions was clear in its pronouncement that the means and methods adopted by the British to put down the uprising in Punjab were neither un-Christian nor a blot on British rule.

After the Jallianwalah Bagh Massacre, Marcella Sherwood, speaking on behalf of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, and Rev Canon Guildford, representing the Church Missionary Society, were to later applaud Gen Dyer’s brutality, saying it was “justified by its results”. The Christian Missionary Review, describing Gen Dyer as a “brave man”, said his action was “the only means of saving life”. Missionaries saw nothing wrong in brutality and the massacre, finding them “neither un-Christian not a blot on British rule!” This, when many ordinary men and women in Britain were ashamed of the brutality and denounced it.

This is not just a matter of history. India churches remain subservient to foreign organizations like the Vatican. Its priesthood, though more politicians than spiritual leaders are appointed by foreign officials like the Pope. They have never reconciled to India being a free country. They act as though Indians including Hindus should behave like the subjects of an imperial power. They also hold on to privileges that they received from their former colonial masters.

This raises a fundamental question: can these colonial institutions, still owing allegiance to foreign masters still enjoy tax and other privileges? This should be the topic for a new debate.

(Concluded)