Stephen Vizinczey Quotes
Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?
Vizinczey, Stephen. The Rules of Chaos. Macmillan, 1969, p. 11.
The Church no longer believes this of course. Having learned from this unfortunate experience and Galileo’s persecution, today the Roman Catholic Church is one of the more advanced religious institutions in accepting modern science.
The Roman Catholic Church had stultified scientific thinking for over a thousand years where differing with accepted church doctrine was not only discouraged but was dangerous. Hicletas—see {590328}—realized that the earth rotated around its own axis three centuries before Christ, and his view was in the literature to which learned people had access. Copernicus later communicated this idea to the Pope but in much more delicate terms—see {590327}. He did not have the problems that Galileo endured with the Church for several reasons. There were different men controlling the church, the printing press had been invented and Galileo published a book that many could read, the Protestant Reformation had really frightened the Church fathers who felt more vulnerable and less tolerant.
While the Visigoths had some very advanced legal principles, this law, quoted in its entirety is typical of the nations that were part of the Catholic world. The church and its doctrines were immune from any possible criticism, explicit or implicit. This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
Professor Clark wrote this historical description of witchcraft and the Inquisition in contemporary verbiage as we would discuss the solution to serious problems of today. His overall point is that when society fears something, it establishes and institution to cope with the object of the fear, and the institution itself creates more fear as this is the way it “succeeds.” A more recent historical example was when Congress created House and Senate Committees to cope with the problem of communists infiltrating and undermining our important institutions. This had not been a problem until Senator Joseph McCarthy and a few others claimed that they had found thousands in our military, state department and other government agencies. In the final analysis, while there were NO witches, there were only a few former communists in government and most were fiction and imagination. Yet society went through a Red Scare that in some ways paralleled society’s problem with witchcraft.
Of all the Western Colonial Powers, Spain was the worst. They took the most from their possessions and contributed the least. Worst, they killed off almost all the indigenous people.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
This quotation shows the unique relationship that the Irish Republic has had with the Catholic Church. There was probably no other non Muslim country in the world where a political leaders could get elected avowing this kind of loyalty and control by a religious heirerchy. See {639726} for an even more Irish, drastic departure from the concept of separation of church and state.
Stephen Vizinczey, originally István Vizinczey (born 1933, in Káloz, Hungary), is an author and writer.
