Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

Note: the audiobook is currently free on Audible As a Protestant, I bought this book after thinking public secular education had been biased against Catholicism. A few of my Catholic friends recommended this book because I asked them for something that would give a fair side to Catholicism because of things I had been taught about Catholicism that I later learned were misrepresentations. Stark takes aim at some of the exact misrepresentations I had been taught and believed. This book is well researched, well cited, and easy to read. Stark is not one to mince his words, and he writes in a clear, direct style that borders on dry humor at times. I was shocked to learn some of the things I was taught in public school were actually anti-Catholic propaganda with no basis in truth (for instance, I was taught that Columbus sailed around the earth to prove it was round, while the Catholic Church and the rest of the world thought it was flat). This book must have been a painstaking effort to write, it cites hundreds of academic tests and books , but it pays off and supports its central argument with countless references and supporting evidence. I’ll certainly be picking up Stark’s other books after reading this. If you are a Protestant like me, you owe it to yourself to read this book in case you have gotten similar misrepresentations about Catholic history from biased sources with a hidden agenda. Atheists will also get a lot out of this book, especially after reading Hitchens. This book quickly corrected many false things I had previously believed, and I shudder to think that I held these views considering he also explains where they come from (often they are fabrications or embellishments with an anti-Catholic agenda). If you see the Catholic Church in a negative light, or think you may have been given a biased view of Catholic history, buy this book immediately.

This book is fantastic. Other reviews have laid out some of the content of the book and it's structure, so I won't bore you with that here. I just want to say this book is fantastic. Not only it has amazing content, it is so well written it can easily be a bed time book. Don't get me wrong, but easily written, I don't mean it's written for a fifth grader (although I love fifth graders, I used to be one). Rather, I mean it is easy to follow, and he is a master at explain his thoughts and making complicated ideas into easy to understand simple notions. The best part of the book that stood out to me is this: you don't have to take professor Stark's word for any of his claims. He has evidences, TONS of it. I've heard this from someone important (I don't remember who), but he say, "always let the evidence speak for itself." And this saying works perfectly for this book. Please I urge you to read this book. I highly recommend it. And what's interesting professor Stark presents it as a defense of truth and accurate history, not so much an apologetics book for the catholic faith. In fact, he's a practicing Lutheran (AKA a protestant). Being a practicing Lutheran and writing a top notch, scholars book debunking historical myths about the catholic faith gives the book a special type of reliability. We are all bias, but some of us are more so than others. If Stark was a diehard Catholic crusader, then I think, prima facie, the book loses a *little* reliability (of course this could be ought weighted by other considerations). At any rate, please do read it. I promise you won't regret it. If you don't have time to read it, make friend or a family member read it. They'll love it.

After reading the solid logic and historical facts of this book, I don't understand how the prejudices against Catholics that are discussed could have survived this long. Just by examining numbers and dates, Stark completely decapitates some widely held assumptions about the place of the Catholic Church in European history. There is a gaping chasm between laymen's understanding of, for example, Galileo, and the actual facts. The prose is immensely readable and to-the-point. What was less positive was the obvious underlying assumption that Western society is more advanced, has succeeded more, than anyone else. The blind equating of science and technology with advancement and even virtue is something that belongs decidedly in the first half of last century. Also Indian and Eastern cultures are generally assumed by Stark to be inferior, which is regrettable. Moreover, Stark wants to give Christianity all the credit for advances in European culture, for example the irradication of slavery following the fall of the Roman Empire. But he is less interested in examining Catholic culpability in the European class system, despite often mentioning how monastic orders were almost always populated with children of nobility, and dispite how capitalism arose most clearly under the management of monastics and clergy. Protestants get some fair but stinging critism, while the question of how Catholicism's shortcomings gave birth to Protestants' shortcomings goes unexamined. A small but telling episode in the book celebrates how Jesuits "invented" an "advanced" Indian society in South America, complete with paved roads and philharmonic orchestras, but that this culture just disappeared once the Jesuit-built regime was overthrown. This short account is telling because Stark attributes none of the successes of that society to Indians themselves but only to the Western Jesuits. Nor does he question the assumption that Western culture is superior to Indian cultures. Are orchestras and cobblestones the best harbingers of social virtue - better even than the approach to the sanctity of land, family, the environment? Were the only admirable qualities of that society the imported accidents? Once the white European Jesuits were no longer able to manage the natives, says Stark, the culture vanished into thin air, which has to be nonesense because hundreds of thousands of people did not suddenly vanish. Stark is not always critical of White European sources, and assumes too much about how representative church fathers and theologians are of their culture. Augustine is taken as a representative voice of the church's thoughts while the impotence of the papacy is later used to excuse the church of involvement in slavery. What exactly is the relationship of church leaders and laymen, and how much do each group represent the actions and thoughts of "the Church"? This remains to be examined systematically. This book is an important contribution towards the task of soberly analyzing the influence of Christianity in Europe and the world, specifically Catholic Christianity. Orthodox Christians and the East are neglected entirely, but to be fair that was outside of the scope of the book. The next scholar to write on the subject should question the underlying assumptions, and be willing to take non-white peoples more seriously. But I feel I have learned a great deal from this book, and recommend reading it.

REVIEW ARTICLE OF BEARING FALSE WITNESS--Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History by Rodney Stark, West Conshohockon, Templeton Press, 2016, 268 pages. by Samuel A. Nigro, MD, retired psychiatrist, copyright c 2018 Abstract: Rebutted is the hatred-ordure from the world's worst lying historians, philosophers, educators, atheists, secularists, intellectuals, sociologists, socialists, spokesmen, pressmen, professors, scholars, scientists, philanthropists, publishers, physicians, politicians, encyclopedists, feminists, editors, journalists, commentators, moviemakers, poets, novelists, Satanists, and Pulitzer Prize winners. The lies from these "distinguished bigots" (page 1) about the Catholic Church are detailed and replaced by the truth, oneness, good and beauty which the Church really offers. Secondarily, the book actually shows how hate is natural to each man, and how egoism, pride, jealousy, ignorance, and self-righteous arrogance metastasize into epidemics of misguided hate onto the Church as the largest most convenient target for hate without fear of aggressive retaliation; when, instead, humans should really teach, from childhood, to target "Satan to hate" as the personification of evil (the creation of non-being and willful entropy) thereby converting the natural propensity to hate in each man onto a guilty and more deserved target--Satan instead of the Church. Overall, it appears that humans must hate and the Church will always be a big safe target. Chapter titles convey the topics: "Sins of Anti-Semitism; The Suppressed Gospels; Persecuting the Tolerant Pagans; Imposing the Dark Ages; Crusading for Land, Loot, and Converts; Monsters of the Inquisition; Scientific Heresies; Blessed Be Slavery; Holy Authoritarianism; and Protestant Modernity." After describing the falsehoods at the beginning of each chapter, the author thoroughly documents their lies with an interspersed scattering of terse summarizing phrases: "...an absurd fiction" (page 26); "this historical libel" (page 29); "obvious forgeries and nonsense" (page 43); "this scheme is a complete fraud" (page 75); "the 'Dark Ages' was a hoax" (page76); "the rise of science was inseparable from Christian theology" (page 88); "the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Reason...were great historical eras that never really happened" (page 91); the claims that the Crusades were against "a tolerant and peaceful Islam...have been utterly refuted..."(page 96); about the Crusades, "No apologies are required" (page 115); "Enough! The standard account of the Spanish Inquisition is mostly a pack of lies..."(page 119); "Torture ...This may be the biggest lie of all"( page 122); "Witchcraft...Vicious nonsense, all of it" (page 123); "Great historical myths die hard [about Galileo]" (page 133); "Not so! The Scholastics were fine scholars who founded Europe's great universities...it was they who launched the rise of Western science" (page 136); "...there was no Scientific Revolution...There is far more fiction than fact in this account" (page 144-5); "claims that the Church failed to oppose slavery and that slave codes merely served the masters simply aren't true" (page 185); "All these charges are either greatly exaggerated or simply false" (page 188); "Nonsense!" (page 210). Again: Wrong headed ideas based on hate are irreclaimably corrected between his terse phrases. Not that he did all exhaustively. My own decades of study were confirmed and documented by this non-Catholic author of Bearing False Witness. However, astonishing is Stark omitting several sources correcting the anti-Catholic slanders: the Jewish failures to clarify the causes of and rescuers in the Holocaust as Peter Novick’s The Holocaust and American Life, Hanna Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Rafael Medoff's The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust, and Zigmunt Baumann's Modernity and the Holocaust , and most important, Ben Hechts' Perfidy and Church of Spies--the Pope's Secret War Against Hitler, by Mark Riebling. There are many omissions of Catholic salutary efforts of the Inquisition, science, and slavery--and I make available as attachments or can send if requested. Many of my efforts supplement Stark and his Bearing False Witness. and deserve republications; many can be found at Medcrave and Facebook. If requested by email (Sam@DocNigro.com--send requests twice back-to-back so I do not delete the unknown sender), I can provide further support for Stark such as: "Popes and Slavery", Social Justice Review, July August 2000; my "race documents"; my Book Review of Islam's Black Slaves, by Ronald Segal, Social Justice Review, September October 2001; my review of Book Review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades by Robert Spencer and my other elaborations on Islam; my articles on the fraud of scientists, especially about Richard Dawkins; my censored and suppressed scientific critique of Darwin and other reviews of anti-religious pseudo-science tomes from atheists, secularists and Satanists; my book review of The Spanish Inquisition--a historical revision by Henry Kamen, Social Justice Review March April 1999; my review of Mad For God: Bartolome Sanchez, The Secret Messiah of Cardente by Sara Tilghman, Social Justice Review November December 2006. All full human beings will enjoy Bearing False Witness as it gives the recovery of the ancients words which have given life, sacrifice, virtue, love, humanity, peace, freedom, and natural death without fear to billions of people for thousands of years (to tell lies about this is simply outrageous), and still does by the pre-big bang Spirit-filled subdued "rock-concert" Lovelution made possible by living the Sacraments and the Last Words of Christ in all one does--It is the only way to really enjoy the Big Bang of fifteen billion years ago which gave us the incredible Love-filled (if we would just open our senses) Universe under the guidance of the Church, given by God because our superhuman supernature has the freedom to choose entropy over synthesis and create lies over truth, oneness, good and beauty.

Rodney's not even a Roman Catholic, and I don't know if he's a Christian. The book is filled with material on the false gospels (perfect for clearing up confusion created by books like "Zealot" by Reza Aslan or "The Da Vinci Code"), the Inquisition (which actually helped reduce injustice and hysteria among the lay rabble), deflating the myths of the renaissance and dark ages, and breathing life into the truth about the Church's supposed persecution of science. Time and again while reading this I kind of lost track of my jaw dropping. I felt like I was waking out of the Matrix. Everything I learned about Columbus, the native Americans, slavery, and science etc. has been wrong. I have a degree in physics, and I can't tell you how many times I read about how Galileo was this humble thinker who was imprisoned for the truth, or about Copernicus not wanting to publish De Revolutionibus until on his death bed when he finally had a spark of courage. This is lunacy. Galileo was an arrogant thief of other's inventions (such as the telescope), and was never imprisoned. There was no illuminati that came about for him. If you want the truth about the Illuminati go to Carroll Quigley and read about its origins in 18th century Bulgaria. I believed the Da Vinci Code like an idiot. And Copernicus just didn't have the facts straight and couldn't predict planetary activity right, not because of heliocentrism, but because he used concentric circles for orbits. It wasn't until Kepler proposed elliptical paths that heliocentrism took off. Finally, Columbus didn't sail the ocean blue to spite the backwardness of a Roman Catholic Church who thought the Earth was flat and that he'd sail off the edge. The Church knew the world was round, but didn't know anything about a landmass in the Western Hemisphere (N and S America). Columbus calculated a few thousand miles to the Indies, but the RCC knew it was closer to 14,000 and that Columbus mission was doomed and suicidal due to batty mathematics. History is filled with calumny against Jesus and his kingdom, portraying these priests and people as ignoramuses following scheming evil geniuses. Some popes were bad. Some priests are bad. But you go to a bar and you find everyone bad. You go to an EDM raze festival and you find everyone bad. You go to a Protestant church, and you find hypocrites everywhere. You go to the mirror and you find the biggest one of all. People this age hate Jesus. They really do, and I was deceived for almost 20 years against this faith. Against the true Church. I have a couple chapters left, and I can't wait to re-read this book.

Informative. Extremely well sited. References galore. Written by a Protestant, making the whole subject even more powerful. Debuncts so much of what had become almost " common knowledge history". Pleasant read.

Professor Stark has written a truly important work in the history of anti-catholicism, one that will be the standard work. Other reviews have more than adequately summarized the work's contents so I will comment on the point Stark did not so clearly address:Why this virulent hatred of the Catholic Church? "Hatred" is the right word because these attacks from the Enlightenment down to Richard Dawkins are inevitably cast in extreme polemical tones. As an academic of more than forty years, I have seen this in the class room and in the faculty lounge. I have found little interest on the part of the academy in the kind of reasoned debate characteristic of Stark's many works. In my book LAST THINGS FIRST(Roman Catholic Books) I analyze four guiding principles of modern society: Absolute autonomy of the will,sexual gratification,entertainment, and consumerism. The origin of these values may be traced to the Enlightenment with its emphasis on a humanism devoid of God. Stark does an excellent job in analyzing this. It is clear that the Catholic Church stands in complete opposition to the four principles of modernity and as happens when one's fundamental principles are challenged the result is often rage and especially so when the values in question are base and unworthy of human civilization. Current society is more highly eroticized by far than any previous society which makes sexual self mastery extremely difficult. Once again, the Church seems to be the enemy of our modern identity. These values are mutually supporting. Entertainment creates a fantasy world which easily elides into pornography, unhappiness is dispelled by a visit to the mall where more sexual imagery is available. Such a populace tends toward fantasy and savage over indulgence to feed its ever empty life. Then enters the Church teaching what she has always taught for 20 centuries--Faith, Hope ,Charity , almsgiving,unceasing prayer, repentance, fasting and self-denial. All of this in the context of a crystal clear understanding that this life is over in the blink of an eye and then comes eternity. So it is hardly surprising that post Enlightenment man not only cooks the historical evidence but eagerly swallows its own lies. Catholicism has to be not simply refuted but destroyed. So I suspect that Stark may not find many willing converts since if evidence were important to modernity it would have counted long ago. As Stark frequently points out,his sources are all in the public domain. Stark seems to think that the evidence speaks for itself but evidence cannot matter to the post enlightenment mentality. I used to tell my students that Catholicism is the Marine Corps of religion---it is VERY difficult but the rewards are(literally) eternal.

The author is a protestant historian who recognizes the contributions of the Catholic Church to western civilization. As a catholic, I thought he gave a fair account, except for the funny part where he says that the Catholic Church forbids the practice of magic to everyone but itself.

It is very well done, with historic references closer to the period in which the accounts happened. it gives a whole new idea of what actually happened and it sheds light on the truth

Este livro, escrito por um judeu, põe por terra a calúnia de que a Igreja Católica colaborou com o nazismo.

I found this book to be very informative, unbiased, well researched and referenced. The writer relates the details in full, and in some instances, this makes uncomfortable reading. It undoubtedly adds strength to the conviction that his arguments are genuine.

Bien documentado y muy pedagógico.

Ein grundlegendes Buch, dass vieles richtig stellt, was falsch über die kath. Kirche des Mittelalters berichtet worden ist. Der Autor Rodney Stark ist selbst nicht katholisch, er geht als Religionssoziologe an das Thema ran. Er stellt fest: "I am not a Roman Catholic, and I did not write this book in defence of the Church. I wrote it in defence of history." (S. 7) Es ist ein wichtiges Buch, dass jeder Historiker kennen sollte! Das Buch sollte Pflichtlektüre für alle Theologiestudenten sein - mindestens für die katholischen. Das Buch hat unbedingt eine deutsche Übersetzung verdient. Hier könnte die katholische Kirche eine sinnvolle Investition tätigen mit der Übersetzung.