Religious Attack on Charlie Hebdo (verbal, this time)

The Catholic Church is back at it in the wake of the new Charlie Hebdo cover cartoon of God beneath the caption, “One Year On, The Assassin Remains at Large.” This time, Osservatore Romano. the official Vatican newspaper,  wrote, “Behind the deceptive flag of uncompromising secularism, the weekly [Charlie Hebdo] is forgetting once more what religious leaders of every faith unceasingly repeat to reject violence in the name of religion . . .”

“Unceasingly repeat”? Well, that certainly is news.

One needn’t go back centuries to see how this “unceasing” rejection of violence has manifested itself, but we’ll do so anyway.  Shall we start with the crusades? Better, let’s start with the Beziers massacre of ten thousand Albigensian heretics in 1209 by a returning crusader army, at which abbot and papal agent Arnaud Amalric famously told the rampaging crusaders, “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”

Then there was the Inquisition and its brutal torture of uncounted people during the Middle Ages. Let’s also consider the wave of torture, coerced confessions, and witch burnings that swept across Europe for centuries, which resulted in the horrific deaths of at minimum tens of thousands of unfortunate women, and which was largely inspired by Pope Innocent VIII’s encyclical Summis Desiderantes, and the subsequent appointment of witch-finding Inquisitors.

Then, following the Reformation, there were all of the religious wars in Europe, continuation of the millennium-long orgy of pogroms against “Christ killer” Jews, and the Christian slave trade–which no pope said a word against–and the list goes on.

To cite but one non-Christian example, following their trek to Utah, Mormon “prophet” Brigham Young instituted a reign of terror, which reached its high point in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 in which 120 non-Mormon men, women, and children were murdered on the orders of Young. (Mormons, despite their official name, are about as Christian as Muslims are.)

In more modern times in the West, churches have largely relied on the institutional violence of the state to do their dirty work for them. They’ve been behind laws banning contraceptives, abortion, sexually explicit materials, and homosexual acts. Those imprisoned for violating these intrusive laws were direct victims of  institutional violence inspired by religion. Religious leaders not only didn’t denounce this institutional violence, they were responsible for it.

In the Islamic world, there’s not only daily institutional religion-inspired violence, but direct religious violence continues unabated, with uncounted victims (undoubtedly in the thousands) being murdered annually for “crimes” such as adultery, fornication, atheism, and homosexuality. Muslim religious “leaders” not only haven’t spoken out against these atrocities, they’ve ordered a great many of them.

How all this fits with the Osservatore‘s assertion that “religious leaders of every faith unceasingly repeat to reject violence in the name of religion” remains a mystery.