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In this episode, Trent takes on wild anti-Catholic historical myths related to the Olympics, Columbus, and even an allegedly satanic telescope.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn, and today I’m going to talk about five wild anti-Catholic historical myths. Before I do that though, I want to give a big thanks to our patrons at trenthornpodcast.com. You guys are awesome. You’re the reason we have this new studio, why we’re going to be expanding even more in 2023, so I’m really excited about that. If you want to help the podcast to grow, then definitely consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. If you do, you get access to my catechism study series, an 18 hour course on the catechism. If you need even more than catechism in a year, you can have that. Also, our patrons get access to the New Testament study series, another 18 hour course. You can get a mug with my mug on it. That’s always a lot of fun. All that and more, definitely go and check that out at trenthornpodcast.com.
Now, let’s jump right into it today, five wild anti-Catholic historical myths. I’m doing them in roughly chronological order here. The first one takes us back to the fourth century. This was after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. It is the claim that Emperor Theodosius banned the Olympic Games. So you’ll have critics of Catholicism saying that the Catholic Church is against culture, wants to stymie good things like athletics and things that would build up culture and discipline. And there’s some people who defend Catholicism and say, “This is a great thing that Emperor Theodosius banned these pagan festivities.” But the truth is that from a historical perspective, Emperor Theodosius probably did not do this.
So, to give you a little bit of background here on the Olympic Games. The first recorded Olympic game, I think is in 776 BC, before Christ, though some historians place it starting in the 10th century BC, but it began in the eighth century BC. And some of the events that were at the Olympics, you had the foot race, wrestling, the long jump, the javelin throw, discus throwing and boxing. So in these events, you had ways of measuring them. The stadia, I think that’s about 200 yards, is how they would measure things like a foot race. Hence that’s where we get the word stadium from the ancient Greek stadia for measuring the races that would take place at the Olympics.
Now, the claim is that Emperor Theodosius, now that Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire … Remember, that didn’t happen with Constantine. Constantine just gave toleration to Christianity. The suppression of pagan cults of worship didn’t take place until the end of the fourth century. And one of the claims that Emperor Theodosius banned the Olympic Games because they were done in honor of Zeus and had sacrifices, things like that. The problem with this theory is that when you go back to the Theodosian cannons at the end of the fourth century, the decrees that he gave banning things like pagan worship, they actually don’t mention the Olympic Games.
It says, “No person at all shall sacrifice an innocent victim to senseless images in any place at all or in any city.” That’s a good rule. “They shall not more by secret wickedness, venerate these things of fire, wine, fragrant odors. You shall not burn lights to them, place incense before them or suspend [inaudible 00:03:39] for them.” So the Theodosian cannons forbid pagan idolatry, but they don’t mention the games themselves because you could have the games without the sacrifices. In fact, the historical records show by the middle of the fourth century as the Roman Empire continued to become Christianized, sacrifices had largely stopped taking place at the games.
Our sources show that the Olympics continued in the city of Ephesus in the year 420 AD, and they also continued at Antioch in Syria until the early sixth century AD. So you had people during this time period, long after Theodosius, one prominent Christian Senator, Leontios, intended to stage his own Olympics in Chalcedon in the mid fifth century, which would be weird if the games have been banned a century prior because you had Christian clerics who were criticizing the games, but it seems like they still continued on.
So two historians writing at a website called The Conversation, these are two historians that study the classics in ancient Rome. Their theory is that the Olympic Games didn’t end because of an imperial decree, rather you just ran out of money. Remember, when we’re getting into the fifth century, the Roman Empire is basically collapsing. I mean, it doesn’t collapse overnight in the year 476 when Rome was overrun, but it’s in a stage of collapse. The Roman bureaucracy and the Empire doesn’t have the money to stage these games anymore, so you have to rely on local benefactors and others because of the Empire’s decline. They just ran out of money. So the games just petered out as a result of that, not because of one Christian emperor’s decree.
All right, here’s number two. In the Middle Ages, monks did not know what babies looked like. Why would you think that? Well, when you look at some medieval art that depicts babies, the babies look very ugly. They look weird. They look like middle-aged men. Some have called them Benjamin Button babies. There’s a film called Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt. I think it’s probably based on an older story about the Curious case of Benjamin Button, where he ages in reverse. He’s born an old man and he gets younger as he gets older. So you get these weird Benjamin Button babies. Why do they draw this in art? One theory was that the monks had been raised apparently in these monasteries and they just didn’t know what babies looked like, which is silly because these monks would’ve been raised in families, probably would’ve had a lot of siblings. They couldn’t have been that obtuse. So that’s not a serious theory that’s put forward.
Rather, what is believed, why the babies look so odd in these medieval paintings, is because these are actually images of Jesus and the painters, the artists are trying to capture a particular symbolic element of Christ that he’s fully God and fully man. So because of that, they’re trying to show that he’s fully man even as a baby, that he’s not just any ordinary baby, that he has the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity present within him. The artists are trying to represent that in a symbolic way. So nearly all of these babies that are shown in this way, these are images of Mary and Jesus. So later on when we get into the Renaissance, one of the things that actually changes and why babies start to look more like Gerber babies instead of scary babies in these paintings is because you have a growing middle class who are now seeking art for personal use. Whereas a lot of art that had been commissioned in the Middle Ages was primarily for religious use or for decorating churches or monasteries.
With the rise of the Renaissance, you have middle class individuals who now want portraits. They want portraits and art reflecting themselves. They want selfies, if you will. So they want their babies painted to look the way babies actually look. So we see ushered in the Renaissance more of this realism and other things like that. So that is why the monks, certainly the odds of them not knowing what babies look like, I would say is very low.
So going forward from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance and up into the early modern period, we have this myth, and it is the claim that the church castrated choir boys so that they would have perpetually high voices. You see that in lurid online magazines will claim that the Catholic Church needs to apologize for what they’ve done to what were called the castrati, what they had done in this regard. Now, here’s the thing with this myth. There were in the Renaissance and going all the way up to the early part of the 20th century, there were individuals who were called castrati. You had young boys like seven, eight years old who were castrated for the purpose of trying to have singing careers.
Now, this happened in the Renaissance centuries earlier and was popular when women were not allowed to sing in public choirs, either secular or religious. Since women couldn’t sing, you needed somebody to be able to hit those high notes. So those who wanted to seek this out, they would castrate these boys, and some of these boys would actually become very wealthy and famous and they would sing at these operas. And when these castrati would sing, the crowd would burst into applause and they would yell, “A viva il colleto,” long live the knife. My goodness. But here’s the thing, the church did not endorse and in fact opposed this practice. But knowing that the castrati existed and many of them did not become famous, they needed jobs within choirs, they needed something to do, that the church hired them, but the church was actually opposed to this practice.
I’m going to read you an excerpt from Steve Weidenkopf’s book, the Real Story of Catholic History, that talks about this. So here’s what he says. “It was secular society, not the church, and the prospect of financial success that was behind the castrati phenomenon. Almost 40 years after castrati debuted in the Duke of Ferrara’s choir, Pope Sixtus the fifth approved the recruitment of the angelic singers for the choir of St. Peter’s Basilica. Canon law,” so the church’s code of canon law, “forbade castration. So the church contrary to modern day allegations did not approve of the ghastly procedure. Indeed, the penalty for performing castrations was ex-communication, which prompted most surgeons to operate in strict secrecy. It is true however, that many church choirs benefited from the castrati’s otherworldly voices. Since many of them did not finish music school or find gainful employment, the church established charitable organizations to care for them. Toward the end of the 19th century, especially after the prohibition was lifted on women singing on stage and inquirers, the castrati phenomenon came to be seen as grotesque and barbaric.”
“After unification of Italy in the late 19th century, the new government banned castrations. In 1878, Pope Leo the 13th prohibited the hiring of new castrati for church choirs. And by the turn of the century, there were only 16 castrati performing in the Sistine Chapel or other church choirs throughout Europe. Finally, in 1903, Pope St. Pius the 10th banned adult male sopranos from the Sistine Chapel Choir.”
All right, here’s number four. The church taught the earth was flat. This is a myth that is surprisingly persistent, even though we have a lot of evidence against it, that people just believe the church was really opposed to science, and dogmatically taught that the earth was flat and it was only brave people like Columbus that proved the church wrong, which was not the case at all. The church had a very well established relationship with scientists of the time. You had Albert Magnus, Albert the Great, Albert Magnus, who helped to pioneer the sciences and a systematic understanding of them. Churches actually worked with astronomers and other scientists to build the churches. You had to understand astronomy so that the sun would shine through stain glass windows of particular times of day and times of the year.
But when it comes to the idea the earth is flat, most of the people in the Western world knew that the earth was round since the time of the ancient Greeks, since around the fifth or the sixth century. You have in the second century before Christ, a Greek scholar Eratosthenes. He calculated the circumference of the earth, and he was really close, about 85% accurate to the actual circumference of the earth. And they just dug wells in two different parts of, I think it was in Egypt, and they dug wells in two different areas, measured the distance between them, the stadia between them, remember stadia, and then the angle of the shadow in the wells. And they could calculate based on the distance and the angle of shadow, how round the earth is.
This is really intuitive because the Earth’s shadow on the moon is round. The earth being round explains why a ship disappears over the horizon. So it is really weird to me that you have a growing movement of people on YouTube who think the earth is flat, but that’s a subject for another time. Pliny the Elder, writing in the year AD 79, the Roman historian scientist says, “Everyone agrees that the earth has the most perfect figure. We always speak of the ball of the earth. We admit it to be a globe bounded by the poles.” The science historians David Lindbergh and Ronald Numbers write, “There was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge the Earth’s sphericity and even know its approximate circumference.”
So where do people think that people had thought the earth was flat up until the Middle Ages or up until Columbus in the 15th century? Well, Washington Irving in 1828 wrote a romanticized history of Columbus called A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. That was, as I said, written in 1828. And there, he pedaled the myth that Columbus had to disprove to ecclesial authorities that the earth was flat to get off on his voyage.
Here is a video from a cartoon. I think it’s from like 1959 or 1960, Mel-O-Toons, that shows even up to the middle of the 20th century, you have cartoons talking about this in their depiction of Columbus.
Cartoon:
In fact, most of them believe the earth was flat. Then one day a mapmaker named Christopher Columbus had an idea. Do you know what? I think the world isn’t flat at all. I think it’s round like a ball. Did you hear what he said? Did you hear what he said? He said that the world is round. Oh, he’s crazy. I think the world isn’t flat at all. I think it’s round like a ball.
Trent Horn:
Also, you have in the 19th century a guy named Robert Ingersoll. He was basically the Richard Dawkins of the 19th century, and he attributed a fake quot- of course, he thought it was real, but he spread a fake quotation attributed to Magellan, who was a 16th century explorer. He claimed that Magellan said, “The church says the earth is flat, but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church,” which of course is false there, that people have believed that. There might have been a few church fathers like Lactantius who weren’t sure, but the vast majority agreed with ancient Greek science that the earth was round. So, any contrary depictions are a myth.
Here’s the last one. Taking us up into the modern age, but still wild. It is the claim that the Vatican owns a telescope called Lucifer, that the Vatican has a telescope named after the devil. I mean, it just is very ripe for anti-Catholics to want to spread. Actually, there’s a great article on PolitiFact. I normally don’t like PolitiFact, but this is a good article they have debunking this one. I’ll read you to what they say. They said, “The Vatican Observatory has a research center at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory.” I used to live in Arizona, and I’ve driven by. There’s this observatory in southern Arizona outside of Tucson where the University of Arizona is. “And one of the offices there has a telescope that was previously named that.” So the Vatican has an observatory in Castel Gandolfo outside of Rome. It was founded in 1891. But the Vatican also has a dependent research center that uses the telescope in Arizona. So it operates there with other groups. It’s at the Mount Graham facility.
So one of the other groups there has had a telescope called the large binocular telescope, and they called it the large binocular telescope near infrared spectroscopic utility with camera and integral field unit for extra galactic research. That’s a mouthful. And I think they just named it that so they could give it Lucifer. That’s the name. So that was the nickname, but it didn’t last. When people knew that the Vatican was involved with this observatory, even though it wasn’t their telescope, the news spread. So they renamed it Lucy in 2012. PolitiFact simply rates that as false.
So, there you have it. We have the five anti-Catholic wild … That’s wild. Who’s that? Johnny Carson. That’s wild. Catholics banned the Olympics. Monks didn’t know what babies look like. The church castrated choir boys. Now let me just re-summarize them. Catholics banned the Olympics. No, they went on for several decades, if not over a century, after they were purportedly banned. Monks didn’t know what babies looked like. No, they’re just trying to have a stylized portrait of Jesus. The church castrated choir boys. No, there were in secular society, boys who were castrated so that they could perform in operas, but the church opposed this practice and tried to help them by giving them employment, but then eventually banned the practice. The church taught the earth was flat. Nope, never did that. And the Vatican does not have a telescope named after the devil. There you are. Five wild anti-Catholic historical myths. I hope this is helpful for you guys and that you all have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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