Keep The Faith's Podcast

The term "The Black Legend" specifically describes a set of lies regarding Catholic Spain. Dr. John Rao speaks here of a broader "syllabus" of Black Legends, developed through the ages, accusing the Church of destroying the State, peace, education, philosophy, the family, and human freedom in general.

Dr. John Rao explains that in the early Middle Ages, from the 500's through the 900's, the Church had a number of battles with Byzantine Emperors and pagan influenced men in the civil service, all of whom resorted to "Black Legends" to attack her. One major example of these emerged during the Iconoclast Controversy, during which the Church in general, and monks in particular, were accused of destr...

Dr. John Rao shows that the period from the 1000's-1200's saw a rediscovery and reapplication of the fullness of Roman Law with its emphasis on the power of the State. Many people were in such awe of the Roman Empire's achievement that they thought her law and legal decisions had to take precedence over philosophical and theological truth. The battle against a Church primarily concerned for Truth...

Ancient literature and ancient rhetorical arguments were rediscovered and used by many Humanists from the 1300's onwards. Dr. John Rao explains that they often now attacked the Christian concern for Truth above style with many of the same arguments used against Plato. Catholic Christianity was said to limit the genius and inspiration of great men. Mystics of heretical tendency, possessing their ow...

Dr. John Rao explains that Protestant preachers obsessed with charismatic presentations of the inner meaning of the written Word were part of the anti-theology and anti-philosophy movement that began in the late Middle Ages. They depicted a world of "nature" which was totally corrupt and which the Church misunderstood and then tried to baptize in a hopeless venture to raise it to God. Secularists...

Jansenists were among those who claimed to understand nature as it really was: wicked. Dr. John Rao indicates that they were horrified by the Church's alliance with Jesuits trying to raise nature to "the greater glory of God". Hence, their commitment to an effort to "shoot down" the exalted Tridentine vision of nature's mission, and the associated attempts to make everything from architecture to s...

Dr. John Rao describes how the Jansenists saw the Church's attitude towards nature as deluded and overblown. The Enlightenment believed that nature could soar if only freed from the Church's effort to corrupt it with a fraudulent supernatural guidance. Both groups promoted their understanding of nature and ridiculed the Church's vision as a lie through a development of the popular Press and the cr...

What Black Legends did the Jansenists and the Enlightenment promote? Dr. John Rao outlines them as being on the one hand, the idea that the Church was a hypocritical supporter of despotism. Yes, she claimed to raise things to the greater glory of God but in fact really built a monstrous despotism which crushed the pure, simple believer who really understood what a wretched sinner he was. On the ot...

The entire legalist-Humanist-Protestant-Jansenist-Enlightenment alliance became a new Grand Coalition which seized upon the image of freedom and placed it on its banners. All those who yearned to be free had to fight Catholicism. Dr. John Rao demonstrates that what these new defenders of freedom were actually promoting was a world in which knowledge was meant to gain power over nature and other me...

From the middle of the 1700's through the French Revolution and down to the present, this new Grand Coalition used all media to develop an endless variety of Black Legends. Dr. John Rao demonstrates that it did not matter that these were often contradictory, and that Catholicism was depicted, simultaneously, as an enemy of the State and too great of a friend of the government; anti-family and too...

Catholics have often shown themselves incapable of responding to the Black Legends. Why is this the case? Dr. John Rao explores reasons for Catholic apologetic failures and argues that a solid combination of concern for rhetoric with a primary dedication to use it for the cause of the Truth could go a long way to overcoming them.

There has been a battle between prominent proponents of rhetoric on one side and philosophers and theologians on the other since the ancient world. Father Richard Munkelt speaks on the question of rhetorical style and the way in which it can ignore the greater importance of substance and truth. Taken from: The Black Legends: The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Anti-Catholic Myth - 2003 Von...

Father Richard Munkelt discusses the influence of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment rhetoric on the political life of colonial America and the early Republic. These are shown to have favored an essentially anti-Catholic political and social vision shaping the nation's future right down to the present. Taken from: The Black Legends: The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Anti-Catholic Myth -...

The Christian Roman Empire of the 300's and early 400's ultimately split into three parts that ruled from Constantinople, from the confused Germanic dominated West, and from underneath the dominion of the Moslem Caliphate. What was the character of each of these three parts of early Christendom by the middle of the 700's? Dr. John Rao addresses this question in the lecture.

Dr. John Rao first takes a detailed look at the Germanic West at the time of the Papal alliance with the Carolingian Family of the Kingdom of the Franks. He examines the complex and intense effort at Romanization and Christianization of a still highly Germanic world under Pippin, Charles the Great, Louis the Pious and their children from the 750's through until the middle of the 800's.

What exactly was Church life like under the Carolingians? What was the position of the Papacy, Metropolitans, Bishops, monks, and parish priests? How deeply was the Faith understood? What were the ecclesiastical differences among the different parts of Charlemagne's Empire?

The Eastern part of the old united Roman Empire was ripped apart by the Iconoclast Heresy in the 700's and early 800's. Dr. John Rao discusses the nature of that heresy and the growth in depth of the orthodox response to it from its height in the 750's until its final defeat in the 840's.

If the Papacy thought that it would escape the kinds of Church-State problems that it had experienced in its relationship with the Emperors in Constantinople under the new alliance with the Carolingians, it was sadly mistaken. Problems emerged in a variety of realms, including Iconoclasm and the conduct of the missions.

The missions in the West under the Carolingians most concerned the Saxons and some of the Scandinavians and Slavs. Saint Boniface was disturbed by the meshing together of politics and religion in Frankish policy. So was the great scholar-monk Alcuin. And this aside from the difficulties of dealing with Germanic, Slavic, and Norse Paganism in and of themselves.

Germanic customs also badly affected politics. The Empire was looked upon as a family territory to be divided among the heirs of Louis the Pious, already causing problems when the former was still alive. This horrified Churchmen concerned for Christian and Roman unity. But the problem had just begun for Lothair, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald when their father finally died.

The "Carolingian Renaissance," illustrating the consequences of earlier work done to Romanize and Christianize the Germanic West, reached its peak underneath Louis the Pious' sons. Nevertheless, their divisions, made worse through deaths, rebellions, and the invasions of Northmen and Saracens, made the latter 800's a disastrous time for the Christian Roman West. Popes tried vainly to halt the deca...

The East experienced a period of revival under the Macedonian Dynasty, which lasted until the middle of the 1000's. This growth, following the end of the Iconoclast Heresy, also gave new confidence to the Church, her Patriarchs, and the joint Church-State sense of mission. Fights with the West ensued, especially regarding Papal Primacy and who, exactly, was in charge of the missions to the Slavs a...

Dr. John Rao's talk concerns the life of Orthodox, Nestorian, and Monophysite Christians under the Moslems in the Middle East in the 700's and 800's. A short discussion of the distinct life of Orthodox Georgia and Monophysite Armenia conclude the lecture.

Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro discusses Spain after the fall of the Visigothic Kingdom to the Moslem invaders of 711 A.D. After describing the Christian retreat to the northern reaches of the peninsula, he explains the life of the Church in both its free and Moslem-dominated areas. The problems of Christian survival in an Islamic State are also outlined.

Father Brian W. Harrison, O.S., analyzes the 1965 Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation entitled Dei Verbum. This two-part lecture covers the Magisterial doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy, previous ecclesiastical pronouncements, and contemporary misunderstandings of the Dogmatic Constitution.