History of the Catholic Church

One would like to find in historians a fair presentation of the reality of the Catholic Church that acknowledges the complexity of the situation. I recently pulled two books down from our bookshelf to do some casual reading. Although the topic of the books had nothing to do directly with Catholicism, the passages I read displayed such unsubstantiated antipathy to the Church, I can't help but wonder how much of this exists in the academic culture of our day, and how young people can help but get alienated from the Church. Here are the passages:

"In the Netherlands the Reformation had an even longer and bloodier struggle to establish itself than in France, for while they, like Germany, were affected by the imperial ban of Charles V, they alone had to suffer the domination of Spanish fanaticism, particularly during the reign of Charles' son, Philip II...." (Alec Harman and Anthony Miller, Man and His Music: the Story of Musical Experience in the West, Vol. II, Late Renaissance and Baroque Music (New York: Schocken Books, 1962).

The authors had made it clear earlier that the fanaticism in question was religious. So, you wind up with the reasonable Dutch Calvinists vs. the Spanish Catholic fanatics. This is the normal, English view of thing. Guy Fawkes and all that.

The second example is even more weird. The book in question is Clocks and Culture, by Carlo M. Cipolla (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978). Here is is describing the early middle ages (aka the "dark" ages).

"People were few in number, small in stature, and lived short lives. Socially they were divided among those who fought and hunted, those who prayed and learned, and those who worked. Thos who fought did so often in order to rob. Those who prayed and learned, learned little and prayed much and superstitiously. Those who worked were the great majority and were considered the lowest group of all." (p. 15).

Note there is no acknowledgement that the monks saved learning and had a genuinely rich religious life.

You also don't want a history of the Church written by a Catholic to be a Church always good, non-Catholics always bad whitewash. An egregious example is the handling of Augosto Pinoche by Anne Carroll in her Christ the King, Lord of History.

I agree with a friend on this one.

"I think it's important to understand that History is a very complex thing. For our understanding of History, we are always relying upon someone else's facts. Within the Catholic Church, there are many issues which are not agreed upon, and the Church doesn't say that you have to believe this or that side. I think this is a good concept for children (especially high schoolers) to understand. I would suggest having your children use this text, but discuss these important issues before you embark on your journey, and have them read materials from other Catholic sources as well."

I also think a perspective and interpretation that is sympathetic with the Catholic Church's role in the world and therefore prone to whitewashing and hagiography is closer to the truth than one that is antagonistic.

I've often found discussions of the Galileo affair to be simplistic and one-sided. Usually it is Galileo is the great hero for truth, the Church was the villainous enemy of scientific progress. This in no way does justice to the complexity of the issues involved--the relationship between scholastic philosophy and theology, the new humanism, and the new empirical sciences. Most people don't realize that the humanists (who opposed the scholastics), also apposed the new method of Bacon. Descartes was as critical of the humanists as he was of scholastic philosophy.