The most incredible expressions of historical ignorance are expressed by the low-level Pastor Bobs. It is staggering to see people so poorly educated, or so desperate for money, that they tell such blatant lies as “The Catholic Church has killed over five hundred million people!”
The disconnect between such thoughts and reality indicates a degree of disturbance that is akin to insanity.
Mid-level and upper-level Pastor Bobs know enough to realize that such lies are blatant frauds, but many will not combat them. “Well, we are competing with Catholics for donations, so maybe I should just keep quiet. No need to tell anyone that the ‘Potato Famine’ was caused when hundreds of thousands of armed English troops confiscated nearly all the food in Ireland and starved a million and a half of Ireland’s Catholics to slow, painful death.”
That is another form of lying.
But, that’s how sheep and goats are separated. “Estimates of the number of executions carried out by Henry VIII range from 57,000 to the 72,000 claimed in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (the mass murder following the Catholic rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace should be taken into account). The troops of his son Edward VI massacred more than 5,500 Cornish Catholics in the wake of the Prayer Book Rebellion. Elizabeth I was more sparing of formal executions, though St Margaret Clitheroe was pressed to death at York and Mary Queen of Scots beheaded; but the butchery in Ireland was appalling. There, Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, (One got to be a published author by supporting the Crown, no matter what.) supported a policy of extermination by artificial famine on a scale that was not exceeded until Stalin in the 1930s.”
