(November 10, 2020 at 5:29 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: It isn’t really absurd. The Catholic population didn’t want the Kingdom of Italy to have authority over the Church, and the Church didn’t want the responsibility of having to deal with the secular governance of Rome. The Lateran Treaty was actually a pretty clever way to not give both sides what they didn’t want. It’s debatable, but failure to set up the Vatican as its own city state may very well have triggered a civil war.
Boru
Edit: Yeah, what our favourite lizard said.
Oh really. They didn't want to deal with the secular government. So if the Scientologist population decides to make their own state because they don't want to deal with the secular government, would you also find it not absurd?
Besides, what kind of responsibility does Chruch have in any of the other countries? They don't pay taxes anywhere, they tell people for who to vote, they are frequently entangled with the armies, and clergy meets with state officials to boost their ratings if they choose to. So I don't see Italy to be particularly different.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
