I have many issues with Christianity. At base, it has a completely alien world view to the European logos. In some ways Protestantism is better than Roman Catholicism and vice-versa in Western Europe, always when the Semitic tradition is abandoned in favour of something more European. The Roman Catholic Church's obsession with celibacy has been particularly unnatural and it is no coincidence that the Church itself has become a hive for sexual delinquents who have practiced sexual abuse on our children. Not only this, but successive popes and their cardinals have conspired to cover up both individual cases and the sheer scale of systematic and institutionalised abuse of the most vulnerable members of society for whom the clergy had a duty of care. The abuse has also been an abuse of trust and power in which the clergy had been confided. Now, the current active pope Francis has been using the scandal to deflect blame onto 'Pagan practices' within the Church of Rome, which sounds suspiciously like Puritan rhetoric. So what is going on here?
In this three-part video series, we visit Stift St Peter in Salzburg, which is a multi-faceted monastic complex dating originally from the end of the seventh century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and founded by St Rupert. What a good place, then, to talk about how and why Christianity swept through the Roman Empire, replacing the various forms of Pagan worship. In the first video, we talk a little about the edifice itself, before examining a text by the Roman historian Sallust, writing before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, whose De coniuratione Catilinae presents a good picture of the moral vacuum in Rome, which Christianity would come to fill, and the reasons for it. Strangely, or perhaps not so, Sallust also seems to be describing the present day....
