A COTTAGE INDUSTRY IN DEFENSE OF THE CHURCH IN HISTORY
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Work that needs to get done often is done not by the influential, wealthy, or well-known (who so often seem preoccupied with themselves rather than with the task at hand) but by little-known people who take what had been an avocation and turn it into a public benefit.
Case in point: Dennis Barton, age 76, resident of Birkenhead, England, which is across the Mersey River from Liverpool. For years he has run a tiny apostolate called The Church in History Information Centre.
I have on my shelves several of his privately-printed monographs. They obviously come from a home workshop. The typesetting seems to have been done on a home computer or a typewriter. The pages, "printed" on a photocopier, are bound together with staples. The covers are plain text. In some of the books are loose errata sheets.
Before me as I write is Barton's 120-page treatment of "The Authors of the Gospels." His argument is that the Gospels are historical, were written by the men to whom they traditionally have been attributed, and were written early. While there is little here that is new to me, I delighted when I first saw the book--not just because I found a like-minded soul but because the book presents the evidence and discusses the competing theories in a clear, simple, and convincing way.
I met Barton in 1995 when on a visit to England. In the years since he has continued to produce works on points of Catholic history. Among his titles are "The English Pope," "Melanie of La Salette," "A Brief History of 'No Popery,'" "Joan of Arc: Saint or Witch?," "Bismarck and the Four Gospels," "Fr. Tiso, Slovakia, and Hitler," and "The Anti-Christian Roots of Nazism." There are three dozen titles in all. Some are only a few pages long. Others are booklets. Still others are short books.
Barton no longer offers printed copies of his writings. Everything is available, gratis, at his web site, in HTML or PDF format. The web site is as simple as can be, as you will discover when you visit:
http://www.churchinhistory.org
In an introductory essay Barton writes:
"From 1534 until about 1800 (with two very short interludes) government policy in England was relentlessly anti-Catholic. All events were reported and presented in ways calculated to discredit the Catholic Church and the Pope. The main opinion-forming organs continued this tradition for more than a further century. In more recent times, anti-religious political movements and religious sects have repeated falsehoods from the past and added myths of their own.
"This tradition exerts a powerful influence in contemporary history books, novels, plays, films and video productions. The authors and producers drink from the poisoned wells of anti-Catholic bias and stereotyping and, often unwittingly, help to perpetuate the tradition for a further generation. . . .
"Catholics absorb much of their attitude to historical events from the national tradition. This can lead to a schizophrenic attitude towards their Faith; combining a deep love for Bible, Sacraments and moral idealism, with a vague sense of shame (and even guilt) regarding the Church’s impact on history. Instead of experiencing a proper pride in the past, many live in a state of tension, which can affect their judgments of modern religious challenges."
If you have read my book "Catholicism and Fundamentalism," you know something of the groups that have pushed "No Popery" in this country. Many of them were weaned on British anti-Catholic prejudice. In their eyes Thomas Cranmer was an early hero and Ian Paisley a recent one. There has been a decidedly British bent to the American challenge to "Romanism."
I often have wondered what European Protestants must think of American Fundamentalists whose arguments are phrased in terms that would have been commonly heard on the streets of nineteenth-century London--and I mean not just the sense of the arguments but even the very wording of them.
Northern European Protestants--chiefly Lutheran or Calvinist in their background and, today, usually nothing at all in their practice--never produced the long-lasting anti-Catholic bias that still is found in Britain and, by inheritance, in America. It is not overreaching to say that this bias, on both sides of the Atlantic, often is perfected into real hatred for the Catholic Church.
Dennis Barton acknowledges that not all popes have been admirable and that not all Catholic politicians have been models of rectitude. He does not play the hagiographer, and that makes his monographs valuable:
"Admittedly, there could be a temptation to whitewash the actions of particular Popes and individuals. We trust, however, that the quality of our publications, when presenting factual material, will assure readers of our ultimate aims: reliability and trustworthiness."
In my opinion, Barton succeeds in being objective, and he succeeds in counteracting much misinformation and much prejudice. He hopes to continue to do so for a long time to come. In a letter to me he said, "I look forward to another twenty years in the Lord's vineyard." Being a prudent man, he realizes that hope is not the same as assurance, so now he has a younger colleague, a writer and educator who specializes in European history.
I say to both of them, "ad multos annos!" The Church in History Information Centre is a fine example of how good work on behalf of the faith can be done on a shoestring budget. I hope you will read several of the offerings at the group's web site.
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