The Book of Priestcraft Open: Fraud and Idolatry

Abstract

We have already seen that Protestants and Catholic anti-curialists denounced the miracles of the Catholic Church as priestly craft, and orthodox Catholic propagandists similarly those attributed to Protestants. In order, however, to be effective in the battle of the confessions, the assault upon the doctrine and religious practice of opponents needed to be broadened. The most efficacious polemical and analytical form suited to general denunciations of religious opponents was comparative religious history, a technique quickly developed during and shortly after the Reformation. Catholic, Protestant, Moslem, Judaeo-Christian and other religions were compared to one another in order to demonstrate that religious opponents — whether Catholics or Protestants — were infected with various degrees of paganism. In early modern mentality, the term pagan could not be separated from, and was virtually synonymous with, the presumed gross priestly guile of the ancient priests. Thus, for dissenting Protestants, anti-curialists, Enlightened deists, sceptics and atheists of the eighteenth century, the conclusion that the heathen and much of the Christian priesthood had practised longterm religious fraud upon state and subjects was old news. All such thinkers had at their disposal a large and varied corpus of ready-made comparative and sociological analyses with which to inform their own historical comparisons.