Questions tagged [catholic-church]
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, reporting more than a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity.
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Is Christianity responsible for the scientific method?
I've heard at least a few times now from apologists that Christianity is responsible for science. For some examples:
From a commercial for the site, Catholics Come Home (video LINK that opens right ...
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Did Albert Einstein say he admired the Catholic Church for standing up to Hitler?
The alleged quote would be:
Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth... I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great ...
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Shroud of Turin -- is it absolutely and definitively debunked?
A little context on this famous myth:
The Shroud of Turin or Turin Shroud is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma in a manner consistent with ...
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Has condom distribution increased the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa?
Related: Do condoms have large enough holes for HIV to pass through?
Back in Mar 2009, Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa and stated that condom use was not the answer to Africa's HIV/AIDS problems.
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Was Pope Francis a Black Sabbath fan in his youth?
Recently I stumbled upon the image of the young Pope Francis wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt.
Could this be real?
I'm guessing this is fake, but I am at work and can't do a complete research about ...
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Did the Irish Catholic church have slaves in Ireland as recently as 1996?
This article covers the topic well, but is more about the Irish government admitting collusion with the supposed slave holders.
Labelled the "Maggies", the women and girls were stripped of ...
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Catholic church owns 20% of all real estate in Italy
It is claimed that the Catholic church owns 20% of all real estate in Italy, and a quarter of all real estate in Rome. Read here. Even assuming this is the lump sum for all the parishes (not just the ...
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Does the Catholic church accept evolution?
In his 2007 video 1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism the YouTuber AronRa claims
[Catholicism and Orthodoxy] have stated support of evolution and denounced creationism. Pope Benedict recently ...
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Is there systemic sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests?
Is there a systemic relationship between Catholic priests and sexual abuse of children?
I ask because I grew up in Newfoundland, which was at the time engrossed in the abuse at Mount Cashel ...
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Did people blaspheme deliberately to be tried in the Medieval European Inquisition courts instead of other secular courts?
On the Wikipedia page about "Criticism of the Catholic Church", there was recently (though removed by an editor since this question was asked) a little paragraph about the Medieval European ...
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Cohabiting couples more likely to divorce?
v0.2 of myself was Catholic; subsequent revisions have removed this feature from my code base. In any case, I went through Catholic marriage prep, and was married in the Catholic Church. At the ...
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Do historians agree the motive behind Catholic celibacy was primarily economic?
According to a BBC article:
the First and Second Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139 explicitly forbade priests from marrying - so we are almost past 1,000 years since the Catholic Church has ...
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Are between 20-50% of Catholic priests homosexual?
In Penn & Teller's Bullshit, Season 7, there is an episode about the Vatican. I just watched it via this post on the blog, Arizona Atheist.
In it, around the 8m:10s mark, a statement is made that ...
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Was the Vatican bailed out from bankruptcy by private interests in the 1980s?
I read an article years ago about the Vatican City going bankrupt and subsequently being bailed out by the CEO of a large sneaker company (Nike, Adidas or Reebok, etc. - I can't remember which). I ...
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Did Pope John Paul II perform a miracle?
The catholic church has very recently beatified late Pope John Paul II. As one of the requirements for this, the church required at least one miracle attributed to the candidate. In this case, a nun ...
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Was the opposition of the Catholic Church to contraception based on the Homunculi theory?
I have heard said that the opposition of the church to any form of contraception - or any attempt to prevent conception (pulling out, oral sex, etc.) while still performing coitus - was originally ...
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Do visitors of Lourdes experience spontaneous recovery more often than would be expected by chance?
People going to Lourdes sometimes return and tell stories about a miraculous healing they have witnessed. Do visitors of Lourdes experience spontaneous recovery more often than would be expected by ...
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Is Vatican Radio causing childhood leukaemia?
It an ugly, long standing story in Italy: Vatican radio has huge antennas, not subject to Italian law, and the people living in the surroundings lament severe ailments such as leukaemia.
The Santa ...
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Have 5% of Australian Catholic priests been charged with child sexual abuse offences?
From The Monthly: Letting Catholic priests into Australia was a mistake
There are around 3000 Catholic priests in Australia, plus a few
hundred retirees. Of these, an astonishing one in 20 has ...
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Was St Peter a bishop of Rome?
The Roman Catholic Church claims that St Peter was the first pope, which would imply that he was also one of the first bishops of Rome.
Some statements from the New Testament make this seem unlikely:
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Was the practice of eating fish during Lent started by the church to spur the economy of Italy?
At lunch today I heard the claim again that the practice of eating fish on Fridays during Lent was started by the church to help save a floundering Italian economy at a time when fishing was its ...
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Were beavers once classified as fish for religious reasons?
Starting from a comment on this ELL question, it appears to be a fairly common internet fact.
The most famous case involving beavers began when Francois de Laval,
the first Bishop of Quebec, ...
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Does St. Januarius' "blood" congeal and liquefy?
Saint Januarius is famous for the reputed miracle of the annual liquefaction of his blood, which, according to legend, was saved by a woman called Eusebia just after the saint's death. Thousands of ...
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Did the Catholic church prosecute Galileo because he was teaching unproven ideas?
There is a popular Youtube video, Priest Debunks Common Catholic Myths, in which Casey Cole, a Catholic and Franciscan, "debunks" the idea that the church wrongly tried Galileo.
The Church ...
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Did the Catholic Church forbid the use of forks in Medieval times?
A very popular "demotivational" website in Poland has an image that claim that in Medieval times, the Roman Church forbade the use of forks, calling then "tools of the Devil" and threatening to ...
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Has the Catholic Church ever retracted an "ex cathedra" statement?
Question: Has the Catholic Church ever made a proclamation ex cathedra (as in, one which it declares is infallible) that it later retracted?
This could literally be any form of the following:
Some ...
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Does the Catholic Church prohibit abortion?
In the light of a recent death of a pregnant woman in Ireland, it has been heard in the print and electronics media that she was denied abortion because Ireland is a Catholic country.
Her repeated ...
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Cause of Catholic clergy sexual abuse is the attitude of the 60's and 70's
Is there corroborating evidence to support the arguments put forward in a recent study by the U.S. Conference of Bishops that
neither celibacy nor homosexuality can be blamed for the clerical abuse ...
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Does contraception cause infidelity and/or divorce?
Related: Natural family planning and divorce rates
A friend of mine attended Catholic Mass today and shared that the homily was entirely about contraception. From her summary, the gist was that the ...
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What happened at Fatima on 13 October 1917?
It is widely claimed (mostly by religious people) that there was a miracle in Fátima where the sun "danced". It is known as the miracle of the sun.
Is there any scientific consensus that anything ...
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Ash Wednesday History
I recently read a blog that stated:
Ash Wednesday is a relatively late addition to the Christian liturgical calendar, first surfacing in the tenth century according to accounts written in the ...
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Did the Miracle of Lanciano turn bread and wine into flesh and blood?
The story of the Miracle of Lanciano is that, in 700 AD, a monk in Lanciano reported that:
During the Mass, when he said the Words of Consecration [...], with doubt in his soul, the priest saw the ...
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Is this an old church being destroyed in France?
I saw this video on Facebook this morning:
2800 churches could be destroyed in France in the next 10 years according to current trends.
Catholicism is weakened from inside and outside, islam is ...
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Did Pope Gregory IX call the Holy Fire a fraud?
It is commonly claimed that Pope Gregory IX said the annual Holy Fire miracle in Jerusalem is a fake.
This backed up by the Holy Fire Wikipedia page. Unfortunately, the reference for that claim ...
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Has the Catholic Church lifted more people out of poverty than any other civic institution?
The New York Times published an editorial on December 29, 2013 about Pope Francis titled "Radical Pope, Traditional Values" which includes the following statement:
As a result of its work in basic ...
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Was Alberto Rivera formerly a Jesuit priest?
"Chick tracts" are a series of comic books by cartoonist Jack Chick. The publisher estimates that is has printed over 800 million tracts since its founding.
An issue in this series from 1981,...
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Is there evidence that Saint Bernard of Corleone knew the day of his death in advance?
A recent CommonSenseAtheism post featured a picture in which St. Bernard of Corleone was named. Curious about the reference to "kill a few guys," I looked him upon on Wikipedia. Among the fact that he ...
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Did a statue of Mary, mother of Jesus cry in St. Rita's church in Ja-Ela in Sri Lanka?
According to what seems to be this Roman Catholic church's official Facebook page:
Official News :
A miracle did happen today with tears coming from a statue of Mother Mary, during prayers.
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Did Richard Dawkins say Pope John Paul II was a hypocrite about Darwinism?
Multiple sources (including Richard Dawkin's own web-site) quote the following from an article by Michael Ruse, which he supposedly wrote for the Playboy magazine.
We who love science must realize ...
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How should we evaluate the evidence for the miracle of Lanciano? [duplicate]
Here are the basics of the miracle of Lanciano:
One day, a certain monk was offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Although we do not know his identity, an ancient document described
him as .....
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Did the body of Saint Bernadette remain intact after 50 years, despite the conditions it was in?
According to this 2019 article in the National Catholic Register, The Marvelous Preservation of St. Bernadette, the body of Saint Bernadette had limited decay, despite:
given the close examinations, ...
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Are the lips of this illumination of St. Mary moving?
The Mirror reports that a video of footage of an illumination of St. Mary, at St Charbel's Church in Sydney, Australia, appears to have her her lips moving to a prayer:
I'm skeptic... but I don't ...
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Has the documentary hypothesis become invalid? [closed]
The documentary hypothesis is a hypothesis which proposes that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were ...
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Did Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi start smiling 45 minutes after his death?
Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi was the Abbot of The Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, Greece. He died in 2009.
Several religious Christians claim that his corpse started to smile after ...
