Another blemish

I’m still working my way through David* MacCullough’s quasi-magisterial Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, and I’ve gotten to the Black Death, not a good time to be alive in Europe. Christians responded to the horrors of the bubonic plague first by beating themselves (which McCullough calls the “flagellant movement,” generally more appropriate for paramecia and other one-celled critters than human beings) and then switching to Jews. According to McCullough, the Church became alarmed at the sort of anarchy the flagellants caused, even, apparently, worrying (a little) about the Jews. “Yet renewed outbreaks of the plague repeatedly broke through the Church’s supervision, brining renewed panic, renewed flouting of Pope Clement’s prohibition on flagellant public processions and renewed troubles for the Jews,” said renewed troubles including torture and herding Jews into specially constructed buildings and setting fire to them, burning the Jews alive. Oh, how I don’t miss the “Age of Faith.”

Afterwords
Today, of course, we don’t torture Muslims, very much, unless you consider locking away people whom we know are innocent in maximum security prisons to be “torture,” nor do we burn them alive, although we do blow them up from time to time. And, of course, we do occasionally invade their countries, creating havoc and tens of thousands of deaths, driven first by fantastic dreams of absolute power, not to mention domestic political gain, and then by the unwillingness to admit that we were wrong. Still sinners after all these years, eh? Still sinners after all these years.