@The Liturgist is not Roman Catholic.
That’s correct, and insofar as the Eastern Orthodox Churches of which I have been a member, the OCA and the Antiochian Orthodox Church, and the Oriental Orthodox with which I have close ties as a result of my ecumenical work, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church, have not persecuted anyone, but have been victims of Roman Catholic persecution in the case of the Syriac Orthodox in India and the Antiochians during the Crusades, and in the case of the OCA’s Alaskan Archdiocese of Sitka, one of the major Orthodox saints of North America is Saint Peter the Aleut, a 15 year old boy, martyred by the Franciscans in California after his party of twenty Aleutian fishermen, who had routinely sailed to California for centuries, were arrested due to their Orthodox faith, and St. Peter, out of all of them, who was not the leader but a mere 15 year old boy, was martyred for refusing to recant the Orthodox faith and convert to the Roman faith, and thus who could be regarded as a victim of violence connected to the Spanish Inquisition insofar as the Franciscans along with the Dominicans were involved in conducting the Inquisition, and the territory of Alta California, which corresponds to southern and central California in the US, was at the time under Spanish Colonial rule. Furthermore, our churches in the Middle East are under active persecution right now, with the abduction of the Syriac and Antiochian Metropolitans of Aleppo in 2013 (the incident that prompted me to join the Orthodox Church after my friend who was one of the last conservative priests in the ultra-liberal Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles (Anglican) retired, and since that time the persecution of Orthodox Christians in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq has been incessant, most recently with the martyrdom of 90 men, women and children at an Antiochian Orthodox Church in Damascus that was attacked by an Islamist with automatic weapons, who on running out of ammo, threw a grenade at the Iconostasis, kyrie eleison.
My interest in this thread rather is twofold: insofar as some posts by
@Amo2 have had an anti-Orthodox effect by implying that Orthodox ecumenical councils such as the Council of Nicaea were Roman Catholic conspiracies aimed at suppressing worship on Sunday, despite the fact that of the 318 bishops at Nicaea, only two were Roman Catholics, and the rest were Orthodox Christians of Greek and Syrian ethnicity, and the Pope of Rome was not involved with the council, and the council enacted two canons, 6 and 7, which have the effect of precluding Papal Supremacy by declaring in canon 6 that the churches of Antioch and Alexandria should have the same privileges as that of Rome, and in canon 7 that the church of Jerusalem, newly reinstated after the city, which was largely ruined and renamed Aeolia Capitolina in 130 AD following the failed revolt led by the false messiah Bar Kochba, was restored by Emperor Constainte’s mother St. Helena, should also have those privileges.
Later councils also clarified that the church of Cyprus had always had those privileges, and granted them officially to the Church in Constantinople. Given the severe persecution of Orthodox and Roman Catholic persecutions by Emperor Constantine’s son Constantius, who was persuaded to apostasize and join the Arian religion, which denied the Incarnation and the Trinity, and his successors up through Emperor Valens who were all Arians, except for Emperor Julian, who was a Neo-Platonist, and thus the persecution of the Nicene Christians by the Roman Empire, whether Roman Catholic or Greek, Coptic and Syrian Orthodox continued until 386 AD, when a vigil held by the great bishop St. Ambrose of Milan persuaded Emperor Theodosius, who was a Christian, not to yield to demands by Arians that a church in Milan be handed over to them (which Theodosius had intended to do fearing a riot).
Additionally insofar as the accusations made against Roman Catholics, for example, the claim they murdered 125 million people, are so egregious as to potentially lead to renewed persecution of Catholics, particularly by Muslims, who might be fearful of Catholics because Muslims worship on Friday, and the false accusation of a Roman Catholic conspiracy to prohibit worship on days other than Sunday (which is so untrue when one considers that in recent years, nearly all Roman Catholic parishes have begun scheduling Saturday afternoon worship services and attendance at these satisfies the obligation for Roman Catholics to attend weekly worship, and combined with existing masses on Saturday mornings, given the extremely large global population of Catholics and the fact that all Catholic priests are required to celebrate the Mass daily, and also the Divine Office (Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer etc), that the majority of Saturday worship services worldwide are held in Catholic churches. The Orthodox (specifically a combined total of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox) and Anglicans probably come in second and third place due to the normal practice of Saturday vespers, and also the Saturday morning divine liturgies which are normal in the Coptic, Ethiopian and Eritrean churches.
My concern is these allegations of violence and of a conspiracy to suppress worship on days other than Sunday could lead to persecution or individual misconduct towards the Roman Catholic Church, whose clergy in places such as Northern Ireland, Scotland and parts of England routinely experience violence both from Muslims and other persons not of Roman Catholic ethnicity, and whose churches in the US, Canada and other countries frequently fall victim to arson attacks, and whose laity in the Middle East, particularly the Melkite Catholics, Maronite Catholics and Syriac Catholics in Syria, the Coptic Catholics in Egypt, and the Chaldean Catholics in Iraq, have experienced violent persecution alongside their Orthodox and Anglican brethren.
In addition, in Pakistan, where Christians are severely persecuted, nearly all of the violence has been encountered by Anglicans, Catholics and other Protestants, for the Orthodox do not have a significant presence in that country (and have not since the genocide of Tamerlane in the 12th century AD, which killed all Aramaic-speaking Christians of the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Antiochian Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East outside of Mesopotamia and the Malabar Coast of India, including all of those living on the island of Socotra in Yemen, and the very large number living in Central Asia, China, Mongolia and Tibet. Today, only ruins exist where there were once beautiful churches in these lands.
Because of this, and because we are Christians, we have a duty to seek historical truth, even if it disagrees with our assumptions. At present, the facts of history as agreed upon by all academic sources do not support the narrative about the Spanish Inquisition and the Roman Catholic Church presented in this thread. Additionally, claiming the Catholics murdered a population equal in size to that of Western Europe is a historical impossibility.
www.carnegiecouncil.org
