From the historical Jesus to the Catholic Church: a reckoning with power, abuse and legacy

Almost everything said about the Catholic Church begins with Jesus, and it is exactly there that historians draw the first line. On one side, the first-century man about whom little documentation exists. On the other, the Christ built by the councils, with his doctrines and his power. A critical analysis that underlies this piece traces both and then examines what the institution did with that inheritance. Its thesis is an interpretation, not a consensus verdict, and it is worth reading it with that qualification in mind.

What is known about Jesus

Jesus's existence is widely accepted by scholars. The closest sources are Paul's letters, from the 50s, and the Gospels, written starting around the year 70. Among non-Christians, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions him, even though one passage has additions by copyists, and Tacitus records, around 116, that Christ suffered the extreme penalty under Pontius Pilate. Suetonius and Pliny the Younger show an already organized movement shortly afterward.

Archaeology has left nothing directly linked to him, but it has confirmed the setting. In 1961 an inscription was found naming Pilate as prefect of Judea, and in 1968, in Jerusalem, the bones of a man crucified in the first century, with a nail through the heel.

The most widely accepted portrait is that of a Galilean Jew, baptized by John the Baptist, who preached the coming of the Kingdom of God, taught in parables, gathered disciples, among them women, and was crucified in Jerusalem around the year 30. Reconstructing his exact words is harder, because the Gospels were written decades later, within communities of faith. The long discourses, in Greek vocabulary, of the Gospel of John, for instance, reflect later theology more than literal speech.

From preacher to dogma

The historians' Jesus is thus set against the Christ of Catholic doctrine: the incarnate Son of God, second person of the Trinity, defined at the councils of Nicaea, in 325, and Chalcedon, in 451. The resurrection and the miracles are, for the historian, unverifiable accounts of faith. For the Church, they are the foundation of everything. The distinction does not invalidate faith, but it shows that many claims about Jesus come from later ecclesiastical interpretation rather than from direct historical proof.

When faith met power

The turning point is the fourth century. In 313, the Edict of Milan guaranteed freedom of worship to Christians. In 380, Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the Empire's official religion. Pagan temples were closed, sacrifices banned in 392, and the Serapeum of Alexandria destroyed in 389. The Church stopped being persecuted and became, in part, a persecutor.

In the Middle Ages, the most remembered chapter is the Crusades. The one in 1095 was called by Urban II to retake Jerusalem, and the city fell in 1099 amid a massacre of Muslims and Jews. The Albigensian Crusade, starting in 1209, targeted the Cathars in southern France. The Fourth Crusade, in 1204, sacked Constantinople. The Inquisition, created by Gregory IX in 1231, tried doctrinal deviations in secret proceedings that used torture. The Spanish Inquisition, from 1478, targeted converts and Moriscos. The Index of Forbidden Books, from 1559, was only abolished in 1966, and in 1633 Galileo was condemned for defending heliocentrism. In 2000, John Paul II asked forgiveness for these excesses.

During colonization, bulls such as Inter caetera, from 1493, legitimized the division of the New World and often-coercive evangelization. Earlier, bulls from 1452 and 1455 had authorized Portugal to subjugate peoples in Africa. Institutionally, the Church only took an official stance against slavery in the nineteenth century, with individual exceptions before then.

In the twentieth century, the Vatican signed the 1933 Concordat with Hitler and the 1929 Lateran Treaty with Mussolini. In Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, according to the research cited, the Church was an important ally of the regimes. In Cold War Latin America, part of the hierarchy stayed close to military dictatorships, although some bishops resisted. The sexual abuse scandals, exposed in reports from Ireland, the United States, Australia, Germany and France, brought the harshest evidence: in 2021, a French commission estimated about 216,000 children abused by members of the clergy since 1950, a figure that rises to 330,000 if lay Church workers are included.

The thread the analysis sees running through it all is the preservation of institutional authority, even at the cost of the truth and of victims.

The other side of the ledger

That would, however, be a partial portrait. The Church was a great patron of the arts, from cathedrals to Michelangelo and Bach. Its monasteries copied ancient manuscripts, and from the cathedral schools came the first universities, such as Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. Among the scientists linked to it are Copernicus, a canon, Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk, and Georges Lemaître, a priest and author of the Big Bang theory. Saint Basil of Caesarea, in the fourth century, founded a care complex considered a precursor to the hospital, and today, according to cited figures, the Church runs more than 5,000 hospitals worldwide.

And there were voices of reform within it: Francis of Assisi, with evangelical poverty; Catherine of Siena, who convinced the pope to return from Avignon to Rome in 1377; Luther, who began by criticizing indulgences before the break; Bartolomé de Las Casas, defender of indigenous peoples and an inspiration for the New Laws of 1542; Óscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, assassinated in 1980; along with Dom Hélder Câmara and Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns in Brazil. The Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, recognized religious freedom and opened dialogue with other faiths.

Dogma, control and change

The final assessment is the most interpretive part. The author argues the Church kept dogmas and structures of control out of institutional self-preservation. He cites papal infallibility, proclaimed in 1870 as the Papal States were collapsing, the Latin liturgy, confession made mandatory since 1215, and the idea that there is no salvation outside the Church. He acknowledges, however, that many clergy acted out of sincere conviction, and that modernity, with literacy, science and pluralism, took from the Church its monopoly over consciences.

The conclusion applies to any millennia-old institution. When it closed itself off in dogma and power, the Church caused harm. When it opened itself to service and dialogue, it regained standing. What remains is the question of whether it can embrace transparency without losing what defines it.