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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34513 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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If it it 'standard operating procedure' for 'average Christian peasants', can you show me another example of a dog saint? Or do I need to point you to the many many irrationalities of our modern secular world before you'll agree that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that you can't generalize from a single example that was notorious even in its own day?

This dog anecdote was just an illustration of peasant relationship to the divine and supernatural, untouched by any theological thought.

Yes, it is an anecdote, because we do not have any research or opinion polls from medieval villages.

We don't, but we have second best, classic anthropologic survey work of extremely trad Italian village (with very unPC name), as close we could in 20th century get to the medieval world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_Society

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society is a book by Edward C. Banfield, an American political scientist who visited Montegrano, Italy (Montegrano is the fictitious name used by Banfield to protect the original town of Chiaromonte, in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata) in 1955. He observed a self-interested, family-centric society, which sacrificed the public good for the sake of nepotism and the immediate family. As an American, Banfield was witnessing what was to become infamous as the Southern Italian Mafias and a self-centered clan-system promoting the well-being of their inner group at the expense of the other ones. Banfield postulated that the backwardness of such a society could be explained "largely but not entirely" by "the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family."

So, after 1500 years of Christianity, how pious and devoted were the Montegranesi?

The Montegranesi get little religious instruction. A peasant grandmother tells her grandchildren the stories of miracles and sacred things which she heard from her grandmother. At six a child learns his catechism, a meagre list of questions and answers which is likely to be forgotten soon after the priest has given a simple test.

In school an hour a week is devoted to religion. In later life the individual, if he goes to church--and many do not--hears simple sermons: the priest says, for example, that to be a good Catholic one must love God, obey the laws of the church, and do right. On saints days speakers sometimes come from Naples and Potenza to tell about the saint whose holiday it is.

This is the extent of the ordinary person's religious training.

Those few who could read the Bible are not discouraged from doing so but they are not encouraged either. A few peasant women have prayer books or the gospels, but most homes contain no religious literature.

Every peasant has his children baptized but (according to a Montegrano priest) most of them--especially the men--do not take seriously the idea of life after death. They believe there may be some kind of an after-world but that, whatever its nature, it will be the same for all. The hope of heaven and the fear of hell do not move them.

For the typical peasant, God (or Christ, the terms are used interchangeably) is not a spirit of loving kindness or even of firm justice. He is a demanding and capricious overlord. He may not notice one at all. If He does, He may distribute bounty or catastrophe according to whim.

Many think of God as a hostile, aggressive force which must be propitiated. A young woman, very angry with her father for getting drunk and making it necessary for her to leave a festa to take him home, sobbed, "What do I have to do to satisfy Christ ? He never does any nice things for me, and He always does these bad things to me. I don't know what to do to satisfy Him."

Some Montegranesi pray more to the saints than to God. Candles are rarely left before the main altar; most people think it more economical to leave them before the statue of a saint or madonna.

These judgments are made on practical grounds: no one has heard of any noteworthy miracles performed recently by God; this or that saint, on the other hand, has shown himself to be able and willing to afford protection (it is always protection that is asked) in a special class of matters. Some peasants even believe that certain saints are more powerful than God.

Five Madonnas are honored in Montegrano, and for some people the connection between them and the mother of Christ is extremely vague. (When a Montegrano boy who had studied for the priesthood attempted to explain to an old woman that there is only one Madonna, she laughed at him. "You studied with the priests for eight years", she said, "and you haven't learned the differences between the Madonnas!"

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