"Celibacy was made the rule in the western church in the course of the 11th century in a struggle for the independence of the christian movement from feudalism, [which] rebuilt society according to family relations, natural and artificial: a vassal was a son to his lord, and obligations were respectively filial and paternal. To our eyes the feudal order collapsed the distinction between public and private; it produced an entire society -- which lasted a thousand years, roughly from the 8th through the 18th centuries -- structured like the mafia. The church sought to throw off control by the new lords of Europe by celibacy, which ended the natural family ties, and by what came to be known as 'the investiture controversy,' which cut the artificial ones. The uniqueness of the church order that grew from feudalism is due in part to the uniqueness of feudalism itself -- a polity that finds a parallel only in pre-modern Japan (where christianity was officially suppressed)..." -- "Sex and Power in Catholicism" <www.counterpunch.org/estabrook0420.html>.
Perry Anderson wrote 35 years ago,
"One single institution, however, spanned the whole transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in essential continuity: the Christian Church. It was, indeed, the main, frail aqueduct across which the cultural reservoirs of the Classical World now passed to the new universe of feudal Europe, where literacy had become clerical. Strange historical object par excellence, whose peculiar temporality has never coincided with that of a simple sequence from one economy or polity to another, but has overlapped and outlived several in a rhythm of its own, the Church has never received theorization within historical materialism ... Its own regional autonomy and adaptability -- extraordinary by any comparative standards -- have yet to be seriously explored. Lukacs believed it to lie in a relative permanence of man's relation to nature, unseen substratum of the religious cosmos. But he never ventured more than asides on the question..." --"Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" (1974), p. 131 and n. 11
Bill Bartlett wrote:
> What are you talking about? The troglodytes are the *most* antagonistic to
> capitalism. They long for a return to feudalism.
>
> The enemy of your enemy isn't always your friend.
>
> Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
>
>
> At 5:23 PM -0400 20/4/09, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> On Apr 20, 2009, at 5:16 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>
>>> With the collapse of official Marxism-Leninism and the growth of
>>> Liberation Theology among the increasing number of Catholics in what used
>>> to be called the Third World, while neoliberalism grew in the developed
>>> world, Catholicism might be seen ca. 2000 as the largest body of
>>> anti-capitalist thought in the world -- followed perhaps by Islam...
>>
>> If you overlook the troglodytes in the Vatican.
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