This is a short sample of the complete publication.
Introduction
WHEN DAVID WILLEY drafted the core* of this paper he had been battling against cancer for some time. Given his work load it is not surprising that he lacked the time to prove and publish it before he succumbed. Nevertheless, it is a powerful piece which we feel must be made more widely available and his wife, Yvette, is giving the project her full support. His premature death was a great loss to the small and struggling movement for population awareness and sustainable policy-making and we hope that, in due course, more of his contributions will be made available – possibly as ‘collected works' on CD-ROM.>
Some readers may be offended by the title I have adopted – to David's less blunt but still shocking original version** – even to the very idea of a venerable religious institution being weighed in the balance as a major source of human death and destruction. Sad to relate, however, there can be no substantive argument against the fact that the Roman Church – along with many (most?) other religions – has in the past been directly responsible for a great deal of human suffering including the taking of many lives – ie, acquiring a body-count.
Paradoxically, it was a stern admonition from the present Pope which convinced me that plain speaking was the right choice here. In the 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, he wrote:
We need now more than ever to have the courage to look truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of selfdeception. (John Paul II, pp. 103-4. Itals. original)
Many religions have practised human sacrifice; some still do. The torso of a small black boy (‘Adam') recently found in the Thames in London is thought to have been the victim of ‘muti', an African form of religious rite. The Aztecs were particularly depraved; hacking open the chests of tens of thousands of living victims and tearing out the still-beating heart to hold up high to satisfy their bloodthirsty gods. The major world religions have never quite attained these gory extremes but there can be no doubt that they all have substantial body-counts and the Roman Church is no exception. The question whether was settled centuries ago; the operational questions now are; how many killings, why, when, where, and how – and how to avoid them in the future?
In earlier days the Vatican was almost indistinguishable from other polities, scheming, aggrandising, invading, warring, torturing, executing prisoners, and so forth. As the ‘eyebrow' to this Foreword shows, the Vatican strongly supported the bloodthirsty Crusades, ironically, largely on the ground of relieving serious local overpopulation. Possibly the most violent, shocking and degrading epoch in the church's long history was – from 1231 to 1834 – that of the Inquisition, during which time many thousands were fiendishly tortured and burned alive.
Although the Vatican long ago relinquished torture and killing in pursuit of allegedly spiritual goals, the great irony is that in this nominally enlightened age the body-counts stemming directly from present-day dogma and social control vastly outnumber those of earlier epochs.