The Lies of the Black Legends

The Lies of the Black Legends

Peter Kopa, Prague, June 26, 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xedwd5o5CCs

We present an annotated summary of what Chesterton wrote on this topic. Here is the material:

Introduction

The tensions between faith and reason that emerged with rationalist subjectivism in recent centuries have left their mark in the form of prejudice and falsehood. This consists of simply pitting faith against reason—the obscurantist Middle Ages against the Enlightenment—or of the denigrating prejudices against the Catholic Church, which is blamed for the Inquisition, the exploitation of indigenous peoples in Latin America, and the never-ending saga of Galileo. These accusations have been made against a political backdrop (the Nordic Protestants against the Latin world of France, Italy, and Spain).

In other words, this mindset did not arise spontaneously but emerged as the result of campaigns orchestrated primarily by Great Britain, with a clear political agenda. For its part, rationalism supported this movement at the university level and in the cultural discourse of recent centuries.

The reality—now widely recognized—is that through these criticisms, the British Empire sought to divert attention from the fact that English colonization had perpetrated genocide with the declared intention of killing all indigenous peoples. Twenty million were wiped out, partly due to the spread of diseases against which they had no immunity and also due to their legitimate defense of their habitat.

In contrast, Spanish colonization recognized the human dignity of the indigenous peoples, declaring them citizens of the Crown, which led to a ban on enslaving them. The proof of this is plain to see: throughout Spanish America, racial mixing has taken place. History has always been this way: in the face of disasters and evils caused by unjust violence, those in power have always sought a scapegoat or the “villain of the piece” to hide the truth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZflUxSDofDo

A few more examples: Nero blamed the Christians for the Great Fire of Rome; communism sought to justify Stalin’s purges by shifting the blame onto the nobles and the wealthy. Similarly, Hitler killed so many Jews under the pretext that they were subhuman and exploiters of the poor.

This is the truth—now widely accepted and easily demonstrable—which the renowned British convert summarized in five arguments:

The university, a Catholic invention

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWK2u2y6dYc

When the Roman Empire fell in the year 476, so too did the immense Roman achievements inspired by Greek culture: roads and aqueducts, its architecture, its arts, its legal and administrative systems, and so on. Faced with barbarian invasions, the cities were abandoned. However, the few monasteries in the 5th and 6th centuries managed to preserve much of this cultural heritage, viewing this task as a moral obligation. Despite the bloody persecutions that lasted until the year 313, Christian families had so many children that by the end of the 5th century, Christians constituted the majority in the Empire.

https://thinktanklatam.org/el-poder-demografico/

The Benedictine monks saved what could be saved by making copies for posterity. Thanks to this work, we can read Cicero, Socrates, Plato, and the Roman *Corpus Juris Civilis* today—works that have inspired laws up to the present day. The reception of Aristotle took place in the Middle Ages, thanks to the Arabs in Spain.

The university emerged later, in the shadow of the great cathedrals and under the direct patronage of the popes. The oldest is the University of Bologna, founded nine centuries ago. Then the University of Paris was founded in 1150, followed by Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Heidelberg, and Prague. Over the centuries, as university chairs came to be filled by rationalist professors without theological training, a paradoxical development occurred: from within the university’s Alma Mater, the argument emerged that reason and faith were incompatible. This scourge and this error still persist today in some universities. It is like an adult child raising a fist against his parents, who gave him life and everything else.

Prof. J. L. Hilbron, who teaches the History of Science at the University of California, Berkeley—and is not a Catholic—concluded after years of study that the Catholic Church provided all the financial and social support for the study of astronomy for more than six centuries. Without this, we would not have satellites in space today, nor so many other things, such as GPS.

Chesterton: The Deaths and Resurrections of the Church

Emperor Constantius I, in the third century, was an Arian, as were many bishops, until Arianism was defeated in 385. It was a heresy that held that Jesus Christ is not God. The Church emerged strengthened from this severe trial lasting nearly two centuries…….

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Cathars and Albigensians espoused an unnatural puritanism, contrary to the faith. It is interesting to note that Puritan thought had—and continues to have—a significant influence in the United States. Luther possessed Puritan tendencies that led him to fail to distinguish between the excesses of the clergy and their priestly function, in which the unworthiness of the officiant is no obstacle to the efficacy of the sacrament. Jan Hus, in the 15th century, fell completely into this error. All of this was overcome by the Church and did not lead to his death, in Chesterton’s words

With Descartes, the primacy of the self over the extramental object burst onto the scene of philosophical thought. The Greek Sophists had already devised this principle, which drags philosophy into the closed tunnel of subjectivism and absolute relativism. Along these lines, the rabid rationalism that proclaims the incompatibility between reason and faith later emerged. Leading exponents of this error include Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, and, ultimately, Marx. All of this remained somewhat isolated in the lofty spheres of philosophical abstraction, which had broken away from Aristotelian realism, primarily in England, where the crown is also the head of the Church founded by Christ—according to the whim of Henry VIII.

In response to this challenge, the Oxford Movement, led by Cardinal Newman, and the Catholic Renaissance in France emerged here in the 19th century. Then, in the middle of that century, Darwin wrote that Catholicism would not survive into the next generation. However, the 20th century saw its greatest geographical expansion in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania. Chesterton foresaw this, noting that every death predicted by the Church’s opponents was followed by a new resurrection.

No empire or civilization has such a glorious history. Empires have risen and fallen: Egypt, Greece, Rome, Spain, and England. It remains to be seen, at this very moment, what the future holds for China and the United States, currently the world’s leading powers. The same has happened with ideologies and systems of thought, such as Marxism, materialist positivism, Nazism, and today’s “woke” ideologies. All these systems of thought are erroneous because they are based on false premises. By condemning them, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church—as the only institution of divine origin—has preserved for all people the truth that enlightens and redeems.