title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: It was during this time that the first formal request for troops in the support of the UN mission was given to Canada, the request included Canadian signals and logistics personnel be sent to the Congo. From Canada the UN needed specifically signals personnel as well as quartermaster and maintenance personnel. The Canadian Signallers were to be used to send communication from the front to the headquarters and vice versa. They were stationed both at ONUC HQ as well as in 10 static signals stations spread throughout the country. Canada also sent a Provost Unit which attempted to promote law and order in the capital. "At any one time there were more Canadians serving at ONUC HQ than of any other nationality." In addition to the Signals Squadron, Canada also sent an advanced reconnaissance party consisting of six officers from the United Nations Military Observer Group in India. "These men were instructed to determine personnel and equipment requirements, as well as the organization requirements at HQ." The reconnaissance party found that "ONUC HQ personnel did not carry weapons and were able to move about freely without any trouble." The Canadian government, however, was scared that their French-speaking peacekeepers could get mistaken for Belgian paratroops, and so "peacekeepers were given small arms training ... depending on rank the troops were issued either Browning automatic pistols or C1 submachine guns, weapons the non-combatant peacekeepers carried for personal defence only."


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: It soon became clear that these fears were not unwarranted, Canadian peacekeepers were attacked by Congolese troops on several occasions. "The first incident of serious violence that occurred between Congolese and Canadians occurred at N'Djili Airport, and demonstrated how vulnerable the Canadians could be. Two groups of peacekeepers were waiting to depart on reconnaissance missions, when those destined for Luluabourg were delayed on the tarmac. A patrol of about ten to twelve Congolese soldiers suddenly rushed them ... the Congolese forced them facedown onto the tarmac, arms extended and then they kicked them." The commanding officer was then knocked out and the remaining Canadian soldiers were herded onto a truck. After about ten minutes the Canadians were rescued by a Danish officer and Ghanain troops. The UN as well as Canada reacted in outrage to this senseless attack against Canadian troops. In turn they praised the Canadian officer for not escalating the situation and responding in due discretion. It was recognized by all parties that the Canadian soldiers were capable of firing on the Congolese troops in self-defence but they did not.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: Even though Canada was not in the Congo in a combat capacity, their involvement came under scrutiny from the USSR. The Soviets began to attack Canadian involvement directly, "they objected to the use of Canadian peacekeepers because Canada was one of Belgium's NATO allies". The Soviets even went so far as to demand "the withdrawal of armed groups from Canada". According to Scarnecchia, the Soviets "accused the RCAF of supplying weapons and armoured steel to Tshombe's forces in secessionist Katanga, they believed that this RCAF support was in line with Western interests." Although these allegations were never proven, in response, the Secretary-General of the UN transferred the RCAF contingent from performing airlift duties in support of the UN mission to a Pisa-Leopoldville airlift of food and aid. This transfer served to somewhat satisfy the Russians and any further scrutiny was mild in comparison. Instead of arguing against UN involvement in the Congo, the Soviets began to provide aid to Prime Minister Lumumba in Leopoldville. Along with the assassination of Lumumba and the death of Secretary-General Hammarskjold, this then led to the use of force by UN troops in the Congo being allowed by the UN. In 1961, UN troops under aggressive commanders pushed into Katanga, and began routing Tshombe's armed forces. As "clashes between Tshombe and UN forces grew more frequent, the UN moved even more aggressively, and eventually took control of key parts of the province".


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: Canadians would play an important role in nearly every aspect of the UN mission in the Congo, from their detachment at Command HQ to the RCAF Pisa-Leopoldville Airlift on to the Signals Personnel stationed throughout the Congo. Though Canadian involvement came under Soviet attack the Canadian commitment to the mission did not waver and Canadian soldiers stayed in the Congo until the end of the mission in 1964. Canadian forces proved themselves admirably in tough situations when they were attacked by Congolese forces and responded with discipline and tact by not firing on their attackers.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: The greatest strength which the Canadian Contingent in the Congo reached was 461, though 1,900 Canadian soldiers would serve there from 1960 to 1964. There were no casualties except the bruises and cuts given to the Canadian Forces by Congolese troops at N'Djili Airport.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: During the ensuing Congo Crisis, about 1,800 Canadians from 1960 to 1964 served among the 93,000 predominantly African peacekeepers with the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC), working chiefly as communications signallers and delivering via the Royal Canadian Air Force humanitarian food shipments and logistical support. The Canadian participation stemmed more from overwhelming public opinion, and not decisive action on the part of the Diefenbaker government, according to historians Norman Hillmer and Jack Granatstein. However, Diefenbaker reportedly refused to comply with numerous public calls for Canada to provide humanitarian relief to 230,000 Congolese famine victims in South Kasai in 1961 ostensibly because "surplus foodstuffs should be distributed to unemployed persons in Canada" as a first priority. Two Canadians died from non-conflict-related causes, and, out of the 33 Canadians injured in the conflict, twelve received "severe beatings" by Congolese forces. Although Patrice Lumumba dismissed the first incidences of these beatings, on 18 August 1960, as "unimportant" and "blown out of all proportion" in order for the UN to "influence public opinion", he attributed them a day later to the Armée Nationale Congolaise's "excess of zeal". Historians have described these incidents as cases of mistaken identity under chaotic circumstances, in which Canadian personnel were confused by Congolese soldiers with Belgian paratroopers, or mercenaries working for the Katanga secession.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: Only a quarter of Canada's signallers extended their six-month tours of duty to a full year, and Canadian forces reportedly found the Congolese to be "illiterate, very volatile, superstitious and easily influenced", including an instance where a Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel successfully persuaded Kivu Province's Prime Minister to accept a relief contingent from Malaysia by explaining to him that the Malaysians were capable of diverting bullets in flight away from their intended path. A recent study concluded that while the Canadian government "demonstrated a greater willingness to accommodate the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba than other Western nations" and publicly did not side with either faction, it "[p]rivately ... favoured the more Western oriented [President] Kasavubu". however financial assistance was turned down by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Canada's troops earned the trust of Joseph Mobutu, the latter visiting Canada in 1964 as President of Zaire, during which he acknowledged Canada's support in maintaining his country's territorial integrity.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: Four hundred and sixty Ethiopian troops were among 3,500 UN soldiers to arrive by 20 July 1960. This initial contingent would form the Tekil (or "Tekel") Brigade, which was stationed in Stanleyville. Through the course of the operation, some 3,000 members of the elite "Kebur Zabagna" (imperial bodyguards)—about 10 percent of the Ethiopian Army's strength at that time—were raised by Emperor Haile Selassie, along with an air force squadron. The Ethiopian 3rd Brigade was distinguished for having provided decisive artillery support in the UN's siege of Kibushi in late 1962/early 1963.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: Ghanaian and Nigerian troops also served in ONUC, the latter with the 99th Indian Infantry Brigade. The Nigerian 1st Battalion was among the last military forces in the country in 1964.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: An Egyptian battalion appears to have arrived by September 1960, but left by early 1961 after a dispute about the UN's role. On 26 January 1961, the Secretary-General reported that United Arab Republic (a union of Egypt and Syria) requested that its contingent of roughly 510 personnel be repatriated by 1 February; these troops allegedly comprised a parachute battalion based in Lisala in Equateur Province, where visits of UAR Ilyushin aircraft caused concern among UN officials.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: ONUC was the first UN peacekeeping mission to employ force as a means of implementing the decisions of the Security Council. It was also the first mission to enforce a no-fly zone and an arms embargo. As of 2021, it remains the most robust UN operation in terms of scope, scale, and use of force.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: During the first three years of its operation, ONUC managed to successfully improve the internal security of the Congo. On the eve of ONUC's departure, Adoula declared over radio that the mission was a "decisive factor" in restoring the Congo's unity and that it set "an encouraging precedent" for intervention in emerging states.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: In subsequent years, most Congolese came to view ONUC as an unwelcome foreign interference in their country's affairs.


title: United Nations Operation in the Congo

text: The Netflix film "The Siege of Jadotville" (2016) directed by Richie Smyth is based on Declan Power's book, "The Siege at Jadotville: The Irish Army's Forgotten Battle" (2005). The film tells the story of the Irish peacekeeping troop that held off Katangese and mercenary troops in the mining town of Jadotville, despite being heavily outnumbered.


title: Draft (sports)

text: A draft is a process used in some countries (especially in North America) and sports (especially in closed leagues) to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players. When a team selects a player, the team receives exclusive rights to sign that player to a contract, and no other team in the league may sign the player. The process is similar to round-robin item allocation.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The best-known type of draft is the entry draft, which is used to allocate players who have recently become eligible to play in a league. Depending on the sport, the players may come from college, high school or junior teams, or teams in other countries. An entry draft is intended to prevent expensive bidding wars for young talent and to ensure that no team can sign contracts with all of the best young players and make the league uncompetitive. To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a "lottery" factor to discourage teams from deliberately losing.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Other types of drafts include the expansion draft, in which a new team selects players from other teams in the league, and the dispersal draft, in which a league's surviving teams select players from the roster of a newly defunct franchise. Major professional sports leagues also have special contingency plans for rebuilding a team via a disaster draft, should an accident or other disaster kill or disable many players.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Drafts are usually permitted under antitrust or restraint of trade laws because they are included in collective bargaining agreements between leagues and labor unions representing players. These agreements generally stipulate that after a certain number of seasons, a player whose contract has expired becomes a free agent and can sign with any team. They also require minimum and sometimes maximum salaries for newly drafted players. Leagues may also allow teams to trade draft picks among each other in exchange for other draft picks or in exchange for players.


title: Draft (sports)

text: In 1935, National Football League president Joseph Carr instituted the NFL Draft as a way to restrain teams' payrolls and reduce the dominance of the league's perennial contenders. It was adopted by the precursor of the National Basketball Association in 1947; by the National Hockey League in 1963; and by Major League Baseball in 1965, although draft systems had been used in baseball since the 19th century.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Major Indoor Lacrosse League (National Lacrosse League) adopted a collegiate draft in 1988, Major League Soccer in 2000, Major League Lacrosse in 2001, and Major League Rugby in 2020.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Sports drafts are uncommon outside the U.S. and Canada. Most professional football clubs and those in other sports obtain young players through transfers from smaller clubs or by developing youth players through their own academies. The youth system is operated directly by the teams themselves, who develop their players from childhood. Parity in these leagues is instead maintained through promotion and relegation, which automatically expels the weakest teams from a league in exchange for the strongest teams in the next lower league.


title: Draft (sports)

text: In Australian rules football's premier competition, the Australian Football League (AFL), a draft was introduced in 1986 when the competition was then known as the Victorian Football League (VFL). This was in response to the increasing transfer fees and player salaries at the time, which in combination with declining attendances, threatened to derail the league. It was also a result of the failure of country zoning, introduced in the late 1960s, which had led to a systematic inequality whereby the clubs with the best zones, like Carlton and Hawthorn, could dominate over clubs with poorer zones like Melbourne.


title: Draft (sports)

text: In the AFL Draft, clubs receive picks based on the position in which they finish on the ladder. Therefore, the teams that finish at the bottom of the AFL ladder will get the first draft picks. Also, any team that finishes in a low ladder position for consecutive seasons will receive priority picks.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The AFL's National Draft is held in November, with a pre-season draft and a rookie draft held in December.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The 1991 NSWRL season featured the introduction of rugby league football's first draft system. The draft allowed teams to recruit players on a roster system based on where the club finished the previous year. It ran in reverse order with the wooden spooners getting first choice and the premiers last. The draft lasted just the one season before being defeated in the courts by players and coaches opposed to its limitations.


title: Draft (sports)

text: When the Russian Superleague became the Kontinental Hockey League, the collective bargaining agreement between the KHL and its players introduced a draft, starting from the very first season of the league. It also allowed teams to use a first-round draft pick to select protected players from a team's farm system. The KHL Junior Draft was discontinued in 2016.


title: Draft (sports)

text: A draft system is used for The Hundred, a professional franchise 100-ball cricket tournament in England and Wales run by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which started in 2021. The inaugural Hundred draft took place in October 2019.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The Canadian Football League holds its annual player draft before the start of the season, either in the last days of April or the start of May. It was formerly held as part of the annual league meetings in Hamilton, but is now typically held by conference call with the first two rounds being broadcast live on TSN. Since 2016, the draft has consisted of eight rounds, with teams drafting in inverse order of their records in the previous season, with the Grey Cup runner-up selecting second-to-last and the Grey Cup champion selecting last. As with the NFL Draft, trading of picks is very common, meaning that a team will not necessarily have eight picks in a given draft.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The draft is restricted to Canadian citizens, plus non-citizens who were raised in Canada since childhood (see the relevant section of the main CFL article). Eligible players can be drafted both from U Sports football programs in Canada and U.S. college football programs (with the latter category containing one Canadian school, Simon Fraser).


title: Draft (sports)

text: International players, which can compose up to half of a CFL team's roster, are not subject to a draft and enter the league by way of the negotiation list, a process that allows a CFL team to unilaterally stake claim to any international player on a first-come, first-served basis without the player's consent and bar them from negotiating with any other CFL team. This includes almost all of the league's quarterbacks.


title: Draft (sports)

text: In the inaugural 2018 Global T20 Canada a player draft was held for franchises to choose the players from the available pool.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Draft order in the NFL is determined in a reverse-record order (the previous season's worst team picking first, the Super Bowl winner picking last). There are 7 rounds of the draft (a maximum of 260 picks), so each team can have 7 selections, plus whatever compensatory selections a team receives as a result of free agency (up to 32 compensatory selections are given each year), and any picks awarded for developing minority candidates for NFL head coaching or general manager positions (starting with the 2021 draft in accordance with NFL Resolution JC-2A). Teams are allowed to trade draft picks (including compensation picks since 2017) among each other in exchange for other draft picks or in exchange for players.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Because the NFL requires that players be three years removed from high school, and of the lack of an effective junior development system outside the college and university programs, players are chosen almost exclusively from National Collegiate Athletic Association college football programs.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The NFL Draft has become one of the key events on the American football calendar, airing live on television each April. In recent years it had been held at New York's Radio City Music Hall, but in 2015 and 2016 it was held at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre,<ref name="Chicago/Los Angeles"></ref> and in 2017 it was held on the Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The 2018 draft was the first ever to be held at an NFL stadium, namely the Dallas Cowboys' AT&T Stadium.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The NBA Draft, held historically in another NBA city, but in recent drafts it has been held either in a theater in the New York area or the Barclays Center each summer, is only two rounds long (60 picks). Instead of automatically granting the top pick to the worst team from the year before, the NBA holds a draft lottery to determine who chooses first. The top four picks are allocated by chance among the 14 teams that did not make the playoffs the year before. This discourages a team from losing on purpose to get a better draft pick, but also causes other controversies such as allegations that the lottery is rigged.


title: Draft (sports)

text: NBA teams choose players from the NCAA and from teams overseas. It was formerly common for players to be chosen directly from high school, but in 2006, the NBA required that players wait a year after high school before playing in the NBA. Almost all top U.S. players thus play at least one year in college.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The NHL operates a seven-round off-season draft (224 picks). Like the NBA, the NHL uses a lottery system to determine which team gets the top pick. All 16 teams, up from 15 between 2017 and 2021, that failed to qualify for the playoffs take part in the weighted lottery with the winner moving up to select first overall. Any North American player aged 18–20, and any overseas player aged 18–21 is eligible to be selected. Players are generally chosen from junior hockey teams, high schools, the NCAA and overseas clubs.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The NHL rotates the draft's location among cities with teams in the league. Like baseball, players drafted in the entry draft usually have to wait a few years in development, either in junior hockey or the minor leagues, before cracking an NHL roster; usually, only one or two draft picks, generally, those that are widely predicted to be blue-chip superstars, jump directly from the draft to the NHL (e.g. Sidney Crosby or Jaromír Jágr).


title: Draft (sports)

text: The league has incrementally expanded the draft lottery process over the course of the early 2010s to discourage "tanking"—the act of deliberately losing to get a better draft pick. Historically, the league only subjected the first overall pick to the draft lottery among the five worst teams in the league, meaning that if a draft had more than one marquee prospect (a generally rare occurrence), it would still be a viable strategy to tank, as a second overall pick was still guaranteed. This was made evident in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, where marquee prospects Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel were both seen as NHL-ready and likely to be stars; much speculation surrounded the struggling Buffalo Sabres, who allegedly tanked to secure the rights to at least the second overall pick (a charge that, although the Sabres' fans openly encouraged it, the team officially denied). From the 2016 to 2020 drafts, the top "three" overall picks were subject to lottery among all fourteen teams that did not make the playoffs, meaning the last-place team will only be assured of the fourth overall pick, at which point virtually any marquee prospect will have already been selected. Since the 2021 draft, only two draws are held for the first two selections. Starting with the 2022 lottery, the team winning one of the two lotteries is only allowed to move up a maximum of ten spots in the draft order and teams will only be allowed to win the lottery twice in a five-year period.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The three major junior leagues that make up the Canadian Hockey League also hold drafts of teenage players in their territories.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Major League Baseball holds two drafts each year. In June, the First-Year Player Draft, MLB's entry draft, takes place. Only players from Canada, the U.S. or a U.S. territory may be drafted; players from elsewhere are free agents and can be signed by any team. Draftees are high-school graduates who have opted not to go to college; college baseball players at four-year institutions who have played three years or turned 21; or junior college baseball players. As of 2021, the draft lasts 20 rounds (down from 40 in 2019 with the exception of a 5-round 2020 draft), but earlier drafts have lasted up to 100 rounds. The MLB Draft generally receives less attention than the drafts in other American sports, since drafted players usually spend several years in the minor leagues before they crack the Major League team's roster. Also, unlike the MLS, NFL, NBA and the NHL Drafts, the MLB Draft takes place during the season instead of in the offseason.


title: Draft (sports)

text: In December, MLB holds the much shorter Rule 5 draft. If an organization keeps a player in the minor leagues for a certain number of years, other teams can draft him in the Rule 5 draft. The drafting team must keep the player on its major league roster; it cannot put the player in its own minor leagues system.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Major League Soccer has two types of draft that occur each year, plus a third that is held intermittently when the league adds one or more teams. The two annual drafts are the three-round long MLS SuperDraft (a maximum of 81 picks since 2021, down from four rounds and 104 picks in 2020), which was held for the first time in 2001, and MLS Supplemental Draft, with the MLS Expansion Draft held in the offseason immediately before the league expands.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The MLS SuperDraft happens every January. During the draft the teams from the league will pick up to three players each from colleges across the United States. Only players from the American college sports system (e.g., the NCAA and the NAIA) are eligible to be drafted. Canadian U Sports men's soccer players are not included.


title: Draft (sports)

text: In addition to drafted players, MLS teams also acquire new players from their youth academies. These players are called homegrown players. Homegrown player are academy players who is given a first-team contract. They are required to have spent at least one year in a club’s academy, and to have lived in the club’s territory (for example, in the case of Orlando City, northern Florida).


title: Draft (sports)

text: The draft gives to the teams opportunity to acquire players from other regions of the country, from outside their territory.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The teams can also acquire new players by signing players from other leagues (usually foreigner leagues). MLS has two transfer windows—the primary pre-season transfer window lasts three months from mid February until mid May, and the secondary mid season transfer window runs one month from early July to early August.


title: Draft (sports)

text: MLL implemented its first collegiate draft in 2001. The draft was held every year until MLL merged with the Premier Lacrosse League in December 2020, with the merged league operating under the PLL banner.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Major League Rugby implemented its first collegiate draft in 2020. Players are eligible for draft after 3 years in college at 21 years old. Free agents can try to join teams at 18 years old.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The National Women's Soccer League held its first drafts prior to its inaugural 2013 season. The first was a draft of college players, followed by a supplemental draft. The final draft was a preseason waiver draft in which teams could select players who had been waived by their first squads, but only one player was selected at that time.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The college draft has been held prior to each league season. The waiver draft, now called the "re-entry wire", has also been a permanent part of the league. With league expansion and contraction since its establishment, both expansion drafts (intended to help stock the rosters of new teams) and dispersal drafts (in which teams could select players from defunct teams) have been irregularly held.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The Premier Lacrosse League held its first collegiate draft in 2019, shortly before the start of its inaugural season.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The WNBA Draft is held every spring. It has had several locations during its history; the two most recent drafts in 2018 and 2019 have been held at Nike New York City Headquarters, a secondary headquarters for the athletic apparel giant in Midtown Manhattan. The draft is currently three rounds long with each of the 12 teams in the league (trades aside) getting three picks each. Draft order for teams that made the playoffs the previous year are based on team records. The team with the highest previous record will pick last. Since eight teams qualify for playoffs, the bottom eight picks are determined by this method. For the remaining top four picks, a selection process similar to the NBA Draft Lottery is conducted for the four teams that did not qualify for the playoffs.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Cricket's Indian Premier League instead holds a yearly auction before the start of each season in which teams bid on players, subject to a salary cap and restrictions on roster size.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Indian Super League is responsible for holding drafts prior to the commencement of each season. Teams can buy foreign players with international experience while they still can purchase Indian players with little or no experience.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The Pakistan Super League uses a draft system for player recruitment before the start of every season to fairly distribute the league's new players. Teams are allotted slots in every round of the draft and slots can be exchanged with other teams.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) draft is an annual event in the PBA calendar in which teams can acquire new players outside the league which are not free agents. Only natural-born Filipinos and foreign nationals with Filipino ancestry, whether or not they acquired Philippine citizenship, are eligible to be drafted. The draft began in 1985; prior to that teams directly hired rookies.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Until 2014, there was a draft lottery between the two worst team of the preceding season. This was scrapped after the events of the 2014 draft lottery.


title: Draft (sports)

text: A "draft bust" is a highly touted or highly selected draftee who does not meet expectations. This is due to an inability to perform at a professional level. A player is also regarded as a larger bust if more successful players are drafted after them.


title: Draft (sports)

text: In the 1998 NFL Draft, the San Diego Chargers selected promising quarterback Ryan Leaf with the second overall pick, after the Indianapolis Colts selected Peyton Manning.


title: Draft (sports)

text: However, Leaf only managed to play two years with the Chargers and started only 18 games (winning only four) for them before being released, and was out of the NFL after four years. In contrast, Manning had a long career in which he set a number of passing records, led two Super Bowl-winning teams, and considered one of the greatest quarterbacks of all-time, before being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2021.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Tony Mandarich and JaMarcus Russell, two other frequently cited draft busts, are examples of players whose statuses as busts are amplified by their placements in the draft: Mandarich was selected second overall in the 1989 NFL Draft by the Green Bay Packers after Hall of Famer Troy Aikman, and ahead of Hall of Famers Barry Sanders, Derrick Thomas and Deion Sanders, as well as seven future Pro Bowlers.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Russell was selected first overall in the 2007 NFL Draft by the Oakland Raiders, immediately before Hall of Famer Calvin Johnson, and ahead of future Pro Bowlers Joe Thomas, Adrian Peterson, Patrick Willis, Marshawn Lynch, and Darrelle Revis.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Like Leaf, both Mandarich and Russell were cut after three seasons, and ultimately failed to find success elsewhere in the league.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Other frequently cited examples include Akili Smith (the New Orleans Saints had offered the Cincinnati Bengals nine future draft picks in exchange for their No. 3 first round pick, which the Bengals declined to draft Smith), Charles Rogers (who was drafted one spot ahead of seven-time Pro Bowler Andre Johnson), Lawrence Phillips (the St. Louis Rams had traded Hall of Famer Jerome Bettis in the belief that Phillips could better fill his role), Todd Marinovich (remembered for both his unorthodox upbringing and being drafted ahead of Hall of Famer Brett Favre), and Trent Richardson (who only spent two seasons with the Cleveland Browns after being drafted third overall).


title: Draft (sports)

text: In the NBA, the most well-known example of a draft bust is LaRue Martin, drafted 1st overall in the 1972 NBA Draft ahead of Bob McAdoo and Julius Erving. Martin had a career average of just 5.3 points per game and was out of the NBA four years later, while McAdoo and Erving went on to be inducted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and are usually mentioned as all-time greats. McAdoo and Erving were both selected to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Other notable NBA draft busts include Sam Bowie, who while proving to be a serviceable though injury-prone player, was haunted by being drafted second overall in the famously talent-rich 1984 NBA draft (behind Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon(1st) and ahead of Hall of Famers Michael Jordan(3rd), Charles Barkley(5th) and John Stockton(16th)), Michael Olowokandi in 1998 NBA draft (ahead of Mike Bibby, Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter, Dirk Nowitzki, and Paul Pierce), Kwame Brown in 2001 NBA draft (ahead of Tyson Chandler, Pau Gasol, and Tony Parker), Darko Miličić in 2003 NBA draft (after LeBron James and ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade), Adam Morrison in 2006 NBA draft, (After LaMarcus Aldridge, ahead of Brandon Roy). Greg Oden in 2007 NBA draft (ahead of Kevin Durant), Hasheem Thabeet in 2009 NBA draft (ahead of James Harden, Stephen Curry, and DeMar DeRozan), Derrick Williams in 2011 NBA draft (ahead of Klay Thompson and Kawhi Leonard), Royce White in 2012 NBA draft, Anthony Bennett in 2013 NBA draft (ahead of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Rudy Gobert), Jabari Parker in 2014 NBA draft (ahead of Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokić). More recent examples include Jahlil Okafor in 2015 NBA draft (ahead of Kristaps Porziņģis and Devin Booker), Markelle Fultz in 2017 NBA draft (ahead of Jayson Tatum, Donovan Mitchell, and Bam Adebayo).


title: Draft (sports)

text: Notable draft busts include Steve Chilcott (1966) and Brien Taylor (1991), 1st overall draft picks who never reached the majors.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Matt Bush (2004), another 1st overall pick, dealt with legal troubles culminating in incarceration and waited nearly 12 years to make the major leagues, eventually doing so as a middle relief pitcher in 2016. A player like outfielder Josh Hamilton (1999) can also be considered a draft bust before unexpectedly turning their career around.


title: Draft (sports)

text: A notable draft bust was Alexandre Daigle (1993), who is notable for saying "I'm glad I went number one, cause no one remembers number two" upon being drafted by the Ottawa Senators. The number two selection that year happened to be Hall of Famer Chris Pronger.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Other players such as Rick DiPietro, Alek Stojanov, Patrik Štefan, Pavel Brendl, Nail Yakupov, Griffin Reinhart, Gord Kluzak, Hugh Jessiman, and Greg Joly have also been cited as major draft busts.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Examples include former Essendon player Scott Gumbleton and former Hawthorn player Mitch Thorp. Gumbleton and Thorp was drafted with picks 2 and 6 respectively in the 2006 AFL Draft ahead of future All-Australian players Travis Boak, Joel Selwood, James Frawley, and Jack Riewoldt. Thorp managed just two games in three years with Hawthorn before being delisted while Gumbleton managed just 35 games in six years with Essendon before being traded to Fremantle, subsequently retiring without playing a single game for his new club.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Conversely, a player drafted at a low spot, yet went on to have a stellar and productive career is known as a "draft steal".


title: Draft (sports)

text: Mike Piazza, who went on to become one of the best catchers of the 1990s, a 12-time MLB All-Star selection and a Hall of Famer, was chosen in the 62nd round (1390th overall) of the 1988 MLB draft and was selected only as a favor to Tommy Lasorda (whose team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, were the team that drafted Piazza): to further put the pick in historic perspective, the MLB draft is now much shorter, having most recently been reduced from 40 rounds to 20 in 2021.


title: Draft (sports)

text: One of the most notable examples is Tom Brady, who was drafted late in the sixth round (at 199th overall pick) by the then-mediocre New England Patriots only as a fourth-string backup quarterback, but went on to have a two-decade career winning seven Super Bowls (six with the Patriots and one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and three NFL MVPs. Similarly, two-time Super Bowl champion Roger Staubach was a tenth round pick in both the AFL and NFL drafts, largely due to having a four-year commitment to serve in the U.S. Navy.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre was a second round pick, while fellow Hall of Famers Joe Montana, Aeneas Williams and Dan Fouts were all third round picks, with Montana slipping due to an average showing at the combine. Drew Brees, MVP of Super Bowl XLIV, dropped to the second round after being generally dismissed by scouts due to a mediocre performance at the combine and his height, but went on to break or set NFL records for passing yards and touchdown passes and would eventually set the record for all-time passing yardage in 2018.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Aaron Rodgers fell to the 24th overall pick in the 2005 draft, despite being expected to be picked first overall by the San Francisco 49ers, but has since won Super Bowl XLV and been a four-time League MVP.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Russell Wilson was a third-round pick due to his height (5'11"/1.80 m) but went on to become the second-highest rated NFL passer of all time.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Johnny Unitas, who is considered one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the game, was drafted in the ninth round of the 1955 Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers, who cut him at the end of the team's training camp.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Bart Starr, a two-time Super Bowl MVP and multiple-championship winner, was the 200th overall pick in 1956 due to concerns about back injury problems.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Quarterback Kirk Cousins would be drafted in the fourth round by the Washington Redskins in 2012 as a backup to Robert Griffin III, but became the team's full-time starter in 2015 and played out two more seasons in Washington before signing the first fully guaranteed contract for any player in NFL history with the Minnesota Vikings in 2018.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Antonio Brown was drafted 195th overall by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2010 but was an All-Pro receiver from 2013 to 2018, before being traded to the Oakland Raiders in 2019 (later getting released by them, and later the New England Patriots, over accusations of sexual assault), and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, with whom he won Super Bowl LV.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Manu Ginóbili, a key contributor to four San Antonio Spurs championships in the 21st century and the centerpiece of Argentina's national team in 2004, was the next-to-last pick (57th) in the 1999 NBA draft.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Another notable draft steal is Isaiah Thomas, who was selected as the 60th and last pick in the 2011 NBA draft, but emerged as an All-Star in 2017 and led the Boston Celtics to the No.1 seed in the Eastern Conference that same year. He also finished 5th in MVP voting in 2017.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Draymond Green, who was selected as the 35th pick in the 2012 NBA draft, was a key contributor to the Golden State Warriors winning four championships. Green has been named to multiple All-Star selections and also won the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award in 2017.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Nikola Jokić, a Serbian who was selected as the 41st pick in the 2014 NBA draft, remained in Europe for the 2014–15 season to develop his skills before arriving in the NBA in 2015. In his second season, he quickly became a solid post playmaker, averaging about 16.7 ppg, 4.9 apg, and 9.8 rpg. He was also named to the All-NBA Team in both 2019 (first team) and 2020 (second team), and was voted in as an All-Star in both seasons before being named league MVP in 2021 and 2022. He was the first 2nd round pick to win MVP since Willis Reed in 1970. Reed was the 8th pick.


title: Draft (sports)

text: DeAndre Jordan, who was selected as the 35th pick in the 2008 NBA draft, became an All-Star in 2017 and led the league in rebounding two years in a row (2014, 2015). He became a significant contributor of the "Lob City Clippers" era for the Los Angeles Clippers, along with Blake Griffin and Chris Paul.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Kyle Korver, who was selected as the 51st pick in the 2003 NBA draft, went to have a successful 17-year career in the NBA. He was an All-Star in 2015 and is one of the most prolific 3-point shooters in league history, ranking fifth all-time in 3-point field goals made with 2450.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Jordan Clarkson, who was selected as the 46th pick in the 2014 NBA draft, won the NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award in 2021.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Malcolm Brogdon, who was the 36th pick in the 2016 NBA draft, won the Rookie of the Year award in 2017 and became a member of the exclusive 50–40–90 club in 2019.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Marc Gasol is also another example as he was selected as the 48th pick by the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2007 NBA draft, but was traded to the Memphis Grizzlies in a package that sent his older brother Pau to the Lakers. Like his brother Pau, he became an elite rim protector who could pass, shoot, and score efficiently in the post, and later in his career became an example of a "stretch five", a center capable of effective scoring from three-point range. He was also the 2013 NBA Defensive Player of the Year, and he helped the Toronto Raptors win their first championship in 2019.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The 1984 Entry Draft is noted for the unusually high number of future Hall of Famers picked, particularly in lower rounds:


title: Draft (sports)

text: - Luc Robitaille, retired as the highest-scoring left winger in the NHL, was drafted 171st in the ninth round.


title: Draft (sports)

text: A Hall of Famer Doug Gilmour was drafted by the St. Louis Blues in the seventh round, 134th overall at the 1982 NHL Entry Draft, during his career he has scored over 1400 points, won a Stanley Cup and Frank J. Selke Trophy.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Pavel Datsyuk, also drafted 171st in the 1998 NHL Entry Draft, won two Stanley Cups and is considered one of the most talented NHL players of all-time.


title: Draft (sports)

text: The Detroit Red Wings have drafted Nicklas Lidström (53rd in 1989), Sergei Fedorov (74th in 1989), Vladimir Konstantinov (221st in 1989), Tomas Holmström (257th in 1994) and Henrik Zetterberg (210th in 1999) in later rounds, who won multiple Stanley Cups with the Red Wings respectively.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Similarly, The Tampa Bay Lightning have also drafted Alex Killorn (77th in 2007), Nikita Kucherov (58th in 2011), Ondrej Palat (208th in 2011), Cédric Paquette (101st in 2012), Brayden Point (79th in 2014), Anthony Cirelli (72nd in 2015), Mathieu Joseph (120th in 2015) and Ross Colton (118th in 2016) in later rounds, would go to win back-to-back Stanley Cups with the Lightning in 2020 and 2021.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Vezina Trophy winners Dominik Hašek (drafted 199th in 1983), Tim Thomas (drafted 217th in 1994), Miikka Kiprusoff (drafted 116th in 1995), Ryan Miller (drafted 138th in 1999), Henrik Lundqvist (drafted 205th in 2000), Pekka Rinne (drafted 258th in 2004) and Connor Hellebuyck (drafted 130th in 2012), were considered one of the best goalie draft steals.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Theoren Fleury was drafted by the Calgary Flames in the 8th round, 166th overall, at the 1987 NHL Entry Draft, has scored over 1,000 points, while playing 1,000 games in the NHL between 1989 and 2003.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Joe Pavelski was drafted by the San Jose Sharks in the 7th round, 205th overall, at the 2003 NHL Entry Draft, has become one of the best American-born players of his generation.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Patric Hörnqvist was drafted last by the Nashville Predators at the 2005 NHL Entry Draft (230th in the 7th round), has won two Stanley Cups with the Pittsburgh Penguins.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Jamie Benn was drafted by the Dallas Stars in the 5th round, 129th overall in 2007, became the franchise's sixth captain in 2013 and won the Art Ross Trophy in 2015.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Mark Stone was drafted in the 6th round, 178th overall by the Ottawa Senators, and has been nominated for the Frank J. Selke Trophy (awarded to the league's best defensive forward) as a member and now captain of the Vegas Golden Knights.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Johnny Gaudreau, drafted in the 4th round, 104th overall by the Calgary Flames in 2011, ended the 2020-2021 NHL season with 494 career points in 520 NHL games. He also finished tied for second in points during the regular season in 2021-22.


title: Draft (sports)

text: An example of a draft steal is Hawthorn midfielder Sam Mitchell who was drafted with pick 36 in the 2001 AFL Draft. Mitchell went on to become a four-time premiership player, a premiership captain with Hawthorn in 2008, a two time All-Australian, a four time Peter Crimmins Medallist, the 2003 AFL Rising Star, and won the 2012 Brownlow Medal.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Another example of a draft steal in the AFL is former Essendon midfielder James Hird, who was drafted with pick 79 in the 1990 AFL Draft. Hird went on to become a two time premiership player, a premiership captain in 2000, the 1996 Brownlow Medalist, the 2000 Norm Smith Medallist, a five-time All-Australian, a five-time W. S. Crichton Medalist, and a member of the Essendon Team of the Century and the Australian Football Hall of Fame.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Another notable AFL draft steal is Collingwood midfielder Dane Swan, who was drafted with pick 58 in the 2001 AFL Draft. Swan became a premiership player with Collingwood, a three-time Copeland Trophy winner, the 2011 Brownlow Medalist and a five-time All-Australian.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Mr. Irrelevant is a title given to the last player selected in each year's NFL Draft. The phrase pokes fun at the typically poor chances such a player has of ultimately making an impact in the league, although several went on to productive NFL careers.


title: Draft (sports)

text: Some unusual draft picks in professional sports history have included Taro Tsujimoto, a fictional Japanese ice hockey forward who was drafted in the 1974 NHL amateur draft by the Buffalo Sabres (a move made in protest of the league's decision to hold the draft by phone); actor John Wayne, who at age 64 was legally drafted by the Atlanta Falcons in the 1972 NFL Draft; and Derrell Robertson, a man who was mistakenly drafted by the Ottawa Rough Riders in the 1995 CFL Dispersal Draft for the Las Vegas Posse after his death in the previous year.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Christianity has been intricately intertwined with the history and formation of Western society. Throughout its long history, the Church has been a major source of social services like schooling and medical care; an inspiration for art, culture and philosophy; and an influential player in politics and religion. In various ways it has sought to affect Western attitudes towards vice and virtue in diverse fields. Festivals like Easter and Christmas are marked as public holidays; the Gregorian Calendar has been adopted internationally as the civil calendar; and the calendar itself is measured from the date of Jesus's birth.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The cultural influence of the Church has been vast. Church scholars preserved literacy in Western Europe following the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages, the Church rose to replace the Roman Empire as the unifying force in Europe. The medieval cathedrals remain among the most iconic architectural feats produced by Western civilization. Many of Europe's universities were also founded by the church at that time. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries. The university is generally regarded as an institution that has its origin in the Medieval Christian setting, born from Cathedral schools. The Reformation brought an end to religious unity in the West, but the Renaissance masterpieces produced by Catholic artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael remain among the most celebrated works of art ever produced. Similarly, Christian sacred music by composers like Pachelbel, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Verdi is among the most admired classical music in the Western canon.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The Bible and Christian theology have also strongly influenced Western philosophers and political activists. The teachings of Jesus, such as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, are among the most important sources of modern notions of human rights and the welfare commonly provided by governments in the West. Long-held Christian teachings on sexuality, marriage, and family life have also been influential and controversial in recent times. Christianity played a role in ending practices such as human sacrifice, infanticide and polygamy. Christianity in general affected the status of women by condemning marital infidelity, divorce, incest, polygamy, birth control, infanticide (female infants were more likely to be killed), and abortion. While official Catholic Church teaching considers women and men to be complementary (equal and different), some modern "advocates of ordination of women and other feminists" argue that teachings attributed to St. Paul and those of the Fathers of the Church and Scholastic theologians advanced the notion of a divinely ordained female inferiority. Nevertheless, women have played prominent roles in Western history through and as part of the church, particularly in education and healthcare, but also as influential theologians and mystics.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Christians have made a myriad of contributions to human progress in a broad and diverse range of fields, both historically and in modern times, including the science and technology, medicine, fine arts and architecture, politics, literatures, music, philanthropy, philosophy, ethics, humanism, theatre and business. According to "100 Years of Nobel Prizes" a review of Nobel prizes award between 1901 and 2000 reveals that (65.4%) of Nobel Prizes Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Eastern Christians (particularly Nestorian Christians) have also contributed to the Arab Islamic Civilization during the Ummayad and the Abbasid periods by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic. They also excelled in philosophy, science, theology and medicine.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Christianity contributed greatly to the development of European cultural identity, although some progress originated elsewhere: Renaissance humanism and Romanticism began with the curiosity and passion of the pagan world of old. Outside the Western world, Christianity has had an influence and contributed on various cultures, such as in Africa, Central Asia, the Near East, Middle East, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Scholars and intellectuals agree Christians have made significant contributions to Arab and Islamic civilization since the introduction of Islam.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Common criticisms of Christianity include oppression of women, condemnation of homosexuality, colonialism, and various other cases of violence. Christian ideas have been used both to support and end slavery as an institution. Criticism of Christianity has come from the different religious and non-religious groups around the world, some of whom were themselves Christians.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The foundation of canon law is found in its earliest texts and their interpretation in the church fathers' writings. Christianity began as a Jewish sect in the mid-1st century arising out of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The life of Jesus is recounted in the New Testament of the Bible, one of the bedrock texts of Western Civilization and inspiration for countless works of Western art. Jesus' birth is commemorated in the festival of Christmas, his death during the Paschal Triduum, and his resurrection during Easter. Christmas and Easter remain holidays in many Western nations.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Jesus learned the texts of the Hebrew Bible, with its Ten Commandments (which later became influential in Western law ) and became an influential wandering preacher. He was a persuasive teller of parables and moral philosopher who urged followers to worship God, act without violence or prejudice, and care for the sick, hungry, and poor. These teachings deeply influenced Western culture. Jesus criticized the hypocrisy of the religious establishment, which drew the ire of the authorities, who persuaded the Roman Governor of the province of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, to have him executed. The Talmud says Jesus was executed for sorcery and for leading the people into apostacy. In Jerusalem, around 30AD, Jesus was crucified.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The early followers of Jesus, including Saints Paul and Peter carried this new theology concerning Jesus and its ethic throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, sowing the seeds for the development of the Catholic Church, of which Saint Peter is considered the first Pope. Christians sometimes faced persecution during these early centuries, particularly for their refusal to join in worshiping the emperors. Nevertheless, carried through the synagogues, merchants and missionaries across the known world, Christianity quickly grew in size and influence. Its unique appeal was partly the result of its values and ethics.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The Bible has had a profound influence on Western civilization and on cultures around the globe; it has contributed to the formation of Western law, art, texts, and education. With a literary tradition spanning two millennia, the Bible is one of the most influential works ever written. From practices of personal hygiene to philosophy and ethics, the Bible has directly and indirectly influenced politics and law, war and peace, sexual morals, marriage and family life, toilet etiquette, letters and learning, the arts, economics, social justice, medical care and more.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The world's first civilizations were Mesopotamian "sacred states" ruled in the name of a divinity or by rulers who were seen as divine. Rulers, and the priests, soldiers and bureaucrats who carried out their will, were a small minority who kept power by exploiting the many.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: W.E.H.Lecky gives the now classical account of the sanctity of human life in his history of European morals saying Christianity "formed a new standard, higher than any which then existed in the world...". Christian ethicist David P. Gushee says "The justice teachings of Jesus are closely related to a commitment to life's sanctity...".


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: John Keown, a professor of Christian ethics distinguishes this 'sanctity of life' doctrine from "a quality of life approach, which recognizes only instrumental value in human life, and a vitalistic approach, which regards life as an absolute moral value... [Kewon says it is the] sanctity of life approach ... which embeds a presumption in favor of preserving life, but concedes that there are circumstances in which life should not be preserved at all costs", and it is this which provides the solid foundation for law concerning end of life issues.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Rome had a social caste system, with women having "no legal independence and no independent property". Early Christianity, as Pliny the Younger explains in his letters to Emperor Trajan, had people from "every age and rank, and both sexes". Pliny reports arresting two slave women who claimed to be 'deaconesses' in the first decade of the second century. There was a rite for the ordination of women deacons in the Roman Pontifical (a liturgical book) up through the 12th century. For women deacons, the oldest rite in the West comes from an eighth-century book, whereas Eastern rites go back to the third century and there are more of them.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The New Testament refers to a number of women in Jesus' inner circle. There are several Gospel accounts of Jesus imparting important teachings to and about women: his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, his anointing by Mary of Bethany, his public admiration for a poor widow who donated two copper coins to the Temple in Jerusalem, his stepping to the aid of the woman accused of adultery, his friendship with Mary and Martha the sisters of Lazarus, and the presence of Mary Magdalene, his mother, and the other women as he was crucified. Historian Geoffrey Blainey concludes that "as the standing of women was not high in Palestine, Jesus' kindnesses towards them were not always approved by those who strictly upheld tradition".


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: According to Christian apologist Tim Keller, it was common in the Greco-Roman world to expose female infants because of the low status of women in society. The church forbade its members to do so. Greco-Roman society saw no value in an unmarried woman, and therefore it was illegal for a widow to go more than two years without remarrying. Christianity did not force widows to marry and supported them financially. Pagan widows lost all control of their husband's estate when they remarried, but the church allowed widows to maintain their husband's estate. Christians did not believe in cohabitation. If a Christian man wanted to live with a woman, the church required marriage, and this gave women legal rights and far greater security. Finally, the pagan double standard of allowing married men to have extramarital sex and mistresses was forbidden. Jesus' teachings on divorce and Paul's advocacy of monogamy began the process of elevating the status of women so that Christian women tended to enjoy greater security and equality than women in surrounding cultures.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: In the ancient world, infanticide was not legal but was rarely prosecuted. A broad distinction was popularly made between infanticide and infant exposure, which was widely practiced. Many exposed children died, but many were taken by speculators who raised them to be slaves or prostitutes. It is not possible to ascertain, with any degree of accuracy, what diminution of infanticide resulted from legal efforts against it in the Roman empire. "It may, however, be safely asserted that the publicity of the trade in exposed children became impossible under the influence of Christianity, and that the sense of the seriousness of the crime was very considerably increased."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313 AD ended the state-sponsored persecution of Christians in the East, and his own conversion to Christianity was a significant turning point in history. In 312, Constantine offered civic toleration to Christians, and through his reign instigated laws and policies in keeping with Christian principles making Sunday the Sabbath "day of rest" for Roman society (though initially this was only for urban dwellers) and embarking on a church building program. In AD 325, Constantine conferred the First Council of Nicaea to gain consensus and unity within Christianity, with a view to establishing it as the religion of the Empire. The population and wealth of the Roman Empire had been shifting east, and around the year 330, Constantine established the city of Constantinople as a new imperial city which would be the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Patriarch in Constantinople now came to rival the Pope in Rome. Although cultural continuity and interchange would continue between these Eastern and Western Roman Empires, the history of Christianity and Western culture took divergent routes, with a final Great Schism separating Roman and Eastern Christianity in 1054 AD.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: During the fourth century, Christian writing and theology blossomed into a "Golden Age" of literary and scholarly activity unmatched since the days of Virgil and Horace. Many of these works remain influential in politics, law, ethics and other fields. A new genre of literature was also born in the fourth century: church history.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The remarkable transformation of Christianity from peripheral sect to major force within the Empire is often held to be a result of the influence held by St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, but this is unlikely. In April of 390, the Emperor Theodosius I ordered the punitive massacre of thousands of the citizens of Thessaloniki. In a private letter from Ambrose to Theodosius, sometime in August after this event, Ambrose told Theodosius he cannot be given communion while Theodosius is unrepentant of this terrible act. Wolf Liebeschuetz says records show "Theodosius duly complied and came to church humbly, without his imperial robes, until Christmas, when Ambrose openly readmitted him to communion."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: McLynn states that "the encounter at the church door has long been known as a pious fiction." Daniel Washburn explains that the image of the mitered prelate braced in the door of the cathedral in Milan blocking Theodosius from entering, is a product of the imagination of Theodoret, a historian of the fifth century who wrote of the events of 390 "using his own ideology to fill the gaps in the historical record." According to Peter Brown, these events concern personal piety; they do not represent a turning point in history with the State submitting to the Church.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: According to Christian literature of the fourth century, paganism ended by the early to mid—fifth century with everyone either converted or cowed. Contemporary archaeology, on the other hand, indicates this is not so; paganism continued across the empire, and the end of paganism varied from place to place. Violence such as temple destructions are attested in some locations, generally in small numbers, and are not spread equally throughout the empire. In most regions away from the imperial court, the end of paganism was, more often, gradual and untraumatic.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Theodosius reigned (albeit for a brief interim) as the last Emperor of a united Eastern and Western Roman Empire. Between 389 and 391, Theodosius promulgated the Theodosian Decrees, a collection of laws from the time of Constantine including laws against heretics and pagans. In 391 Theodosius blocked the restoration of the pagan Altar of Victory to the Roman Senate and then fought against Eugenius, who courted pagan support for his own bid for the imperial throne. Brown says the language of the Theodosian Decrees is "uniformly vehement and the penalties are harsh and frequently horrifying." They may have provided a foundation for similar laws in the High Middle Ages. However, in antiquity, these laws were not much enforced, and Brown adds that, "In most areas, polytheists were not molested, and, apart from a few ugly incidents of local violence, Jewish communities also enjoyed a century of stable, even privileged, existence." Contemporary scholars indicate pagans were not wiped out or fully converted by the fifth century as Christian sources claim. Pagans remained throughout the fourth and fifth centuries in sufficient numbers to preserve a broad spectrum of pagan practices into the 6th century and even beyond in some places.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The central bureaucracy of imperial Rome remained in Rome in the sixth century but was replaced in the rest of the empire by German tribal organization and the church. After the fall of Rome (476) most of the west returned to a subsistence agrarian form of life. What little security there was in this world was largely provided by the Christian church. The papacy served as a source of authority and continuity at this critical time. In the absence of a magister militum living in Rome, even the control of military matters fell to the pope.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The historian Geoffrey Blainey likened the Catholic Church in its activities during the Middle Ages to an early version of a welfare state: "It conducted hospitals for the old and orphanages for the young; hospices for the sick of all ages; places for the lepers; and hostels or inns where pilgrims could buy a cheap bed and meal". It supplied food to the population during famine and distributed food to the poor. This welfare system the church funded through collecting taxes on a large scale and by owning large farmlands and estates. The canon law of the Catholic Church () is the system of laws and legal principles made and enforced by the hierarchical authorities of the Church to regulate its external organization and government and to order and direct the activities of Catholics toward the mission of the Church. It was the first modern Western legal system and is the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West, predating the European common law and civil law traditions.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The period between the Fall of Rome (476 C.E.) and the rise of the Carolingian Franks (750 C.E.) is often referred to as the "Dark Ages", however, it could also be designated the "Age of the Monk". This era had a lasting impact on politics and law through Christian aesthetes like St. Benedict (480–543), who vowed a life of chastity, obedience and poverty; after rigorous intellectual training and self-denial, Benedictines lived by the "Rule of Benedict:" work and pray. This "Rule" became the foundation of the majority of the thousands of monasteries that spread across what is modern day Europe; "...certainly there will be no demur in recognizing that St. Benedict's Rule has been one of the great facts in the history of western Europe, and that its influence and effects are with us to this day."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Monasteries were models of productivity and economic resourcefulness teaching their local communities animal husbandry, cheese making, wine making, and various other skills. They were havens for the poor, hospitals, hospices for the dying, and schools. Medical practice was highly important in medieval monasteries, and they are best known for their contributions to medical tradition. They also made advances in sciences such as astronomy. For centuries, nearly all secular leaders were trained by monks because, excepting private tutors who were still, often, monks, it was the only education available.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The formation of these organized bodies of believers distinct from political and familial authority, especially for women, gradually carved out a series of social spaces with some amount of independence thereby revolutionizing social history.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Gregory the Great ("c" 540–604) administered the church with strict reform. A trained Roman lawyer, administrator, and monk, he represents the shift from the classical to the medieval outlook and was a father of many of the structures of the later Catholic Church. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, he looked upon Church and State as co-operating to form a united whole, which acted in two distinct spheres, ecclesiastical and secular, but by the time of his death, the papacy was the great power in Italy: Gregory was one of the few sovereigns called Great by universal consent. He is known for sending out the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to convert the then-pagan Anglo-Saxons in England, for his many writings, his administrative skills, and his focus on the welfare of the people. He also fought the Arian heresy and the Donatists, pacified the Goths, left a famous example of penitence for a crime, revised the liturgy, and influenced music through the development of antiphonal chants.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Charlemagne ("Charles the Great" in English) became king of the Franks in 768. He conquered the Low Countries, Saxony, and northern and central Italy, and in 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor. Sometimes called the "Father of Europe" and the founder of feudalism, Charlemagne instituted political and judicial reform and led what is sometimes referred to as the Early Renaissance or the Christian Renaissance. Johannes Fried writes that Charlemagne left such a profound impression on his age that traces of it still remain. He promoted education and literacy and subsidized schools, he worked at protecting the poor enacting economic and currency reform; these, along with legal and judicial reforms, created a more lawful and prosperous kingdom. This helped form a group of independent minded warlords into a well-administered empire, with a tradition of working with the Pope, which became the precursor to the nation of France. Fried says, "he was the first king and emperor to seriously enact the legal principle according to which the Pope was beyond the reach of all human justice—a decision that would have major ramifications in the future."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: By the late 11th century, beginning with the efforts of Pope Gregory VII, the Church successfully established itself as "an autonomous legal and political ... [entity] within Western Christendom".For the next three hundred years, the Church held great influence over Western society; church laws were the single "universal law ... common to jurisdictions and peoples throughout Europe." With its own court system, the Church retained jurisdiction over many aspects of ordinary life, including education, inheritance, oral promises, oaths, moral crimes, and marriage. As one of the more powerful institutions of the Middle Ages, Church attitudes were reflected in many secular laws of the time. The Catholic Church was very powerful, essentially internationalist and democratic in it structures, with its many branches run by the different monastic organizations, each with its own distinct theology and often in disagreement with the others.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Men of a scholarly bent usually took Holy Orders and frequently joined religious institutes. Those with intellectual, administrative, or diplomatic skill could advance beyond the usual restraints of society. Leading churchmen from faraway lands were accepted in local bishoprics, linking European thought across wide distances. Complexes like the Abbey of Cluny became vibrant centres with dependencies spread throughout Europe. Ordinary people also trekked vast distances on pilgrimages to express their piety and pray at the site of holy relics.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: In the pivotal twelfth century (1100s), Europe began laying the foundation for its gradual transformation from the medieval to the modern. Feudal lords slowly lost power to the feudal kings as kings began centralizing power into themselves and their nation-state. Kings built their own armies instead of relying on their vassals, thereby taking power from the nobility. The 'state' took over legal practices that had traditionally belonged to local nobles and local church officials; and they began to target minorities. According to R.I. Moore and other contemporary scholars, "the growth of secular power and the pursuit of secular interests, constituted the essential context of the developments that led to a persecuting society." This has had a permanent impact on politics and law in multiple ways: through a new rhetoric of exclusion that legitimized persecution based on new attitudes of stereotyping, stigmatization and even demonization of the accused; by the creation of new civil laws which included allowing the state to be the defendant and bring charges on its own behalf; the invention of police forces as the arm of state enforcement; the invention of a general taxation, gold coins, and modern banking to pay for it all; and the inquisitions, which were a new legal procedure that allowed the judge to investigate on his own initiative without requiring a victim (other than the state) to press charges.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: "The exceptional character of persecution in the Latin west since the twelfth century has lain not in the scale or savagery of particular persecutions, ... but in its capacity for sustained long-term growth. The patterns, procedures and rhetoric of persecution, which were established in the twelfth century, have given it the power of infinite and indefinite self-generation and self-renewal."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Eventually, this would lead to the development among the early Protestants of the conviction that concepts of religious toleration and separation of church and state were essential.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Christianity in the High Middle Ages had a lasting impact on politics and law through the newly established universities. Canon law emerged from theology and developed independently there. By the 1200s, both civil and canon law had become a major aspect of ecclesiastical culture, dominating Christian thought. Most bishops and Popes of this period were trained lawyers rather than theologians, and much Christian thought of this time became little more than an extension of law. In the High Middle Ages, the religion that had begun by decrying the power of law (Romans 7:1) developed the most complex religious law the world has ever seen. Canon law became a fertile field for those who advocated strong papal power, and Brian Downing says that a church-centered empire almost became a reality in this era. However, Downing says the rule of law, established in the Middle Ages, is one of the reasons why Europe eventually developed democracy instead.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Medieval universities were not secular institutions, but they, and some religious orders, were founded with a respect for dialogue and debate, believing good understanding came from viewing something from multiple sides. Because of this, they incorporated reasoned disputation into their system of studies. Accordingly, the universities would hold what was called a quadlibettal where a 'master' would raise a question, students would provide arguments, and those arguments would be assessed and argued. Brian Law says, "Literally anyone could attend, masters and scholars from other schools, all kinds of ecclesiastics and prelates and even civil authorities, all the 'intellectuals' of the time, who were always attracted to skirmishes of this kind, and all of whom had the right to ask questions and oppose arguments." In a kind of 'Town Hall Meeting' atmosphere, questions could be raised orally by anyone ("a quolibet") about literally anything ("de quolibet").


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Thomas Aquinas was a master at the University of Paris, twice, and held quodlibetals. Aquinas interpreted Aristotle on natural law. Alexander Passerin d'Entreves writes that natural law has been assailed for a century and a half, yet it remains an aspect of legal philosophy since much human rights theory is based on it. Aquinas taught that just leadership must work for the "common good". He defines a law as "an ordinance of reason" and that it can't simply be the will of the legislator and be good law. Aquinas says the primary goal of law is that "good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: "The philosophical foundation of the liberal concept of human rights can be found in natural law theories", and much thinking on natural law is traced to the thought of the Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas continues to influence the works of leading political and legal philosophers.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: According to Aquinas, every law is ultimately derived from what he calls the 'eternal law': God's ordering of all created things. For Aquinas, a human action is good or bad depending on whether it conforms to reason, and it is this participation in the 'eternal law' by the 'rational creature' that is called 'natural law'. Aquinas said natural law is a fundamental principle that is woven into the fabric of human nature. Secularists, such as Hugo Grotius, later expanded the idea of human rights and built on it.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: "...one cannot and need not deny that Human Rights are of Western Origin. It cannot be denied, because they are morally based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and Graeco-Roman philosophy; they were codified in the West over many centuries, they have secured an established position in the national declarations of western democracies, and they have been enshrined in the constitutions of those democracies."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Howard Tumber says, "human rights is not a universal doctrine, but is the descendent of one particular religion (Christianity)." This does not suggest Christianity has been superior in its practice or has not had "its share of human rights abuses".


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: David Gushee says Christianity has a "tragically mixed legacy" when it comes to the application of its own ethics. He examines three cases of "Christendom divided against itself": the crusades and St. Francis' attempt at peacemaking with Muslims; Spanish conquerors and the killing of indigenous peoples and the protests against it; and the on-again off-again persecution and protection of Jews.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Charles Malik, a Lebanese academic, diplomat, philosopher and theologian was responsible for the drafting and adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: According to Jennifer Deane, the label "Inquisition" implies "an institutional coherence and an official unity that never existed in the Middle Ages." The Medieval Inquisitions were actually a series of separate inquisitions beginning from around 1184 lasting to the 1230s that were in response to dissidents accused of heresy, while the Papal Inquisition (1230s–1302) was created to restore order disrupted by mob violence against heretics. Heresy was a religious, political, and social issue. As such, "the first stirrings of violence against dissidents were usually the result of popular resentment." This led to a breakdown of social order. In the Late Roman Empire, an inquisitorial system of justice had developed, and that is the system that was revived in the Middle Ages. It used a combined panel of both civil and ecclesiastical representatives with a Bishop, his representative, or a local judge, as inquisitor. Essentially, the church reintroduced Roman law in Europe (in the form of the Inquisition) when it seemed that Germanic law had failed. "The [Medieval] Inquisition was not an organization arbitrarily devised and imposed upon the judicial system by the ambition or fanaticism of the church. It was rather a natural—one may almost say an inevitable—evolution of the forces at work in the thirteenth century."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a Crusade to re-take the Holy Land from Muslim rule. Hugh S. Pyper says "the city [of Jerusalem's] importance is reflected in the fact that early medieval maps place [Jerusalem] at the center of the world." "By the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks had conquered [three—quarters of the Christian world]. The holdings of the old Eastern Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, were reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East." This was the impetus of the first crusade, however, the "Colossus of the Medieval world was Islam, not Christendom" and despite initial success, these conflicts, which lasted four centuries, ultimately ended in failure for western Christendom.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: At the time of the First crusade, there was no clear concept of what a crusade was beyond that of a pilgrimage. Riley-Smith says the crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages as much as they were of political circumstances. Senior churchmen of this time presented the concept of Christian love to the faithful as the reason to take up arms. The people had a concern for living the "vita apostolica" and expressing Christian ideals in active works of charity, exemplified by the new hospitals, the pastoral work of the Augustinians and Premonstratensians, and the service of the friars. Riley-Smith concludes, "The charity of St. Francis may now appeal to us more than that of the crusaders, but both sprang from the same roots." Constable adds that those "scholars who see the crusades as the beginning of European colonialism and expansionism would have surprised people at the time. [Crusaders] would not have denied some selfish aspects... but the predominant emphasis was on the defense and recovery of lands that had once been Christian and on the self-sacrifice, rather than the self-seeking, of the participants." Riley-Smith also says scholars are turning away from the idea the crusades were materially motivated.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Ideas such as holy war and Christian chivalry, in both thought and culture, continued to evolve gradually from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. This can be traced in expressions of law, traditions, tales, prophecy, and historical narratives, in letters, bulls and poems written during the crusading period.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: According to political science professor Andrew R. Murphy, concepts of tolerance and intolerance were not starting points for thoughts about relations for any of the various groups involved in or affected by the crusades. Instead, concepts of tolerance began to grow during the crusades from efforts to define legal limits and the nature of co-existence. Eventually, this would help provide the foundation to the conviction among the early Protestants that pioneering the concept of religious toleration was necessary.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: During the "calamitous" fourteenth century with its plague, famine and wars, people were thrown into confusion and despair. From its pinnacle of power in the 1200s, the church entered a period of decline, internal conflict, and corruption. According to Walter Ullmann, the church lost "the moral, spiritual and authoritative leadership it had built up in Europe over the centuries of minute, consistent, detailed, dynamic forward-looking work. ...The papacy was now forced to pursue policies which, in substance, aimed at appeasement and were no longer directive, orientating and determinative."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: According to Matthews and DeWitt, "The Popes in the fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century turned their interest to the arts and humanities rather than to pressing moral and spiritual issues. Moreover, they were vitally concerned with the trappings of political power. They plunged into Italian politics...ruling as secular princes in their papal lands. Their worldly interests and blatant political maneuverings only intensified the mounting disapproval of the papacy and provided the church's critics with more examples of the institution's corruption and decline." As the Church grew more powerful, wealthy, and corrupt, many sought reform. The Dominican and Franciscan Orders were founded, which emphasized poverty and spirituality, and the concept of lay piety developed—the "Devotio Moderna" or the new devotion—which worked toward the ideal of a pious society of ordinary non-ordained people and, ultimately, to the Reformation and the development of modern concepts of tolerance and religious freedom.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: In the 13th-century Roman Pontifical, the prayer for ordaining women as deacons was removed, and ordination was re-defined and applied only to male Priests.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Woman-as-witch became a stereotype in the 1400s until it was codified in 1487 by Pope Innocent VIII who declared "most witches are female". "The European witch stereotype embodies two apparent paradoxes: first, it was not produced by the 'barbaric Dark Ages', but during the progressive Renaissance and the early modern period; secondly, Western Christianity did not recognize the reality of witches for centuries, or criminalize them until around 1400." Sociologist Don Swenson says the explanation for this may lay in the nature of Medieval society as heirocratic which led to violence and the use of coercion to force conformity. "There has been much debate ...as to how many women were executed...[and estimates vary wildly, but numbers] small and large do little to portray the horror and dishonor inflicted upon these women. This treatment provides [dramatic] contrast to the respect given to women during the early era of Christianity and in early Europe ..."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Women were in many respects excluded from political and mercantile life; however, some leading churchwomen were exceptions. Medieval abbesses and female superiors of monastic houses were powerful figures whose influence could rival that of male bishops and abbots: "They treated with kings, bishops, and the greatest lords on terms of perfect equality; ... they were present at all great religious and national solemnities, at the dedication of churches, and even, like the queens, took part in the deliberation of the national assemblies ...". The increasing popularity of devotion to the Virgin Mary (the mother of Jesus) secured maternal virtue as a central cultural theme of Catholic Europe. Kenneth Clarke wrote that the 'Cult of the Virgin' in the early 12th century "had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion".


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: In 1054, after centuries of strained relations, the Great Schism occurred over differences in doctrine, splitting the Christian world between the Catholic Church, centered in Rome and dominant in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, centered in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Relations between the major powers in Western society: the nobility, monarchy and clergy, also sometimes produced conflict. For example, the Investiture Controversy was one of the most significant conflicts between Church and state in medieval Europe. A series of Popes challenged the authority of monarchies over control of appointments, or investitures, of church officials. The Court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, based in Sicily, experienced tension and rivalry with the Papacy over control of Northern Italy.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) issued "Unam sanctam", a papal bull proclaiming the superiority of the Pope over all secular rulers. Philip IV of France responded by sending an army to arrest the Pope. Boniface fled for his life and died shortly thereafter. "This episode revealed that the popes were no longer a match for the feudal kings" and showed there had been a marked decline in papal prestige. George Garnett says the implementation of the papal monarchial idea had led to the loss of prestige, as, the more efficient the papal bureaucratic machine became, the further it alienated the people, and the further it declined.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The Papacy had its court at Avignon from 1305 to 1378 This arose from the conflict between the Italian Papacy and the French crown. Theologian Roger Olson says the church reached its nadir at this time when there were three different men claiming to be the rightful Pope. "What the observer of the papacy witnessed in the second half of the thirteenth century was a gradual, though clearly perceptible, decomposition of Europe as a single ecclesiastical unit, and the fragmentation of Europe into independent, autonomous entities which were soon to be called national monarchies or states. This fragmentation heralded the withering away of the papacy as a governing institution operating on a universal scale."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The history of the Inquisition divides into two major parts: "its creation by the medieval papacy in the early thirteenth century, and its transformation between 1478 and 1542 into permanent secular governmental bureaucracies: the Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman Inquisitions...all of which endured into the nineteenth century." The old medieval inquisitions had limited power and influence, whereas the powers of the modern "Holy Tribunal" were extended and enlarged by the power of the state into "one of the most formidable engines of destruction which ever existed."


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Historian Helen Rawlings says, "the Spanish Inquisition was different [from earlier inquisitions] in one fundamental respect: it was responsible to the crown rather than the Pope and was used to consolidate state interest." It was authorized by the Pope, yet the initial Inquisitors proved so severe that the Pope almost immediately opposed it to no avail. Early in 1483, the king and queen established a council, the "Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición", to govern the inquisition and chose Torquemada to head it as inquisitor general. In October 1483, a papal bull conceded control to the crown. According to José Cassanova, the Spanish inquisition became the first truly national, unified and centralized state institution. After the 1400s, few Spanish inquisitors were from the religious orders.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: The Portuguese inquisition was also fully controlled by the crown which established a government board, known as the General Council, to oversee it. The Grand Inquisitor, who was chosen by the king, was always a member of the royal family. The first statute of Limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) appeared in Toledo in 1449 and was later adopted in Portugal as well. Initially, these statutes were condemned by the Church, but in 1555, the highly corrupt Pope Alexander VI approved a 'blood purity' statute for one of the religious orders. In his history of the Portuguese inquisition, Giuseppe Marcocci says there is a deep connection between the rise of the Felipes in Portugal, the growth of the inquisition, and the adoption of the statutes of purity of blood which spread and increased and were more concerned with ethnic ancestry than religion.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Historian T. F. Mayer writes that "the Roman Inquisition operated to serve the papacy's long standing political aims in Naples, Venice and Florence." Under Paul III and his successor Julius III, and under most of the popes thereafter, the Roman Inquisition's activity was relatively restrained and its command structure was considerably more bureaucratic than those of other inquisitions were. Where the medieval Inquisition had focused on popular misconceptions which resulted in the disturbance of public order, the Roman Inquisition was concerned with orthodoxy of a more intellectual, academic nature. The Roman Inquisition is probably best known for its condemnation of the difficult and cantankerous Galileo which was more about "bringing Florence to heel" than about heresy.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: In the Middle Ages, the Church and the worldly authorities were closely related. Martin Luther separated the religious and the worldly realms in principle (doctrine of the two kingdoms). The believers were obliged to use reason to govern the worldly sphere in an orderly and peaceful way. Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers upgraded the role of laymen in the church considerably. The members of a congregation had the right to elect a minister and, if necessary, to vote for his dismissal (Treatise "On the right and authority of a Christian assembly or congregation to judge all doctrines and to call, install and dismiss teachers, as testified in Scripture"; 1523). Calvin strengthened this basically democratic approach by including elected laymen (church elders, presbyters) in his representative church government. The Huguenots added regional synods and a national synod, whose members were elected by the congregations, to Calvin's system of church self-government. This system was taken over by the other Reformed churches.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Politically, John Calvin favoured a mixture of aristocracy and democracy. He appreciated the advantages of democracy: "It is an invaluable gift, if God allows a people to freely elect its own authorities and overlords." Calvin also thought that earthly rulers lose their divine right and must be put down when they rise up against God. To further protect the rights of ordinary people, Calvin suggested separating political powers in a system of checks and balances (separation of powers). 16th-century Calvinists and Lutherans developed a theory of resistance called the doctrine of the lesser magistrate which was later employed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Thus early Protestants resisted political absolutism and paved the way for the rise of modern democracy. Besides England, the Netherlands were, under Calvinist leadership, the freest country in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It granted asylum to philosophers like René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle. Hugo Grotius was able to teach his natural-law theory and a relatively liberal interpretation of the Bible.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Consistent with Calvin's political ideas, Protestants created both the English and the American democracies. In 17th-century England, the most important persons and events in this process were the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, John Locke, the Glorious Revolution, the English Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement. Later, the British took their democratic ideals also to their colonies, e.g. Australia, New Zealand, and India. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the British variety of modern-time democracy, constitutional monarchy, was taken over by Protestant-formed Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands as well as the Catholic countries Belgium and Spain. In North America, Plymouth Colony (Pilgrim Fathers; 1620) and Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628) practised democratic self-rule and separation of powers. These Congregationalists were convinced that the democratic form of government was the will of God. The Mayflower Compact was a social contract.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Both the ancient Greeks and the Romans cared and wrote about sexual morality within categories of good and bad, pure and defiled, and ideal and transgression. But the sexual ethical structures of Roman society were built on status, and sexual modesty meant something different for men than it did for women, and for the well-born, than it did for the poor, and for the free citizen, than it did for the slave—for whom the concepts of honor, shame and sexual modesty could be said to have no meaning at all. Slaves were not thought to have an interior ethical life because they could go no lower socially and were commonly used sexually; the free and well born were thought to embody social honor and were therefore able to exhibit the fine sense of shame suited to their station. Roman literature indicates the Romans were aware of these dualities.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Shame was a profoundly social concept that was, in ancient Rome, always mediated by gender and status. "It was not enough that a wife merely regulate her sexual behavior in the accepted ways; it was required that her virtue in this area be conspicuous." Men, on the other hand, were allowed live-in mistresses called "pallake". This permitted Roman society to find both a husband's control of a wife's sexual behavior a matter of intense importance and at the same time see his own sex with young boys as of little concern. Christianity sought to establish equal sexual standards for men and women and to protect all the young whether slave or free. This was a transformation in the deep logic of sexual morality.


title: Role of Christianity in civilization

text: Early Church Fathers advocated against adultery, polygamy, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, prostitution, and incest while advocating for the sanctity of the marriage bed. The central Christian prohibition against such "porneia", which is a single name for that array of sexual behaviors, "collided with deeply entrenched patterns of Roman permissiveness where the legitimacy of sexual contact was determined primarily by status. St. Paul, whose views became dominant in early Christianity, made the body into a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine. Paul's over-riding sense that gender—rather than status or power or wealth or position—was the prime determinant in the propriety of the sex act was momentous. By boiling the sex act down to the most basic constituents of male and female, Paul was able to describe the sexual culture surrounding him in transformative terms."