Protestants, as well as Voltaire and other Enlightenment intellectuals, are identified as the accusers-in-chief, claiming that the Roman Church suppressed truth and destroyed lives. With each chapter comes a useful list of historians who have explored the issue in more detail and are Stark’s key sources.

Stark, an American sociologist as well as popular historian, guides the reader through some of the most controversial accusations that the Catholic Church has faced: its treatment of Jews, its hostility to learning during the so-called Dark Ages, its part in the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition. I now know that RC Louisiana’s treatment of slaves was rather different from the rest of North America’s for it came under France’s Code Noir, influenced by papal teaching that insisted that Africans and Indians should be afforded the same dignity as anyone else. In reading Rodney Stark’s account of anti-Catholic history - a volume that debunks hundreds of years of prejudice, myth, and false allegations - I could set these stories in context. Later, a friend told how the nuns at one of Louisiana’s most exclusive Roman Catholic convent schools, who had schooled the daughters of elite white families at that time, had also secretly taught the slave girls who accompanied them to read. It might have not have been violent, but it was a deeply disturbing form of enslavement. Then I found out that slaves were forbidden to learn to read, and so their mistress had to read them the recipes. But, on a tour of a New Orleans 19th-century home, I discovered that the lady of the house had worked closely alongside her slaves in the kitchen. UNTIL a visit to Louisiana a couple of years ago, I had always assumed that slaves were completely brutalised. Bearing False Witness: Debunking centuries of anti-Catholic history

Bearing false witness stark