It is the claim that Web Gallery of Art, has made, when commenting on those art works showing royal children with dwarfts:

This figure is a dwarf, it is now thought probably a girl, one of the human toys so popular at many European courts of the time. The physically handicapped figure of the dwarf holds a silver rattle and an apple in imitation of an orb and sceptre, and is acting the part of a comic major-domo to the future little king. One wonders whether their Majesties and the courtiers laughed at this picture and the court painter's amusing idea.

In Spain (and other countries too) there was a long tradition of including dwarfs in royal portraits as subordinate figures. Basically, these deformed little creatures were merely attributes of the royal dignity, part of the furnishings of the court and regarded as neuter beings rather than fully human.

  Sure, we have heirarchy, and the Church is not a democracy, but does this claim apply to Catholics too?
 :shocked:

read somewhere that Isabella of Spain called them God's Special people or something like that......

would think ti sinful as it depreives them of nromal, human dignity God gave everyone, to be demeaned in such fashion...

Do you think this was very sinful or maybe just a little foolish?

  I don't want to think anymore, I just want to believe, tell me what to believe and I will do so.

If Saints kept dwarfts then it cannot be sinful.....

Yes it can. Not everything that every saint ever did is beyond reproach.

Sometimes they disagree with each other too!

And sometimes it's difficult, even for a saint, to rise completely above the world around him.

What I mean by that --

What if we had a saint living today (not too far-fetched!) and he or she were canonized in 2040. Let's call her St. Melissa.

Perhaps St. Melissa had 3 children. Being a humble housewife, she trusted the doctors of her time, who advised 30 vaccinations before age 3.

She was holy for various reasons, but she wasn't held up by the Church as an example of a woman who understood the world and its goings-on. On the contrary, she was canonized because she had a strong prayer life, raised her children to be good Catholics even though her husband left her, she had to work 2 jobs, yet she still homeschooled, etc.

So someone 50 years from now could say "Look at this! We have a saint -- St. Melissa -- who allowed her children to be damaged physically! One of them was sterilized, which we know today is because of the vaccines he received. We all know today how bad vaccines are. This St. Melissa had her children get ALL the vaccines they recommended! Even the ones that used aborted fetal tissue! You can't tell me that it's not sinful to harm yourself or another by injecting aluminum, squalene, foreign DNA, mercury, MSG, and heavy metals into your body..."

Matthew