“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine";
I have been wondering how you came to be in possession of so much disinformation. I’ve been reading a book called “The Da Vinci Hoax,” and now I think you got a lot of your information from “The Da Vinci Code.”
I guess someone should tell you that practically everything presented as fact in that book is false.
“Luther uncritically parroted by RCs, who strangely seem to think we are like hem and follow men as popes or see him as faultless and determinative of doctrine.”
Whether you want to admit it at all, protestants today follow that man out of the church as much as the protestants of his own day.
Yikes! So first you make a fallacious claim yourself, and now you deny that the Donation of Constantine was fallacious?! Where does it end? It was composed probably in the 8th century, and used especially in the 13th century, and later exposed as a forgery by a humanist Italian Catholic priest and others in the early 1400s, though its authenticity was occasionally defended till about 1600
Even the Catholic Encyclopedia admits this:
Donation of Constantine: By this name is understood, since the end of the Middle Ages, a forged document of Emperor Constantine the Great, by which large privileges and rich possessions were conferred on the pope and the Roman Church....This document is without doubt a forgery, fabricated somewhere between the years 750 and 850.
Most of the recent writers on the subject assume the origin of the "Donatio" between 752 and 795. Among them, some decide for the pontificate of Stephen II (752-757) on the hypothesis that the author of the forgery wished to substantiate thereby the claims of this pope in his negotiations with Pepin
The first pope who used it in an official act and relied upon, was Leo IX; in a letter of 1054 to Michael Cærularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, he cites the "Donatio" to show that the Holy See possessed both an earthly and a heavenly imperium, the royal priesthood. Thenceforth the "Donatio" acquires more importance and is more frequently used as evidence in the ecclesiastical and political conflicts between the papacy and the secular power. Anselm of Lucca and Cardinal Deusdedit inserted it in their collections of canons. Gratian, it is true, excluded it from his "Decretum", but it was soon added to it as "Palea". The ecclesiastical writers in defence of the papacy during the conflicts of the early part of the twelfth century quoted it as authoritative
St. Peter Damian also relied on it in his writings against the antipope Cadalous of Parma (Disceptatio synodalis, in Libelli de lite, I, 88). Gregory VII himself never quoted this document in his long warfare for ecclesiastical liberty against the secular power. But Urban II made use of it in 1091 to support his claims on the island of Corsica. Later popes (Innocent III, Gregory IX, Innocent IV) took its authority for granted (Innocent III, Sermo de sancto Silvestro, in P.L., CCXVII, 481 sqq.; Raynaldus, Annales, ad an. 1236, n. 24; Potthast, Regesta, no. 11,848), and ecclesiastical writers often adduced its evidence in favour of the papacy. The medieval adversaries of the popes, on the other hand, never denied the validity of this appeal to the pretended donation of Constantine, but endeavoured to show that the legal deductions drawn from it were founded on false interpretations. The authenticity of the document, as already stated, was doubted by no one before the fifteenth century.
It was known to the Greeks in the second half of the twelfth century, when it appears in the collection of Theodore Balsamon (1169 sqq.); later on another Greek canonist, Matthæus Blastares (about 1335), admitted it into his collection. It appears also in other Greek works. Moreover, it was highly esteemed in the Greek East. The Greeks claimed, it is well known, for the Bishop of New Rome (Constantinople) the same honorary rights as those enjoyed by the Bishop of Old Rome. By now, by virtue of this document, they claimed for the Byzantine clergy also the privileges and perogatives granted to the pope and the Roman ecclesiastics. In the West, long after its authenticity was disputed in the fifteenth century, its validity was still upheld by the majority of canonists and jurists who continued throughout the sixteenth century to quote it as authentic. - http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05118a.htm
The Donation of Constantine (Latin, Donatio Constantini) is a forged Roman imperial decree by which the emperor Constantine I supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. Composed probably in the 8th century, it was used, especially in the 13th century, in support of claims of political authority by the papacy.[1] Lorenzo Valla, an Italian Catholic priest and Renaissance humanist, is credited with first exposing the forgery with solid philological arguments in 1439–1440,[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine
Now do you want to deny the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were extensive and influential ninth century forgeries as well? RCs can make outlandish assertions such as there has never been a bit of anti-protestant bigotry on FR, as that is personal judgment (if assuming omniscience), but denying what is even admitted by Catholic authorities is simply untenable.
To which can be added, The Catholic historian Paul Johnson in his 1976 work “History of Christianity” finds,
By the third century, lists of bishops, each of whom had consecrated his successor, and which went back to the original founding of the see by one or the other of the apostles, had been collected or manufactured by most of the great cities of the empire and were reproduced by Eusebius…– “A History of Christianity,” pgs 53 ff.)
Eusebius presents the lists as evidence that orthodoxy had a continuous tradition from the earliest times in all the great Episcopal sees and that all the heretical movements were subsequent aberrations from the mainline of Christianity.
Looking behind the lists, however, a different picture emerges. In Edessa, on the edge of the Syrian desert, the proofs of the early establishment of Christianity were forgeries, almost certainly manufactured under Bishop Kune, the first orthodox Bishop....
When Eusebius’s chief source for his Episcopal lists, Julius Africanus, tried to compile one for Antioch, he found only six names to cover the same period of time as twelve in Rome and ten in Alexandria. More .
As for The Da Vinci Hoax, i have exposed that as fallacious as well, by God's grace, and is not based on Rome's actual forgeries. And in fact, as these forgeries were useful to supply what Scripture does not testifies that Rome did not change the Bible to conform to herself. It would not have been hard to include one mention of addressing saints in prayers to Heaven, or titling NT pastors "priests" and of them dispensing the Eucharist as life-giving flesh and blood, interpretive of the gospels. Etc.