The prots have been making up crap ever since Luther apostatized.
Like this one, in use for longer than the history of America:
The Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals (or False Decretals) are a set of extensive and influential medieval forgeries, written by a scholar or group of scholars known as Pseudo-Isidore. The authors, who worked under the pseudonym Isidore Mercator, were probably a group of Frankish clerics writing in the second quarter of the ninth century. They aimed to defend the position of bishops against metropolitans and secular authorities by creating false documents purportedly authored by early popes, together with interpolated conciliar documents.
The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, along with certain fictitious letters ascribed to early popes, from Clement to Gregory the Great, were incorporated in a ninth-century collection of canons purporting to have been made by the pseudonymous Isidore Mercator. Collections of canons were commonly made by adding new matter to old; the forger of the Pseudo-Isidore collection took as the basis of his work a quite genuine collection, Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis, and interpolated his forgeries among the genuine material that supplied credibility by association. The official Liber pontificalis was used as a historical guide and furnished some of the subject matter.
For approximately 150 to 200 years, the forgeries met with only moderate success. Although a relatively large number of manuscripts dating from the ninth or tenth century is known—altogether about 100 more or less complete manuscripts of the False Decretals dating from the ninth to the 16th century have been preserved—the canonical collections took but little note of the False Decretals until the early 11th century.
During the 11th century, the situation changed rapidly under the impetus of the Gregorian reforms and the Investiture Controversy. Under the impetus of monastic reform movements and the efforts of some Holy Roman Emperors, a group of cardinals and a series of successive popes strove to cleanse the church of abuses and free the papacy from its Imperial patronage, which had recently freed it from the influence of the Roman nobles. The reformers' efforts soon conflicted with temporal power. The bishops of the Holy Roman Empire were crucial to the Emperor's power and were the backbone of his administrative structure. Thus, the emperors were keen to maintain their say on who was promoted bishop and who was not. This intermingling of spiritual and temporal power constituted a deadly sin in most reformers' eyes. After all, St. Peter himself had already condemned the magician Simon Magus (the "Simon" of simony), who tried to buy spiritual power.
Given this situation, the alleged letters from some of the most venerable Roman bishops fabricated by the forgers' workshop came as a godsend. The close interaction of bishops and pope was a welcome proof that the emperors' practice was in blatant contradiction with the oldest traditions of the church. Collections of canon law rediscovered the False Decretals—some were largely extracts from the forgeries. The forgers' intentions, however, were turned around. They had used Rome's power to maintain the independence of the bishops; now the texts were being used to bring the bishops under close scrutiny and to make them dependents of the Bishop of Rome.
This tendency continued to prevail until around 1140, when the learned canonist Gratian published his Concordia discordantium canonum, which increasingly replaced the older collections and was soon regarded as authoritative. Gratian, too, made use of texts from the forgers' arsenal, although, for the most part, probably in indirect ways. With Gratian's work, the immediate influence of the False Decretals had come to an end. As intended, the texts had become an important basis for procedural law, but the outcome was nearly the opposite of what the forgers had intended in the mid-ninth century. The bishops' independence was increasingly restricted by the power of the Church of Rome.
During the Middle Ages, there was little doubt as to the genuineness of the alleged papal letters, but this changed during the fifteenth century. Humanist scholars of Latin, such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, noticed bizarre anachronisms, such as the claim that the martyr-pope Clement I had founded the pre-eminence of certain local churches on the fact that the pagans had their high priests in the same localities. During the sixteenth century, Protestant ecclesiastical historians such as the Centuriatores Magdeburgienses (the Magdeburg Centuriators) criticized the forgeries in a more systematic way, although they did not yet recognize the forgeries as one whole interconnected complex. The final proof was provided by the Calvinist preacher David Blondel, who discovered that the alleged popes from the first centuries quoted extensively from authors of a much later time. In 1628, he published his findings (Pseudoisidorus et Turrianus vapulantes). Some Catholic theologians first tried to defend the genuineness of at least some of the material, but, since the nineteenth century, no serious theologian or historian has denied the falsification. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Isidorian_Decretals
The Pseudo-Isidorian collection also includes the earlier (non-Pseudo-Isidorian) forgery, the Donation of Constantine.
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]
The text, purportedly a decree of Roman Emperor Constantine I dated 30 March, in a year mistakenly said to be both that of his fourth consulate (315) and that of the consulate of Gallicanus (317), contains a detailed profession of Christian faith and a recounting of how the emperor, seeking a cure of his leprosy, was converted and baptized by Pope Sylvester I. In gratitude, he determined to bestow on the see of Peter "power, and dignity of glory, and vigour, and honour imperial", and "supremacy as well over the four principal sees, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, as also over all the churches of God in the whole earth". For the upkeep of the church of Saint Peter and that of Saint Paul, he gave landed estates "in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, Italy and the various islands". To Sylvester and his successors he also granted imperial insignia, the tiara, and "the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and the western regions".[4][5]
What may perhaps be the earliest known allusion to the Donation is in a letter of 778, in which Pope Hadrian I exhorts Charlemagne, whose father, Pepin the Younger, had initiated the sovereignty of the Popes over the Papal States, to follow Constantine's example and endow the Roman church.
The first pope to directly invoke the decree was Pope Leo IX, in a letter sent in 1054 to Michael I Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople.[3] He cited a large portion of the document, believing it genuine,[6][7] furthering the debate that would ultimately lead to the East–West Schism. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Donation was often cited in the investiture conflicts between the papacy and the secular powers in the West.[3]
During the Middle Ages, the Donation was widely accepted as authentic, although the Emperor Otto III did possibly raise suspicions of the document "in letters of gold" as a forgery, in making a gift to the See of Rome.[9] It was not until the mid-15th century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual criticism, that humanists, and eventually the papal bureaucracy, began to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa declared it to be a forgery[10][11] and spoke of it as an apocryphal work. Later, the Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla, in De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, proved the forgery with certainty.[12] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine
There are many eminent Roman Catholic historians who have testified to that fact as well as to the importance of the forgeries, especially those of Pseudo-Isidore. One such historian is Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger. He was the most renowned Roman Catholic historian of the last century, who taught Church history for 47 years as a Roman Catholic. He makes these important comments:
In the middle of the ninth century—about 845—there arose the huge fabrication of the Isidorian decretals...About a hundred pretended decrees of the earliest Popes, together with certain spurious writings of other Church dignitaries and acts of Synods, were then fabricated in the west of Gaul, and eagerly seized upon Pope Nicholas I at Rome, to be used as genuine documents in support of the new claims put forward by himself and his successors.
That the pseudo–Isidorian principles eventually revolutionized the whole constitution of the Church, and introduced a new system in place of the old—on that point there can be no controversy among candid historians.
The most potent instrument of the new Papal system was Gratian’s Decretum, which issued about the middle of the twelfth century from the first school of Law in Europe, the juristic teacher of the whole of Western Christendom, Bologna. In this work the Isidorian forgeries were combined with those of the other Gregorian (Gregory VII) writers...and with Gratia’s own additions. His work displaced all the older collections of canon law, and became the manual and repertory, not for canonists only, but for the scholastic theologians, who, for the most part, derived all their knowledge of Fathers and Councils from it. No book has ever come near it in its influence in the Church, although there is scarcely another so chokeful of gross errors, both intentional and unintentional (Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, The Pope and the Council (Boston: Roberts, 1870), pp. 76-77, 79, 115-116).In addition to the Pseudo Isidorian Decretals there were other forgeries which were successfully used for the promotion of the doctrine of papal primacy. One famous instance is that of Thomas Aquinas. In 1264 A.D. Thomas authored a work entitled Against the Errors of the Greeks. This work deals with the issues of theological debate between the Greek and Roman Churches in that day on such subjects as the Trinity, the Procession of the Holy Spirit, Purgatory and the Papacy. In his defense of the papacy Thomas bases practically his entire argument on forged quotations of Church fathers. Under the names of the eminent Greek fathers such as Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Abbott, a Latin forger had compiled a catena of quotations interspersing a number that were genuine with many that were forged which was subsequently submitted to Pope Urban IV. This work became known as the Thesaurus of Greek Fathers or Thesaurus Graecorum Patrum. In addition the Latin author also included spurious canons from early Ecumenical Councils. Pope Urban in turn submitted the work to Thomas Aquinas who used many of the forged passages in his work Against the Errors of the Greeks mistakenly thinking they were genuine. These spurious quotations had enormous influence on many Western theologians in succeeding centuries. The following is a sample of Thomas’ argumentation for the papacy using the spurious quotations from the Thesaurus: - http://www.christiantruth.com/articles/forgeries.html
Paul Johnson, educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, author of over 40 books and a popular historian, finds,
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, and actually a contemporary of Eusebius...
Orthodoxy was not established [In Egypt] until the time of Bishop Demetrius, 189-231, who set up a number of other sees and manufactured a genealogical tree for his own bishopric of Alexandria, which traces the foundation through ten mythical predecessors back to Mark, and so to Peter and Jesus...
Even in Antioch, where both Peter and Paul had been active, there seems to have been confusion until the end of the second century. Antioch completely lost their list...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. (“A History of Christianity,” pgs 53ff;
And then we have the,
The Symmachean forgeries are a sheaf of forged documents produced in the papal curia of Pope Symmachus (498—514) in the beginning of the sixth century, in the same cycle that produced the Liber Pontificalis.[1] In the context of the conflict between partisans of Symmachus and Antipope Laurentius the purpose of these libelli was to further papal pretensions of the independence of the Bishops of Rome from criticisms and judgment of any ecclesiastical tribunal, putting them above law clerical and secular by supplying spurious documents supposedly of an earlier age. "During the dispute between Pope St. Symmachus and the anti-pope Laurentius," the Catholic Encyclopedia reports, "the adherents of Symmachus drew up four apocryphal writings called the 'Symmachian Forgeries'. ... The object of these forgeries was to produce alleged instances from earlier times to support the whole procedure of the adherents of Symmachus, and, in particular, the position that the Roman bishop could not be judged by any court composed of other bishops."[2]
The most important in this group of forgeries was Silvestri constitutum, a report of a fictitious synod convoked by Pope Sylvester, giving twenty promulgated canons, among which was a prohibition of bringing a solitary accusation upon an ecclesiastic of a degree higher than the accuser's: a bishop might only be accused by seventy-two, and a pope could not be accused by anyone. Silvestri constitutum was also an early instance of the fable that Sylvester had cured Constantine the Great of leprosy with the waters of baptism, incurring the Emperor's abject gratitude, which was elaborated and credited to the point that, in greeting Pope Stephen II in 753, Pepin II dismounted to lead the Pope's horse to his palace on foot, as Constantine would have done.[4]
The second, somewhat later group centers on the figure of Sylvester, who accepts the decree of the First Council of Nicaea on the date of Easter. One of these forgeries reports a fictitious synod convoking 275 bishops in the Baths of Trajan; several canons exalt the position of the cleric.[5] -
The Symmachan forgeries reinterpreted some of the more embarrassing episodes in papal history, both real and imaginary. … How convincing these forged texts seemed in the early sixth century is unknown, but when rediscovered in later centuries, they were regarded as authentic records with unequivocal legal authority. … (Collins, “Keepers of the Keys of Heaven,” pgs 80-82).
Certainly Protestant history has some historical fiction about Rome, such as exaggerations about how many souls the RCC murdered as heretics, but Rome has their egregious forgeries which were depended upon, along with her unScriptural sword of men, to gain and maintain her position and power.