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We don't have the faintest idea who really wrote the dictatus papae or what their intention was--we have a half dozen different speculative theories. They certainly never exercised any doctrinal or ecclesial authority. Any who claims to know that they represent the position of Gregory VII is talking through his hat. They might be a papal document, but no one knows for sure, one way or another.

Through them the "Church" is not claiming anything at all because they were never promulgated by any authoritative ecclesial office--we simply don't know whether they ever got past some papal secretary's nightstand. They stand out like a sore thumb against the entire rest of Gregory VII's assertions of papal authority, which stop short of claiming any temporal power. He claims the right to depose the emperor on the basis of spiritual power. He does not claim temporal authority or power--the whole point of the Gregorian Reform was the Church's spiritual independence from control by the temporal rulers.

Innocent III is sometimes portrayed as claiming temporal authority, but I don't think he comes close. There are a number of good discussions of this by historians, including a recent reader giving the various interpretations, ed. by James Powell, if I recall correctly.

Read current scholarship on the Gregorian Reform on the dictatus papae. The best book is the massive biography by John Cowdrey a respected professor at Oxford. IT's simply titled Gregory VII. He shows that one can't build a case for anything on the dictatus papae.

At least in part, D, I was kidding; That's why I put a :) after the comment.

I appreciate the fairness of your comments, but I guess I have to disagree that the Dictatus don't represent the thinking of the likes of Gregory VII or, for that matter, of Boniface VIII and as you know, my opinion is shared by a number of Catholic writers of some note...and not particularly leftist ones at that. But whether or not they do isn't really the point, as a practical matter. The real point is that Orthodox Christians, especially theologians, believe that they do reflect a type of thinking which was perfectly acceptable in the Roman Church perhaps even to this day, certainly within the living past. I myself remember being told by one of my Sister of Mercy teachers that unless the Orthodox "submitted" to the Pope we were all bound for hell. Massive biographies by Oxford dons will do little or nothing to calm the quite justified concerns of not only Orthodox theologians, but also, and in the end more importantly, Orthodox laity.

On a micro level, by the way, I don't think the Dictatus Papae are really of much consequence. Unam Sanctam, on the other hand, has of late been subject to all sorts of revisionist writing in an attempt to make it consistent with modern Latin theology, especially in the area of the possibility of theosis outside The Church. To pretend that the likes of Boniface VIII, as some now do, was a good pope only concerned with saving souls, the role of The Church in that work and that when he spoke of submission to the pope, that meant something different in the Middle Ages, something more gentle and spiritual, than it does now is absurd. refusal to submit to Boniface VIII meant the death of 6000 people at Palestrina. Unam Sanctam was part of the pope's feud with Philip the Fair and gave a theological justification for precisely the behavior that history has condemned him for.

I must say that pretending a document like Unam Sanctam shouldn't give Orthodox Christians pause seems at best disingenuous and does the position of the Latin Church in any discussions about the proper role of the Pope no good at all.