Forged Documents and Papal Power (A Former Catholic Nun)

http://www.CatholicConcerns.com ^ | June 2002 | Mary Ann Collins

[Mrs. Don-o]

Thank you, yes! Our director (I'm not the boss) has ordered this I believe.

I'm secretly in love with Fr. Robert Barron. In a chaste old married lady kind of way... ;o)

[HarleyD]

HarleyD at #38> "No matter how many references you post, no matter how many Catholic sources you cite, it will not be believed and our Catholic friends will 1) ignore it, or 2) claim your a pagan heretic."

This despite the fact that I did not ignore anything, I addressed the false decretals issue, nor did I call anybody a "pagan heretic" --- words I have never written, and I've been posting here for 14 years.

Did I miss something?

In fairness Mrs. Don-o has always been gracious and is what I'd consider a thoughtful and honorable Catholic. She's not afraid to confront the truth and her arguments are always gracious.

However, I see nothing in my response that isn't consistent with the Church's claim as being the ONE true church. If it is the true church, then I am outside it and am a heretic. Understanding Vatican 2 states that I can still be saved, this is only if our Lord recognizes how hopelessly goofy I am (which I sure He does) and has mercy on me. Of course, the Church also states that any non-Christians can be saved just as well. So that puts me exactly outside the "true" Church with all the other non-Christians who might be saved.

If one is going to believe the Catholic Church, then everyone outside the Church is a heretic. It is embedded in their doctrine.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"If it [Catholicism] is the true church, then I am outside it and am a heretic."

Not so, HarleyD!

I'll say a little more on this tomorrow after I process my tomatoes & green beans --- yum --- but just to attend to a little definition chore: according to the Catholic Catechism:

"Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same."

Notice both adjectives.

"Obstinate" means that the correct doctrine has been explained to you, and you nevertheless persist in denial. "Post-baptismal" means that only a baptized Christian can commit heresy. It's not just denial of a true doctrine by anybody: its persistent denial, after correction, by a so-nuff baptized member of the Church (which you are, if you are baptized, no matter what your Christian denomination.)

Catholic moral theology has always distinguished between objective or material sin, and formal sin. Basically, any erroneous teaching is a heresy; but to be a heretic you'd have to be someone who willingly embraces what they know to be contrary to revealed truth.

If you hold a belief that is objectively heretical, but in your conscience before God, you think you're believing the right thing because

• your ignorance of the truth is due to your upbringing in a particular religious tradition (to which you may even be scrupulously faithful), and
• you are not morally responsible for this ignorance (you've never --- from pride or laziness or ill-will or whatever --- resisted correction)

--- then as a matter of personal OK-ness, you're blameless. This is the principle of invincible ignorance, which Catholic theology has always recognized as excusing one before God.

So, assuming you're in good faith, you're not outside the Church, AND you're prolly not a heretic, fur's I can see! So there!

More tomorrow. G'night now, HarleyD.

[metmom]

Catholic moral theology has always distinguished between objective or material sin, and formal sin. Basically, any erroneous teaching is a heresy; but to be a heretic you'd have to be someone who willingly embraces what they know to be contrary to revealed truth.

I guess then, the debate gets back to just what the standard of revealed truth is.

Me? I'm throwing my lot in with Scripture.

*Tradition* is too inherently unreliable, IMO, no matter what claims of infallibility someone makes about themselves or their organization. I do not trust word of mouth nor men who depend on it. There's simply no way of verifying that it has been passed on faithfully.

At least with Scripture, there is a long history and the documents are old and much of them has been verified with findings like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which attest to the accuracy with which they have been copied.

I know what the RCC teaches. I was raised Catholic, have Catholic relatives who are/were ordained priests, have been more than educated on the topic of *sacred tradition* by various FRoman Catholics, and simply do not find their arguments and apologetics convincing or substantially founded.

Once anyone crosses the line into speculations about things not mentioned in Scripture and starts treating them as facts, that just crosses a line I am not comfortable crossing.

[metmom]

Nor do I see the point in following teachings not found in Scripture.

The Bible contains more than enough to keep me and God busy working on me for a lifetime, and that would barely scratch the surface.

Why on earth add anything not important enough for God to include in the first place?

Do people think that the Bible isn’t long enough as it is?

BTW, I got EXACTLY one gallon of tomato sauce today. What I got from the garden EXACTLY filled the jars I had. No partial jars to deal with. WHOO HOO!!!!

[Mrs. Don-o]

Metmolm, (and you too, HarleyD) I just today stumbled upon a new word: new to me (Mrs. CyberKluz) but maybe not new to you: "StretchText". This ties in, I just realized, to our discussion about all the things, oral and written, which Our Lord has been passed down to us.

Y'all know what "hypertext" is, text displayed on the computer screen with references (hyperlinks) to other web pages you can just click and access. There's also something very similar, called StretchText, where text iself (at that same website, as written by the original author), is revealed progressively at multiple levels of detail with every click. It's analogous to a zoom-in or zoom-out.

I think I've got those terms straight. Computer masters, correct me if I'm wrong.

So what would it be like if somebody sent me, Mrs. CyberKlutz, a text with a bunch of StretchText embedded in it, and my response was, "I've got enough to deal with, with just the plain simple page here. I've got my hands full just trying to rightly interpret and apply that. I'm not messing with any StretchText or hypertext, no-sir-ee!"

I would be very unwise, because I'd be ignoring stuff put into the webpage by the original author, quite precisely to guide me in interpreting and applying the original text.

This is how you can see Tradition and Magisterium. Not in opposition to Scripture, not in competition, not as added speculation or ornamentation, but as the original composer's authorized key to interpretation.

To back up and clarify a little, it's not a contest of "Scripture vs Tradition," because Scripture already is Tradition. It's written Tradition. Tradition is what is handed over ("tra-ductus") to us from our Lord and the Apostles, whether written or orally. LIke this:

Tradition
Written | Oral

There's actually a huge area of overlap there, because all of written Tradition (Scripture) was originally Oral Tradition (Preaching and Teaching) --- as you know, St. Paul was telling people to receive the Gospel before any of the Gospels were written.

Anyhow, how can we be solid and sure in picking up an early A.D. source (say, some teaching of Bishop Ignatius of Antioch) and say it constitutes real, genuine "Oral Tradition" from Our Lord Himself? The very same way we know the Gospels are real and genuine:

• by their connection to the Apostles (here I'm speaking of the "Twelve" plus Paul),
• by their genuineness as based on the usual literary detective work (How old is this manuscript? How/from whom did we come to possess it? Is it authentic as to its vocabulary, grammar, style, even physical composition --- the way it was made? Is it quoted or attested to by other early Christian authors? --- etc.), and
• by the document's widespread reception and acceptance by the early Church.

A good read: Ignatius of Antioch

That doesn't make it Scripture-with-a-capital-S. That makes it "Oral Tradition," inasmuch as Ignatius heard the oral preaching --- the "tradition" -- directly from his teacher St. John, and later, naturally, wrote things down.

So there's the very small number of writings from the men called "Apostolic Fathers"(Link) --- men who were direct, hands-on, first-generation disciples of the Apostles.

So it's a kind of StretchLink --- since what they got orally from the Apostles is just as authoritative as what they got in writing from the Apostles.

Significantly, in his Pastoral Epistles, every time St. Paul urges his new Christians to "hear" or "follow" or "obey" or "cling to" the Gospel which had been preached to them, he is urging them to hear, follow, obey, cling to, Oral Tradition --- since all of his general epistles were preached, dictated, then written, then read aloud and received as authentic by the Christian community, before a single Gospel existed in written form.

Now, I don't expect you to immediately cop to this and say "Oh, I get it! Now I believe in Sacred Tradition too!" I just want you to see how Catholic see it --- whether you agree or not --- that these, too, are StretchLinks deriving their certain authority from the original Authors, i.e. from the Apostles of Jesus Christ, and from the Holy Spirit.

P.S. That's the first time I ever used that "StretchText" and "hypertext" analogy. Does it work? (Not meaning, are you totally convinced, but is it totally understandable conceptually?)

Ears perked.

[roamer_1]

I think your view, roamer_1, shows a deeply understandable yearning for a pristine past and a present free from the stains of historic, if not Original, sin. Who has not been made heartsick by history?

Ah, but it is much, much more than that, Mrs. Don-o - I expect error in historical accounting, and I am far less starry-eyed than you seem to believe. But, this tradition that y'all claim to hold as equal to the Word of YHWH must (in order to maintain that assumed equality) be held to a much higher standard than mere history... And that is not to say that the standard of historical criticism should be a low-hung bar either. If history must be held to an exceptionally high standard in order to trust it's reference, then tradition must be scrutinized even more - By an order of magnitude.

How then can one compare in force the authority of a body of work which admittedly contains error with the Scriptures which we all hold to be inerrant? That such error exists (be it in whole, or by secondary or tertiary means) is proved herein and elsewhere to be profound and broadly seeded. One cannot tell me that your tradition holds the weight of (or surpasses) Scripture while blithely sweeping such error under the rug.

It is wholly evident to me that YHWH hates the leaven, and that it is to be purged completely (to the smallest of grains as the preparation for Passover shows us). If the leaven is already baked into the bread, then throw the bread out! It is that example that I lean upon, perhaps more than any other thing, when it comes to the things of God, and especially where the record is concerned...

And I would take exception to your position that forgeries (or psuedepigrapha, unattributed works) are withheld from the Deposit of the Faith, or Divine and Natural Law. As examples, one will find, if one truly researches the succession from Peter, that one cannot make the case without reliance upon spurious works (if even then)... The same for the concept of the Assumption of Mary. And I could go on and on.

If one is to dispute the concept of sola-scriptura, and that the inerrant Word is the sole and final authoritative proof, then one must no doubt meet that burden with a proof that is equally inerrant and utterly bullet-proof. The evidences as they are before me do not meet that standard in the least.

[metmom]

I am what another FReeper referred to as a technotard.

You’re above my pay grade with computers.

I can FReep, do email, check out you-tube videos, burn discs into my iTunes library, and do an occasional Open office document.

[metmom]

Excellent analysis.

Ping to post 167 by roamer_1.

[CynicalBear]

Very well said!

[Lera]

Well said!

[RobbyS]

But who decides what counts as the written Word of God? And what those words mean?

[Mrs. Don-o]

"But, this tradition that y'all claim to hold as equal to the Word of YHWH must (in order to maintain that assumed equality) be held to a much higher standard than mere history..."

This is the key to the misunderstanding right here. We were talking about the development of Canon law via the jurist Gratian, who inadvertently included some forged papers from the papal archives in his collected documents. Papal archives in general, Canon Law in particular, are not "part of the Sacred Tradition which Catholics hold as equal to the Word of YHWH."

On the contrary, these are human documents and human laws. If you mistakenly thought Catholics held them as dogma, or if you were expecting them to be evaluated on some level far superior to that of other human documents, you were much misled. And this is a stumble on a very basic issue: the nature and significance of the papers you were studying.

It would be like this: say your father filed tax returns with the IRS for every year from 1958 to 2000, almost all of them satisfactory to the IRS. But say in 1960 his tax papers had substantial errors in them, not because of intentional fraud or negligence on his part, but because his tax preparer found that by intricately falsifying some figures he could embezzle a tidy sum of money for himself.

Say, years down the line, years after the death of the dodgy tax preparer, your father defended the figures because he didn't immediately grasp where the errors were, but his tangle with the IRS got him in a lot of trouble, landed him in court, generated horrible publicity, ruined his nascent political career -- AND he finally realized where the error was, declared it himself, and did what he could to make it right. You would not regard him as crook or as dispicable. You'd see he had defended a fraud, but only because of human error: damaging, but not (on your father's part) morally degraded.

It would be quite otherwise if he were a polygamist who had falsified all of personal ID as well as his marriage certificate. That situation would involve serious moral turpitude on his part, and would be far worse "by an order of magnitude."

"How then can one compare in force the authority of a body of work which admittedly contains error with the Scriptures which we all hold to be inerrant?"

One can't, and the Catholic Church doesn't. The whole concept of equating Canon Law with Sacred Tradition is erroneous.

"If the leaven is already baked into the bread, then throw the bread out! It is that example that I lean upon, perhaps more than any other thing, when it comes to the things of God, and especially where the record is concerned..."

Once again, your distress is triggered by a category error. If some element of Sacred Tradition or a de Fide dogma were really and truly in error --- say, the authenticity of the Four Gospels, the canon of Scripture, the Christology expressed in the Nicene Creed, the foundations of Holy Orders, the essential elements of the Liturgy --- if these were wrong, then the Catholic Church would be shown to be pervasively and irredeemably false.

But this is not what you are saying when you speak of false papers being inserted into the 9th century archive of papal correspondence, or Gratian's three-centuries-later inclusion of these forgeries into the much bigger collections of letters which formed the basis of Medieval Canon Law. Not a jot of that is Sacred Tradition, properly so called.

Do you understand that?

"And I would take exception to your position that forgeries (or psuedepigrapha, unattributed works) are withheld from the Deposit of the Faith, or Divine and Natural Law. As examples, one will find, if one truly researches the succession from Peter, that one cannot make the case without reliance upon spurious works (if even then)..."

The succession stands, even if we remove the forgeries as we must, and sink them in the deep blue sea. You may apply the same principles that you would apply to Scriptural genealogies: unexplained lacunae do not make the whole series false. In a given genealogy you may have a man described as a father who is in fact a great-grandfather: several generations are missing from the record. For instance, Matthew 1:8 omits Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah, going directly from Joram to Uzziah. But that doesn't mean that there was "nobody" between Joram and Uzziah, or that the whole thing is a mythological genealogy. This is not the case at all. Some records simply have to contain ellipses to show that an ancestor does have a true descendant, a true successor, a couple generations down the line.

You say you could "go on and on," and so could I. Won't do it right now, though.

Suffice it to say that many people (both Catholic and non-Catholic) have wrongly conflated all of the Church's archives, correspondences and papers with "Sacred Tradition." Similarly, many have taken an absurdly inflated idea of papal infallibility (e.g. extending it to mere papal theological opinion) and in doing so have made a grand confusion of the spaghetti pot.

I am convinced by my own evaluation of evidence, that the Church, in her dogmas, has her spaghetti straight.

Through the providential mercy of God.

[count-your-change]

Just a couple of thoughts here. The claims made of being taught first or second hand by the apostles lends little to the credence of the persons teaching since as Paul notes there were men in the congregations that met him and read his letters yet held him in contempt and sought to elevate themselves over others.

“One cannot tell me that your tradition holds the weight of (or surpasses) Scripture while blithely sweeping such error under the rug.”

They can try! Note this comment from the Catholic Encyclopedia on the subject of relics:

“Still, it would be presumptuous in such cases to blame the action of ecclesiastical authority in permitting the continuance of a cult which extends back into remote antiquity. On the one hand no one is constrained to pay homage to the relic, and supposing it to be in fact spurious, no dishonour is done to God by the continuance of an error which has been handed down in perfect good faith for many centuries. On the other hand the practical difficulty of pronouncing a final verdict upon the authenticity of these and similar relics must be patent to all. Each investigation would be an affair of much time and expense, while new discoveries might at any moment reverse the conclusions arrived at. Further, devotions of ancient date deeply rooted in the heart of the peasantry cannot be swept away without some measure of scandal and popular disturbance. To create this sensation seems unwise unless the proof of spuriousness is so overwhelming as to amount to certainty. Hence there is justification for the practice of the Holy See in allowing the cult of certain doubtful ancient relics to continue. Meanwhile, much has been done by quietly allowing many items in some of the most famous collections of relics to drop out of sight or by gradually omitting much of the solemnity which formerly surrounded the exposition of these doubtful treasures.”.

What is being said here except that error is acceptable if it's popular and if uprooting it might upset the peasants!

Now there's the standard for tradition, none of this “worshiping in spirit and truth”.

[CynicalBear]

I have to disagree with the comparison. It seems to me the anology would work just the opposite of what you describe. The “stretchtext” would lead from anyone writing about scripture back to the original in scripture. It would ultimately lead back to the original text as written by the apostles. That is after all what Sola Scripture actually means. It was a good analogy but just needs turned around!

[CynicalBear]

>> BTW, I got EXACTLY one gallon of tomato sauce today.<<

Oh sure! Rub it in. I have barely gotten enough eating tomatoes this summer out of 30 plants.

Actually, I’m happy you are doing much better with your tomatoes.

[metmom]

A gallon isn’t a lot for what I CAN get. In 2010, i got GALLONS. Haven’t had a year like that since. We’ve been fighting blight and dry summers since then.

Sorry your tomatoes aren’t doing better. They’re a great crop to can up for prepping.

[CynicalBear]

>>But who decides what counts as the written Word of God?<<

The Old Testament was set by the Jews and Jesus and the apostles attestation. The New Testament was written from first hand account and the promise from Jesus that the Holy Spirit would “bring to their remembrance” the things that were taught and done. No one else had the promise.

>>And what those words mean?>>>p> 1 Corinthians 2:13 Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. 14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15 But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. 16 For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? but we have the mind of Christ.

[sasportas]

Iscool, you have some very informative links. Especially the one by the Nazarene Church. Not just the Pseudo-Isidorian forgery, this reveal Rome has a VERY long history of forgeries, much of which I wasn’t aware of. Thanks for your post.

I would suggest everybody read Iscool’s Nazarene Church link. [I’m not a member of the Nazarene Church denomination, by the way, neither is Iscool]

[Iscool]

Ignatius is the bedrock of the Catholic religion...The forgeries go back to Ignatius and maybe further back...Depending on what history you read, there never was a single, all authoritative pope...The Isidorian Decretals provided the lies of a fake history that convinced the secular as well as a portion of the religion to buy into it...And they still teach that history today...