Forged Documents and Papal Power (A Former Catholic Nun)

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What we now call popes were originally bishops of Rome (one bishop among brother bishops from other cities). Then they became popes, with power over the entire Church. Then they became so powerful that they were able to depose kings and emperors. They became so powerful that they were able to force kings to use their secular might to enforce the Inquisition, which was conducted by Catholic priests and monks. In 1870, the Pope was declared to be infallible. The process of increasing papal power was influenced by forged documents which changed people’s perception of the history of the papacy and of the Church.

I’m just going to briefly summarize some information about these forgeries. At the end of this paper is a link to an on-line article which gives detailed historical information.

One of the most famous forgeries is the “Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals,” which were written around 845 A.D. (They are also known as the “False Decretals”.) They consist of 115 documents which were supposedly written by early popes. [Note 1]

The “Catholic Encyclopedia” admits that these are forgeries. It says that the purpose of these forged documents was to enable the Church to be independent of secular power, and to prevent the laity from ruling the Church. [Note 2 gives the address of an on-line article.] In other words, their purpose was to increase the power of the Pope and the Catholic Church.

In addition to documents which were total forgeries, genuine documents were altered. One hundred twenty-five genuine documents had forged material added to them, which increased the power of the Pope. Many early documents were changed to say the opposite of what they had originally said. [Note 3]

One of the forgeries is a letter which was falsely attributed to Saint Ambrose. It said that if a person does not agree with the Holy See, then he or she is a heretic. [Note 4] This is an example of how papal power was promoted by fraudulently claiming the authority of highly respected Early Fathers.

Another famous forgery from the ninth century was “The Donation of Constantine”. It claimed that Emperor Constantine gave the western provinces of the Roman Empire to the Bishop of Rome. The Pope used it to claim authority in secular matters. [Note 5]

When Greek Christians tried to discuss issues with the Church in Rome, the popes often used forged documents to back their claims. This happened so frequently that for 700 years the Greeks referred to Rome as “the home of forgeries”. [Note 6]

For three hundred years, the “Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals” and other forgeries were used by Roman Popes to claim authority over the Church in the East. The Patriarch of Constantinople rejected these false claims of primacy. This resulted in the separation of the Orthodox Church from the Roman Catholic Church. [Note 7 gives addresses of on-line articles.]

In the middle of the twelfth century, a monk named Gratian wrote the “Decretum,” which became the basis for Canon Law (the legal system for running the Roman Catholic Church). It contained numerous quotations from forged documents. Gratian drew many of his conclusions from those quotations. Gratian quoted 324 passages which were supposedly written by popes of the first four centuries. Of those passages, only eleven are genuine. The other 313 quotations are forgeries. [Note 8]

In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas wrote the “Summa Theologica” and numerous other works. His writings are the foundation for scholastic theology. Aquinas used Gratian’s “Decretum” for quotations from church fathers and early popes. [Note 9] Aquinas also used forged documents which he thought were genuine. [Note 10]

The importance of Thomas Aquinas’ theology can be seen in the encyclical of Pope Pius X on the priesthood. In 1906, Pius said that in their study of philosophy, theology, and Scripture, men studying for the priesthood should follow the directions given by the popes and the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. [This papal encyclical is available on-line. Note 11 gives addresses.]

William Webster is the author of “The Church of Rome at the Bar of History”. (I recommend this book.) His web site has an article entitled “Forgeries and the Papacy: The Historical Influence and Use of Forgeries in Promotion of the Doctrine of the Papacy”. The article gives detailed information about the “Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals” and other forged documents, showing their influence on the papacy and on the Catholic Church. Four quotations from his article are below. (They are used by permission.)

“In the middle of the ninth century, a radical change began in the Western Church, which dramatically altered the Constitution of the Church, and laid the ground work for the full development of the papacy. The papacy could never have emerged without a fundamental restructuring of the Constitution of the Church and of men’s perceptions of the history of that Constitution. As long as the true facts of Church history were well known, it would serve as a buffer against any unlawful ambitions. However, in the 9th century, a literary forgery occurred which completely revolutionized the ancient government of the Church in the West. This forgery is known as the “Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals,” written around 845 A.D. The “Decretals” are a complete fabrication of Church history. They set forth precedents for the exercise of sovereign authority of the popes over the universal Church prior to the fourth century and make it appear that the popes had always exercised sovereign dominion and had ultimate authority even over Church Councils.”

“The historical facts reveal that the papacy was never a reality as far as the universal Church is concerned. 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 Dollinger. He was the most renowned Roman Catholic historian of the last century, who taught Church history for 47 years as a Roman Catholic.” [Webster quotes extensitely from Dollinger.]

“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…. These spurious quotations had enormous influence on many Western theologians in succeeding centuries.”

“The authority claims of Roman Catholicism ultimately devolve upon the institution of the papacy. The papacy is the center and source from which all authority flows for Roman Catholicism. Rome has long claimed that this institution was established by Christ and has been in force in the Church from the very beginning. But the historical record gives a very different picture. This institution was promoted primarily through the falsification of historical fact through the extensive use of forgeries as Thomas Aquinas’ apologetic for the papacy demonstrates. Forgery is its foundation.”

I strongly encourage you to read William Webster’s article. It has an abundance of valuable historical information. The address of the article is:

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[1] William Webster, “The Church of Rome at the Bar of History” (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1995), pages 62-63. Webster is a former Catholic.

Peter de Rosa, “Vicars of Christ” (Dublin, Ireland: Poolbeg Press, 1988, 2000), pages 58-61, 174, 208. De Rosa is a Catholic, and a former Catholic priest. He was able to do historical research in the Vatican Archives.

Paul Johnson, “A History of Christianity” (New York: A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, 1976, 1995), page 195. Johnson is a Catholic and a prominent historian.

[2] “Benedict Levita” in the “Catholic Encyclopedia”. [Benedict Levita is the pseudonym of the author of the “Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals”.]

[7] Orthodox Christian Information Center, “The False Decretals of Isidore”. An excerpt from “The Papacy” by Abbee Guette. The author was a devout Catholic and a historian. As a result of his historical research about the papacy, he eventually joined the Orthodox Church.

“The Great Schism of 1054”. This is a sermon given at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist,in Washington, D.C.

[10] William Webster, “Forgeries and the papacy: The Historical Influence and Use of Forgeries in Promotion of the Doctrine of the Papacy”. This gives detailed accounts of Aquinas’ use of forged documents which he wrongly believed to be genuine.

[11] Pius X, “Pieni l’animo” (“On the Clergy in Italy”), July 28, 1906. (See paragraph 6.)

In the case of the Papacy, one won’t find any theology on the Primacy of Rome in the early church. In fact, the testimony of the Fathers on where Peter even was and when is quite divided amongst them, and contradictory to the scripture account.

“We read in the Chronicle of Eusebius, at the year 43, that Peter, after founding the Church of Antioch, was sent to Rome, where he preached the Gospel for twenty-five years, and was Bishop of that city. But this part of the Chronicle does not exist in the Greek, nor in the Armenian, and it is supposed to have been one of the additions made by Jerome. Eusebius does not say the same in any other part of his writings, though he mentions St. Peter’s going to Rome in the reign of Claudius: but Jerome tells us that he came in the second year of this emperor, and held the See twenty-five years. On the other hand, Origen, who is quoted by Eusebius himself, says that Peter went to Rome towards the end of his life: and Lactantius places it in the reign of Nero, and adds that he suffered martyrdom not long after.”
http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2010/07/did-eusebius-say-peter-was-bishop-of.html

Now it does not appear that either Peter or Paul founded the church in Rome at all, since all the Biblical evidence points to believers already being in Rome, without any mention of their founding pastor. If it were an Apostle who had founded the church in Rome, it is illogical that Paul would not have at least mentioned him or wrote to him if he were the head of all the churches. This is what the Roman Catholic Joseph Fitzmyer concedes here:

“…Paul never hints in Romans that he knows that Peter has worked in Rome or founded the Christian church there before his planned visit (cf. 15:20-23). If he refers indirectly to Peter as among the “superfine apostles” who worked in Corinth (2 Cor 11:4-5), he says nothing like that about Rome in this letter. Hence the beginnings of the Roman Christian community remain shrouded in mystery. Compare 1 Thess 3:2-5; 1 Cor 3:5-9; and Col 1:7 and 4:12-13 for more or less clear references to founding apostles of other locales. Hence there is no reason to think that Peter spent any major portion of time in Rome before Paul wrote his letter, or that he was the founder of the Roman church or the missionary who first brought Christianity to Rome. For it seems highly unlikely that Luke, if he knew that Peter had gone to Rome and evangelized that city, would have omitted all mention of it in Acts.” [Source: Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., Romans, A New Translation with introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday, 1993), p. 30].

If what Jerome wrote of Eusebius is correct, then Peter would have been in Rome when Paul had written the epistle to the Romans, which is reckoned to have been written around 58AD. When Paul does write to them, he writes only to the members of the church, some by name, but none about its reigning pastor who was supposedly the head of the church.

Not even the supposed successor of Peter, Clement (or the epistle that has his name) is any reference made either to the primacy of Peter (he is instead listed with the other Apostles as fellow workers) or to his own primacy as Pope over the church!

Ingatius, in his letter to Polycarp, writes to his fellow Bishop greeting him thus: “to Polycarp, Bishop of the Church of the Smyrnæans, or rather, who has, as his own bishop, God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Ignatius, Epistle to Polycarp).

Now this cannot be so if the Pope is the “perpetual” head of the church, whom all local Bishops must submit to. In Ignatius’ letter to the Romans, he does not even write to or mention its Bishop, even though he had written to the Bishop of every church he had before written to.

In Irenaeus, deeper into the second century, builds the church of Rome on Peter and Paul, whom he writes ordained Bishops of their own, and not founded upon the authority of only one of them.

Even into the 6th or 7th centuries, when the idea of the Primacy of Peter was more developed, was it even defined in the same way that Rome does today.

According to the Catechism, the Roman Bishop is:

882 ... the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful.”402 “For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered.”403

883 “The college or body of bishops has no authority unless united with the Roman Pontiff, Peter’s successor, as its head.” As such, this college has “supreme and full authority over the universal Church; but this power cannot be exercised without the agreement of the Roman Pontiff.”404

It was this same idea of “General Father” or a ‘Universal Bishop” that Gregory condemned in the then Bishop of Constantinople who had taken the title Universal Bishop:

“Consider, I pray you, that in this rash presumption the peace of the whole Church is disturbed, and that it is in contradiction to the grace that is poured out on all in common; in which grace doubtless you yourself wilt have power to grow so far as you determine with yourself to do so. And you will become by so much the greater as you restrain yourself from the usurpation of a proud and foolish title: and you will make advance in proportion as you are not bent on arrogation by derogation of your brethren. Wherefore, dearest brother, with all your heart love humility, through which the concord of all the brethren and the unity of the holy universal Church may be preserved. Certainly the apostle Paul, when he heard some say, I am of Paul, I of Apollos, but I of Christ 1 Corinthians 1:13, regarded with the utmost horror such dilaceration of the Lord’s body, whereby they were joining themselves, as it were, to other heads, and exclaimed, saying, Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul (ib.)? If then he shunned the subjecting of the members of Christ partially to certain heads, as if beside Christ, though this were to the apostles themselves, what will you say to Christ, who is the Head of the universal Church, in the scrutiny of the last judgment, having attempted to put all his members under yourself by the appellation of Universal? Who, I ask, is proposed for imitation in this wrongful title but he who, despising the legions of angels constituted socially with himself, attempted to start up to an eminence of singularity, that he might seem to be under none and to be alone above all? Who even said, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of heaven: I will sit upon the mount of the testament, in the sides of the North: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High Isaiah 14:13.”

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360205018.htm

It wasn’t until one of Gregory’s successors, Boniface III, that the Roman Bishop petitioned the emperor for the title of Universal that they enjoy today.

Some Catholics can read this letter and say that Gregory only condemned the title, but not the power they claim he still possessed. However, there are other instances where Gregory could have embraced his power as “universal” Bishop of the entire church. While at this time the idea of the “Primacy of Peter” was in vogue, yet this same primacy was not translated to a supremacy over the entire church. And, in fact, there wasn’t just one person who held the “throne” of Peter; according to Gregory, it was held by one Apostolic see ruled by divine authority by THREE separate Bishops, which is that of Antioch, Alexandria and Rome. Here is the letter in full, but first I am going to quote the RCC abuse of it:

The link to the whole letter first
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360207040.htm

Now here are the Roman quotations of this letter, wherein they assert that Gregory is a champion of the Primacy of Rome. Take special note of the clever use of ellipses:

Pope Gregory I

“Your most sweet holiness, [Bishop Eulogius of Alexandria], has spoken much in your letter to me about the chair of Saint Peter, prince of the apostles, saying that he himself now sits on it in the persons of his successors. And indeed I acknowledge myself to be unworthy . . . I gladly accepted all that has been said, in that he has spoken to me about Peter’s chair, who occupies Peter’s chair. And, though special honor to myself in no wise delights me . . . who can be ignorant that holy Church has been made firm in the solidity of the prince of the apostles, who derived his name from the firmness of his mind, so as to be called Peter from petra. And to him it is said by the voice of the Truth, ‘To you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven’ [Matt. 16:19]. And again it is said to him, ‘And when you are converted, strengthen your brethren’ [Luke 22:32]. And once more, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me? Feed my sheep’ [John 21:17]” (Letters 40 [A.D. 597]).

http://www.catholic.com/tracts/the-authority-of-the-pope-part-ii

“Who does not know that the holy Church is founded on the solidity of the Chief Apostle, whose name expressed his firmness, being called Peter from Petra (Rock)?...Though there were many Apostles, only the See of the Prince of the Apostles...received supreme authority in virtue of its very principate.” (Letter to the Patriarch Eulogius of Alexandria, Ep. 7)

http://credo.stormloader.com/Ecumenic/gregory.htm

I provide their versions of the quotations only to highlight for you the parts they omit. And, really, there is no reason for them to omit them. The lines they remove are small sentences, and then they continue quoting right after they finish. It’s quite an embarrassing display!

In this letter, Gregory is specifically attributing to the Bishops of Alexandria and Antioch the “Chair of Peter” and its authority that they bestowed upon him. In the first quotation, the Romans omit the sentence which says: “And, though special honour to myself in no wise delights me, [they omit here] yet I greatly rejoiced because you, most holy ones, have given to yourselves what you have bestowed upon me. [They rebegin here]” After telling them about the “special honor” that is respectively given to both parties, Gregory immediately goes into a discussion on what that special honor is... which is the authority of Peter they all enjoy:

“Wherefore though there are many apostles, yet with regard to the principality itself the See of the Prince of the apostles alone has grown strong in authority, which in three places is the See of one. For he himself exalted the See in which he deigned even to rest and end the present life. He himself adorned the See to which he sent his disciple as evangelist. He himself established the See in which, though he was to leave it, he sat for seven years. Since then it is the See of one, and one See, over which by Divine authority three bishops now preside, whatever good I hear of you, this I impute to myself. If you believe anything good of me, impute this to your merits, since we are one in Him Who says, That they all may be one, as You, Father, art in me, and I in you that they also may be one in us John 17:21.”

Notice how different this reads when one does not omit what the Romans omit! Gregory declares that the See of Peter is one see... but in THREE places, over which THREE Bishops preside, which is Rome, Antioch and Alexandria, the latter of which he was now writing to.

So while the Romans insist that the Primacy of Peter refers to the Bishop of Rome, Gregory applies the Primacy of Peter to ALL the major Bishops of the See. They are, in effect, ALL the Church of Peter, having received the succession from him and possess his chair and authority.

And Gregory, of course, isn’t alone in this. Theodoret references the same belief when he places the “throne of Peter” under the Bishop of Antioch:

“Dioscorus, however, refuses to abide by these decisions; he is turning the See of the blessed Mark upside down; and these things he does though he perfectly well knows that the Antiochene (of Antioch) metropolis possesses the throne of the great Peter, who was teacher of the blessed Mark, and first and coryphæus (head of the choir) of the chorus of the apostles.” Theodoret - Letter LXXXVI - To Flavianus, Bishop of Constantinople.

In fact, what I have presented here are the principle arguments of the Eastern Orthodox, the other guys who claim to be the One true Holy and Apostolic church of God on Earth.

So we see that the history of the Romanist church his hardly indisputable, but is really built on ignorance of church history and forgeries.

Feeling particularly scholarly this afternoon, my friends? Good.

Your underlying assumption, Iscool, is that all the Petrine theories referenced in the Pseudo-Isidore Decretals (PID), originated in the PID or gain their sole or principal support there. This is not the case.

Every time we in the FR Religion Forum have these discussions of Catholic doctrine, I urge both Catholics and non-Catholics to make reference to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Rarely have I seen people do this, for reasons I cannot fathom. Anyhow, if you want an overview on the papacy, do try the Catechism, for instance here (Link) --- the footnotes will give you some primary sources to chew on. I assure you they do not rest --- not even a molecule's worth --- upon dodgy 9th century Frankish Dan-Ratherisms.

As to the (I believe it was sasportas') question about whether Pope Nicholas I lied about the forgeries having been in the papal archives for centuries, it looks like he himself was victim of his own archivist's misrepresentations. According to historian Warren Carroll, the PID were first brought to Rome by a Bishop Rothad, who had been deposed from his See of Soissons in Frankish territory by a good canonist, the Archbishop Hincmar of Reims; Rothad appealed his deposition to the Pope.

Rothad brought these documents with him to bolster his appeal (whether he knew they were forgeries or not, Carroll doesn't speculate, but they were apparently supplied to him via his Frankish allies); but Pope Nicholas' unscrupulous librarian, Anastasius (a former antipope) accepted them eagerly and uncritically, and represented them to Pope Nicholas as being of great antiquity.

According to Warren Carroll:

"They were used extensively in a letter to the West Frankish bishops (probably drafted by Anastasius) explaining and justifying Pope Nicholas' order of January 865 restoring Bishop Rothad to his see of Soissons. However, the main purpose of the 'false decretals' was not to strengthen Papal primacy, which was already well established, but to provide the appearance of more canonical safeguards for bishops. The 'false decretals' did not, therefore, play a major role in gaining public acceptance of Papal governance of the Church.

I'm not going to include Carroll's primary footnotes, many of which go back to Latin, French, and German sources (unfortunately, I don't read these languages) but his one English source is, voila, the Catholic Encyclopedia, which has already been referenced by both bkaycee and myself.

Another good source is the Wikipedia article on Pope Nicholas I, here (Link), which in turn references sources in German.

One enlightening detail from Wiki:

A question that is important in judging the integrity of this pope is whether he made use of the forged pseudo-Isidorian papal decretals. After exhaustive investigation, Schrörs has decided that the pope was neither acquainted with the pseudo-Isidorian collection in its entire extent, nor did he make use of its individual parts. He perhaps had a general knowledge of the false decretals, but did not base his view of the law upon them and owed his knowledge of them solely to documents that came to him from the Frankish Empire.
Footnote: [Schrörs, "Papst Nikolaus I. und Pseudo-Isidor" in Historisches Jahrbuch, XXV (1904), 1 sqq.; Idem, "Die pseudoisidorische 'Exceptio spolii' bei Papst Nikolaus I" in Historisches Jahrbuch, XXVI (1905), 275 sqq.].

There, now we all know a whole lot more about Frankish forgeries of the 9th century Carolingian period.

I did, by the way, make the effort to digest a whole lot of material to write this in reasonably brief summary form.

Please spare me any more long cut-and-pastes. Please. I still have my dishes, my garden, and my yet-to-be-scrubbed bathroom awaiting me. I've just given you all I can constructively offer. Tolle, lege.

The main principles Gratian labored to set forth ---the necessary independence of the Christian Church and its mission from domination by secular politics; the Church's right, as its own society, to appoint clergy, set standards of discipline, convene its own councils and synods, and conduct itself according to its own constitutions; the whole principle of due process within the Church --- are not, or should not be, controversial to any Protestant, nor to any religious group whatsoever.

If those were the only reasons for the collective invention of the Decretals - that of the independence of the Christian church from secular rules - you may have a valid point. But we know that these forged documents were used for centuries to further the myth of the establishment of the Papacy starting with the Apostle Peter and, in turn, the authority and power in both the temporal as well as spiritual realm for ALL of Christendom for the Pope of Rome.

Does this mean that the papacy per se was based on fraud? By no means. The papacy is not a matter of land and political claims. Does this mean that the Catholic doctrines on faith and morals were, for centuries, in error because of these forgeries? Not at all. There is not one dogma of the Catholic Church which is based on forged documents.

Actually, it does! From The Historical Influence and Use of Forgeries in Promotion of the Doctrine of the Papacy :

The authority claims of Roman Catholicism ultimately devolve upon the institution of the papacy. The papacy is the center and source from which all authority flows for Roman Catholicism. Rome has long claimed that this institution was established by Christ and has been in force in the Church from the very beginning. But the historical record gives a very different picture. This institution was promoted primarily through the falsification of historical fact through the extensive use of forgeries as Thomas Aquinas' apologetic for the papacy demonstrates. Forgery is its foundation. As an institution it was a much later development in Church history, beginning with the Gregorian reforms of pope Gregory VII in the 11th century and was restricted completely to the West. The Eastern Chruch never accepted the false claims of the Roman Church and refused to submit to its insistence that the Bishop of Rome was supreme ruler of the Church. This they knew was not true to the historical record and was a perversion of the true teaching of Scripture, the papal exegesis of which was not taught by the Church fathers.

Dr. Aristeides Papadakis is an Orthodox historian and Professor of Byzantine history at the University of Maryland. He gives the following analysis of the Eastern Church’s attitude towards the claims of the bishops of Rome especially as they were formulated in the 11th century Gregorian reforms. He points out that on the basis of the exegesis of scripture and the facts of history, the Eastern Church has consistently rejected the papal claims of Rome:

The Byzantine indictment against Rome also had a strong historical component. A major reason why Orthodox writers were unsympathetic to the Roman restatement of primacy was precisely because it was so totally lacking in historical precedent. Granted that by the twelfth century papal theorists had become experts in their ability to circumvent the inconvenient facts of history. And yet, the Byzantines were ever ready to hammer home the theme that the historical evidence was quite different. Although the Orthodox may not have known that Gregorian teaching was in part drawn from the forged decretals of pseudo–Isidore (850’s), they were quite certain that it was not based on catholic tradition in either its historical or canonical form. On this score, significantly, modern scholarship agrees with the Byzantine analysis. As it happens, contemporary historians have repeatedly argued that the universal episcopacy claimed by the eleventh–century reformers would have been rejected by earlier papal incumbents as obscenely blasphemous (to borrow the phrase of a recent scholar). The title ‘universal’ which was advanced formally at the time was actually explicitly rejected by earlier papal giants such as Gregory I. To be brief, modern impartial scholarship is reasonably certain that the conventional conclusion which views the Gregorians as defenders of a consistently uniform tradition is largely fiction. ‘The emergence of a papal monarchy from the eleventh century onwards cannot be represented as the realization of a homogenous development, even within the relatively closed circle of the western, Latin, Church’ (R.A. Marcus, From Augustine to Gregory the Great (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983), p. 355). It has been suggested that the conviction that papatus (a new term constructed on the analogy of episcopatus in the eleventh century) actually represented a rank or an order higher than that of bishop, was a radical revision of Church structure and government. The discontinuity was there and to dismiss it would be a serious oversight (Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s, 1994), pp. 158-160, 166-167).

To claim that this is much to do about nothing as if everyone now knows not to quote from these false documents and that, anyway, none of the Catholic Church's doctrines on faith and morals are affected, is simply not the case. The very principle that the Pope is "infallible" on matters of faith and morals is called into question. When you begin at the very authority of the office, then ALL the proclamations that followed are called into question. This was probably the MAJOR point of conflict with the Reformers and, before them, with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

There is no denying that many of the doctrines which the Catholic Church holds to today ARE the same Christian doctrines held by the majority of ALL Christians and which have a clear Scriptural basis. But, when Rome stepped away from the need for a Scriptural warrant and invented dogmas that could not be proved by Scripture and which had no antiquity nor unanimous consent of the fathers, they demanded the right to do so anyway based upon the now-proven false basis for that authority. If there IS no early Papacy, no universal recognition of authority to the Pope of Rome, no ancient history that establishes the Apostles built it into the church, then the very foundation of the Catholic Church collapses because it is built upon the human rock of Peter instead of the TRUE Rock, which is Jesus Christ the Lord. The Christians in the churches of Rome are equal to all the other local churches throughout the Christian world. No one bishop has supremacy over them all. I believe that the New Testament example of that is the one that is STILL in effect today.

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