“Familiar with the Pseudo–Isidorian Decretals,”
Yep. more so than you, I am sure.
“The Donation of Constantine”
Yep, again, more so than you, I am sure.
“and the Liber Pontificalis?”
Yep, again more so than you, I am sure.
“Want to talk about lies?”
Sure. Why not? Here’s why I am not worried. Whereas Protestant anti-Catholics can be exposed in this thread, none of the documents you mentioned have anything to do with anyone even alive today. Also, and I would be willing to bet money you don’t know this, but you’re not even citing what you probably think you are citing. Take the Donation of Constantine, for instance. Most historians believe, and with good reason and documentary evidence, that it was written by the Franks trying to prove a political point and not anyone in the papal court.
I suggest you read Johannes Fried, “Donation of Constantine” and “Constitutum Constantini”, (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2007). He explains that the vocabulary shows that the author of the forgery “lacked any intimate knowledge of the Roman Church and had no feeling for Roman sentiments”. So, you were saying?
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
I suggest you read Johannes Fried, “Donation of Constantine” and “Constitutum Constantini”, (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2007). He explains that the vocabulary shows that the author of the forgery “lacked any intimate knowledge of the Roman Church and had no feeling for Roman sentiments”. So, you were saying?Not sure anyone knows who the authors were, I was more concerned with the Romanists using forgeries to further themselves.
Did Rome know they were forgeries? Deception or ignorance?
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). http://www.christiantruth.com/articles/forgeries.html