Again, there is no proof of deception. Centuries later defenses by some Catholics only highlights the old age and acceptance the forgeries found - which in itself means the forgeries taught nothing of import that seemed odd or new.The irony of using Dollinger probably won’t dawn on you. He died and was largely forgotten as a member of a schismatic and heretical sect which even he came to disagree with.
He was a Catholic historian who knew full well, there was no historic papacy for a many hundreds of years and how the Curia who knew about the forgeries, used them anyway to foist Papal fairy tales upon the "faithful"
Doellinger continues..
"It is clear that within a few decades after the spread of the Jesuit Order, the Infallibility hypothesis had made immense strides. The Jesuits had from the first made it their special business to suppress the spirit of historical criticism, and the investigation of Church history. They had rivaled one another in taking under their charge the pseudo-Isidorian decretals, as well as both the earlier and later Roman fabrications. Maldonatus, Suarez, Gretser, Possevin, Valentia, and others, that same Turrianus, who expressly defended the decretals, had come to the aid of the Roman system, with fresh patristic forgeries, for which he appealed to manuscripts no human eye had seen. At the same time the Jesuit Alfonsus Pisanu composed a purely apocryphal history of the Nicene Council, adapted simply to the exaltation of Papal authority. Pthers, Like Bellarmine, Delrio, and Halloix, defended the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius as genuine; Peter Canisius produced forged letters of the "Virgin Mary"
Deollinger, refuses to submit to the new infallibility doctrine.
Doellinger, on March 28, 1871, addressed a memorable letter to the archbishop, refusing to subscribe the decrees (infallibility). They were, he said, opposed to scripture, to the traditions of the Church for the first 1000 years, to historical evidence, to the decrees of the general councils, and to the existing relations of the Roman Catholic Church to the state in every country in the world. "As a Christian, as a theologian, as an historian, and as a citizen," he added, "I cannot accept this doctrine." From the Roman Catholic viewing point he thereby became an heretic as he clearly and publicly denied a doctrine proposed by the Church Magisterium to be divinely revealed (de fide divina).
Sorry, I just don’t see any evidence that you know what you’re talking about. You’re not even making a good case for Dollinger.
“He was a Catholic historian who knew full well, there was no historic papacy for a many hundreds of years and how the Curia who knew about the forgeries, used them anyway to foist Papal fairy tales upon the “faithful””
Nope. Dollinger always believed there was a Bishop of Rome from the first century of the Church. As he himself wrote: “The Roman Church must have been founded by an Apostle, and that Apostle can only have been Peter.” (as quoted in Thomas Livius, S. Peter, Bishop of Rome: Or, The Roman Episcopate of the Prince of the ... page 249).
In the same volume, we also see Dollinger say the following:
S. Peter is so uniformly marked out in the Gospels, and placed in such immediate proximity to Jesus, as the shadow accompanying Him, the one who possessed His confidence and mediated between Him and the other disciples, that in this respect no other Apostle comes near him. Where only the Apostles are enumerated or mentioned he always stands first. All the critical moments in the life of Jesus are placed in a certain relation to him, and to him alone. To him individually Jesus ordered his Eesurrection to be made known; the New Testament narrative records only his failings and humiliations, not those of the other Apostles; while it mentions the strength of his faith and love, and the dignity conferred in return for it, it carefully marks the depth of his fall. There is no other to whose education and training Christ devoted so much labour. Much of grave import He communicated only to him directly, as his future martyrdom, and his elevation to the highest dignity. And, again, in his death he was to be like his Lord.
“It was only in common with the other Apostles that S. Peter received the remaining powers left by Christ to His Church: viz., the power to bind and loose in a manner availing in heaven as on earth, which means to forbid and command; and finally, after the Resurrection, the communication of the Spirit with power to remit and retain. Three prerogatives were left to him exclusively. He was chosen before all other Apostles, and in a peculiar sense, as the foundation of the Church; to him alone were the keys given in Christ’s house; he alone was to have power as shepherd of the whole flock.”
and then there’s this in the same volume:
S. Peter,” writes Dr Dollinger, “held a preeminence among the Apostles, which none of the rest contested. He received the keys of the kingdom, and is the rock on which the Church is built—that is, the continuance, increase, and growth of the Church rest on the office created in his person. To him was the charge given to strengthen his brethren and feed the flock of Christ. ‘The Gospel of the Circumcision,’ as S. Paul says, was especially committed to him by the Lord, as to the man of Tarsus that of the uncircumcision.* Christ Himself was a minister of the circumcision; His Messianic energies were devoted to the good of Israel, so that He said Himself, ‘I am not sent, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ t In this S. Peter followed Him; he is peculiarly the Apostle of Israel, the head of the Church of the circumcision, and he is this in a higher and more eminent sense than S. James, who is doubly inferior to him, both as being confined to Jerusalem, while he included the whole dispersion in his labours, and as holding aloof from the Gentiles, while he was the first to incorporate them into the Church and also extended his ecclesiastical labours, though in a lesser degree, to uncircumcised converts. For there were not two Churches, one of the circumcision and one of the uncircumcision, but there was one olive-tree, one people of God, one Israel; and into this tree the Gentiles were grafted and thereby made partakers of the root and the juice, as adopted children of Abraham, whence S. Peter tells the Christian women of the communities he addresses, that they are daughters of Sarah. J And thus the Apostle, to whom Israel is specially entrusted by God, is necessarily the Head of the Apostolic College and the whole Church. The agreement between him and S. Paul regarded a division of labour, not of the Church; and S. Paul, who travelled to Jerusalem for the special purpose of spending fifteen days with S. Peter, knew well that he was chief among the three pillar Apostles, although he would not be dependent on him in pursuing the way shown to himself by Divine call and revelation, and opposed him at Antioch. The point on which S. Paul laid such great weight, that the Gentiles were to be converted immediately to Christ and not through the medium of previous conversion to Judaism, was first taught by special revelation, not to him but to S. Peter. Nor did S. Paul enter on his peculiar office of preaching to the Gentiles till after his fifteen days conference with S. Peter. While the Apostles remained united at Jerusalem the primacy of Peter displayed itself on all grave occasions. It was he who arranged the filling up of the Apostolic College through the election of S. Matthias; he fixed the form of election, confining it to those who had been companions of Christ, and witnesses of His teaching and acts. He takes up the word before the people and the Sanhedrim, and works the first miracle for confirming Christ’s resurrection. The punishment of Ananias and Sapphira, the anathema on Simon Magus, the first heretic, the first visiting and confirming the Churches suffering under persecution, were all his acts. If he was sent with S. John by the Apostolic College to the new converts at Samaria, he was himself not only a member of that college, but its president. So the Jews sent their high priest Ismael to Nero; and S. Ignatius says that the neighbouring Churches in Asia had sent, some their bishops, some their priests and deacons* He was at the head, as always and everywhere else, in the assembly of Jerusalem, which freed the Gentiles from observing the ceremonial law; he opened it, and his motion was carried, with the conditions added by S. James.
“The sentence of S. James could not but have great weight at that Synod, for S. Peter, like S. Paul, was in a manner a party concerned in the question. It was known in Jerusalem that he had ordered the Centurion Cornelius and other Gentiles with him at Caesarea to be baptised without circumcision, and this had raised great opposition on his return. And when S. Paul and S. Barnabas came to Jerusalem, and the Synod was to be held, the converted Pharisees again urged that Gentiles must submit to circumcision and the Law.t Therefore, S. James, who with his community was so faithful to the Law, was the best, and for opponents the most convincing judge in this strife, and it was obvious that the decree would be made in conformity with his opinion. And hence S. Paul, when appealing, in his Epistle to the Galatians, to the pillar Apostles who gave him and Barnabas their right hand in token of fellowship, named James first, before Cephas ; J for in that matter, and for persons who appealed unhesitatingly to the example of the Mother Church which kept the Law, the example of James had more weight than that of Peter, just as afterwards the Ebionites laboured to make his authority appear the highest in the Church. But S. James himself acknowledged that Peter was called by God’s appointment to gather from among the Gentiles a people that should bear His name, and unite them into one Church with converted Israelites; for he confirms S. Peter’s words, that God had chosen him among all to preach to the Gentiles.§ And so it became the Apostle who had alone received the keys of the kingdom. S. Paul was the first to enter into the work S. Peter had begun, and build on his foundation; he could not have done so unless S. Peter, in consequence of their previous arrangement, had recognised him as a fellow labourer, Divinely called, even though he derived his mission immediately from Christ. That he stood on a lower level than S. Peter is shown by his own way of describing his relations to Jews and Gentiles; he took every way of “glorifying his office,” as Apostle of the Gentiles, by numerous conversions, that through the influence thus obtained he might rouse the emulation of some at least of his people and win them.* S. Peter had no need of this circuitous method; he wrought, by the weight of his office, equally on Jews and Gentiles, and it was his own free act that made him afterwards prefer confining his energies chiefly to Jews. S. Paul was far from concealing that, in his eyes, S. Peter was not simply one of the Twelve, but had a peculiar position and dignity distinct from the rest, and that, accordingly, an appeal to his example had peculiar weight. He is not content with saying, “Have I not power to lead about a sister, like the other Apostles?” but he adds, “like the brethren of the Lord and Cephas.”t And if S. Peter, in mentioning the presbyters of the Churches, calls them “fellow presbyters,” he was mindful of his Lord’s example Who, while standing so high above the Apostles, called them “His brethren,” bade him strengthen his brethren, and as greatest in the kingdom be the least and humblest. He saw in the presbyters men who, like himself, served the brethren in teaching and ministration, and who, so far, were his fellow ministers.” §
“If S. Peter and S. Paul agreed on a certain division of labour, this was grounded on S. Peter’s feeling that he and the rest of the elder Apostles were more immediately fitted and called by their whole mental training to work among the Jews, and that it was their office to bring in the Gentiles at first only where a foundation had been previously laid of converted Jews and well instructed communities of Jewish Christians. They could only act effectively on the Gentiles through the converted Jews of the Dispersion, who were already familiar with Heathen views and morals, while S. Paul was the right man to act immediately on them with the best success. But if S. Paul designated himself the Apostle of the Gentiles, he did not mean that he was to give preference to the Gentiles over the Jews in carrying out his vocation; on the contrary, his first duty and endeavours always belonged to the Jews. But he meant that the wide domain of the Heathen provinces of the empire, where the Jews were only scattered here and there, was the special field of his Apostolical energy, while the other Apostles were still devoting themselves to the communities in Judea and Galilee, which contained only Jewish Christians or so few Gentiles that the Jewish element gave their dominant character to these societies, and the few Gentile converts had to adapt themselves to it. On the contrary, in the communities founded or visited by S. Paul, the Gentile character predominated from the beginning, and the Jewish Christians who chanced to be there were necessarily required to act accordingly, and to renounce the separatist element of the law which forbade to eat with the uncircumcised. . . .
“S. Peter addressed his First Epistle, at a date which cannot be precisely fixed, to the communities in the north of Asia Minor, consisting partly of Jews, but chiefly of Gentile converts, to the believers living as strangers scattered among the Heathen in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,—communities partly founded by S. Paul, Silas, formerly a companion of S. Paul, was its bearer.* The word ‘ dispersion ‘ in the title does not at all mean that the Epistle was only addressed to the Christians of Jewish descent in those communities—a division S. Peter never dreamt of—but it suggested itself as the natural designation for Christians who, like the Jews before, were a ‘dispersion,’ and felt themselves a scattered body of strangers in the Roman Empire, yet inwardly united by the closest bonds.t There are several expressions in the Epistle which can only be understood of those who had formerly been Heathen. . . . Its whole line, both in what it says and what it does not say, proves that the original difficulties in the way of a complete coalescing of Jewish and Gentile Christians were already overcome, at least in those regions, and that the errors S. Paul had to combat in writing to the Galatians no longer presented themselves, while the seductions of Jewish Gnosticism had not yet appeared. The date of the composition must therefore be placed several years before the Apostle’s death, before, indeed, S. Paul had written his Epistles to the Colossians, to Timothy, and Titus.”