Every cleric must
obey the Pope, even if he commands what is evil; for no one may judge the Pope. — Pope Innocent III (1198-1216).
The First See
[Rome/papacy] is judged by no one. It is the right of the Roman Pontiff himself
alone to judge ... those who hold the highest civil office in a state...There
is neither appeal nor recourse against a decision or decree of the Roman
Pontiff. — From today's Code
of Canon Law.
------------
The Roman Catholic pope has often been the most powerful religious and political figure on earth. This is true today, even though the pope no longer has at his disposal the armies and navies of past Roman pontiffs. The papacy is crucial to Roman Catholicism, which is destined to play a vital role in the last days prior to Christ's second coming. Therefore we must take time to understand the papacy in relation to both the Church and the world. How did the papal office arise? What is its significance today?
The Vatican's constituency of 980 million followers is
at least three times the number of citizens in any Western democracy and is
exceeded only by the population of China. Even more important, these 980
million people are scattered throughout the world, many of them holding high
political, military, and commercial positions in non-Catholic countries.
Moreover, the pope has thousands of secret agents worldwide. They include
Jesuits, the Knights of Columbus, Knights of Malta, Opus Dei, and others. The Vatican's Intelligence Service and its
field resources are second to none.
Politically the pope's power is exercised mostly
behind the scenes, at times in cooperation with and at other times in
opposition to the CIA, British Intelligence, Israeli Mossad, and other
intelligence services. Remember, the pope's 980 million subjects are bound to
him by religious ties, which are far
stronger than any political loyalties could ever be. No secular government can
compete with the motivational power of religious belief.
The typical Roman Catholic, though he may disagree
with his church on such issues as homosexuality, abortion, extramarital sex,
contraceptives, and the necessity for confession, nevertheless believes that,
when it comes time for him to die, Rome holds his only hope. The pope as
Christ's Vicar gives a visible reality and practical expression to that hope.
The extraordinary position of
the pope in
relation to members
of the Church
was expressed succinctly in
Rome's La Civilta Cattolica, which a
papal brief described in the mid-nineteenth century as “the purest journalistic
organ of true Church doctrine” [J.H. Ignaz von Dollinger, The Pope and the
Council (London, 1869), p.3]:
“It is not enough for the people only to know that the
Pope is the head of the Church ... they must also understand that their own
faith and religious life flow from him; that in him is the bond which unites
Catholics to one another, and the power which strengthens and the light which
guides them; that he is the dispenser of spiritual graces, the giver of the
benefits of religion, the upholder of justice, and the protector of the
oppressed”. [La Civilta Cattolica, 1867, vol.
xii, p.86]
Similar words have been spoken by the followers of
Joseph Smith, Sun Myung Moon, and other cult leaders. The pope is “another
Christ” and “God on earth” to his followers, and, as Vatican II says, he can be
judged by neither man nor tribunal. [Austin Flannery, O.P., gen. ed. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post
Conciliar Documents, rev. ed. (Costello Publishing, 1988), p.380]
Check Your Mind at the
Door
The pope, and therefore the Church through him as its
head, both claim to be infallible. Ordinary Catholics must not question
anything the pope or Church have to say concerning faith and morals. The
councils and catechisms have for centuries declared the need for such total
submission and still insist upon it today. The
Catholic World reminded all Roman Catholics in the United States at the
time of the First Vatican Council:
“Each individual must receive the faith and law from
the Church ... with unquestioning submission and obedience of the intellect and
the will.... We have no right to ask reasons of the Church, any more than of
Almighty God.... We are to take with unquestioning docility whatever
instruction the Church gives us”. [The
Catholic World, August 1871, vol.xiii, pp.580-89]
Here we have as clear a denial of individual moral
responsibility as can be found in any cult. The same requirement of unthinking
submission is demanded in Vatican II. The
Code of Canon Law likewise reasserts the same rule:
“The Christian faithful, conscious of their own
responsibility, are bound by Christian obedience to follow what the sacred
pastors, as representatives of Christ, declare as teachers of the faith or
determine as leaders of the Church”.[Coriden, et al., op.cit., Canon 212, Section 1]
When it comes to faith and morals and the way of
salvation, Catholics must check their minds at the door and accept whatever the
Church says. They can't even study the Bible for themselves because only the
Magisterium can interpret it. Obviously, this prohibition against freedom of
conscience is related to the total suppression of basic human rights for all
mankind everywhere, which is the unchanging goal of Roman Catholicism.
To understand Roman Catholicism one must ignore the
public posturing and public-relations-motivated profile offered by the
Catholic Church. The face that Rome shows to the world varies from country to
country depending upon the control it has and what it can effect. Instead, we
must look to Catholicism's official doctrines, which never change.
Vatican II is thought by most Catholics and
non-Catholics to have liberalized Catholicism. In fact, it reaffirmed the
canons and decrees of previous key councils: “This sacred council accepts
loyally the venerable faith of our ancestors...and it proposes again the
decrees of the Second Council of Nicea, of the Council of Florence, and of the
Council of Trent”. [Flannery, op. cit., vol. I, p. 412] The Council of Trent
denounced the Reformation and damned evangelicals' beliefs with more than 100
anathemas. All of these condemnations of the gospel of God's grace are endorsed
and reaffirmed by Vatican II. As for the pope, Vatican II clearly states:
“The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops,
enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office [not the holiness of his
life], when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful ... he proclaims
in an absolute decision a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals. For that
reason his definitions are rightly said to be irreformable... in no way in need
of the approval of others, and do not admit of appeal to any other tribunal.
“... the faithful, for their part, are obliged to
submit to their bishops' decision, made in the name of Christ, in matters of
faith and morals, and to adhere to it with a ready and respectful allegiance of
mind. This loyal submission of the will and intellect must be given, in a
special way, to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even
when he does not speak ex cathedra in such wise, indeed, that his supreme
teaching authority be acknowledged with respect, and that one sincerely adhere
to decisions made by him, conformably with his manifest mind and intention…” [Ibid.,
pp.379-80]
Obliged to submit
to their bishops' decision... submission of the will and intellect must be
given...! That gives Rome incredible power over devout
Catholics. That every Catholic does not obey is not the point; the point is
that such wording is the unchangeable
teaching and intent of the Church, not only for its members but for all
mankind.
While many Catholics rebel against certain Church
doctrines, they remain nominally attached to the Church, though they may only
attend on Christmas or Easter. When it comes, however, to their hope of someday
being released from purgatory and getting to heaven, no Catholic can question
the Church or he would cease to be under its protection and thus be damned.
Vatican II clearly says:
“This holy Council teaches ... that the Church ... is
necessary for salvation.... Hence, they could not be saved who, knowing that
the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would
refuse either to enter it, or to remain in it”. [Ibid., pp.365-66]
Remember that Hitler and Mussolini remained Catholics
to the end and were never excommunicated from the Church. So did thousands of
the worst Nazi war criminals, whom the Vatican smuggled out of Europe into safe
havens in South America. Such archcriminals are honored with Catholic funerals
and, like Mafia members, die with the assurance that their Church will continue
to say Masses in order to get them out of purgatory and eventually into heaven.
It is an insurance policy that very few allow to lapse completely.
“Impeccability”
Versus “Infallibility'
The required blind faith in the pronouncements of the
pope and the clergy seems to make sense because the Roman Church is the largest
and oldest. Surely so many billions of religious people couldn't be wrong for
the past 1500 years! Faith is also bolstered by the assurance that the Roman
Catholic Church is the one true church, the one which alone can be traced back
to the original apostles, and that its papal authority comes directly from
Christ through Peter by a long and unbroken line of apostolic succession.
As proof, the Church provides a list of its popes
(thus far 263) all the way back to Peter. Few Catholics know that popes
quarreled and fought with one another, excommunicated one another, and
sometimes even killed each other. It is difficult to find even a few among the
popes after the fifth century who exhibited the basic Christian virtues. Their
lives as recorded in the Catholic
Encyclopedia read like an unbelievable soap opera of lust, madness, mayhem,
and murder. Nevertheless, all of these master criminals, poisoners, adulterers,
and mass murderers are considered to have been infallible when they spoke ex
cathedra-that is, made dogmatic pronouncements upon faith and morals to the
whole church.
Catholic apologists argue that there is a difference
between impeccability in character
and conduct, which the popes certainly did not have, and infallibility in faith and morals, which every Catholic must
believe they had. [Karl Keating, Catholicism
and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by “Bible Christians”
(Ignatius Press, 1988), pp. 215-18] What folly to believe that a man who in his
life denies the faith and is habitually immoral is nevertheless infallible when
he speaks of faith and morals!
Knowledgeable Catholics readily admit that many popes
were incredibly evil. But that fact, it is argued, simply proves they were
human and allows one to disagree with them in good conscience. To the Catholic
it makes good sense that, in spite of the undeniable wickedness of her clergy,
the Roman Catholic
Church must be
mankind's only hope.
After all, it was established by Christ Himself, who made Peter the
first pope. That is supposedly proved by the Scripture “Thou art Peter, and
upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18), which we will deal with
in detail later.
The Unknown Dogma
Contrary to what Roman Catholics are taught, the papal
office did not originate with Peter. It was centuries before the Bishop of Rome
attempted to dominate the rest of the Church, and many centuries more before
this primacy was generally accepted. Leo the Great's letter to Flavian in 449
was not accepted until the Council of Chalcedon had approved it. “[Pope] Leo
[I] himself acknowledged that his treatise could not become a rule of faith
till it was confirmed by the bishops”. [Dollinger, op. cit., p.59]
There were eight councils of the Church before the
schism in 1054 split it into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, when the
Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other.
None of these eight councils was called by the Bishop of Rome, but by the
emperor, who also put his stamp of approval upon their decrees. As for papal
authority, one Catholic historian reminds us:
“Pope Pelagius (556-60) talks of heretics separating
themselves from the Apostolic Sees, that is, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria plus
Constantinople. In all the early writings of the hierarchy there is no mention
of a special role for the Bishop of Rome, nor yet the special name of `Pope'…
Of the eighty or so heresies in the first six centuries, not one refers to the
authority of the Bishop of Rome, not one is settled by the Bishop of Rome… No
one attacks the [supreme] authority of the Roman pontiff, because no one has heard of it”. [Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the
Papacy (Crown Publishers, 1988) pp. 205-06]
The Easter Synod of 680 called by Pope Agatho was the
first ecclesiastical body that asserted the primacy of Rome over the rest of
the Church, but this was not an ecumenical council of the entire Church, so its
decision was not generally accepted. As Catholic historian Peter de Rosa points
out:
“...not one of the early Fathers of the church saw in
the Bible any reference to papal jurisdiction over the church. On the contrary,
they take it for granted that bishops, especially metropolitans, have the full
right to govern and administer their own territory without interference from anyone. The Eastern church never accepted papal supremacy; Rome's
attempt to impose it led to the schism.
“... one looks in vain in the first millennium for a
single doctrine or piece of legislation imposed by Rome alone on the rest of
the church. The only general laws came out of Councils such as Nicaea. In any
case, how could the Bishop of Rome
have exercised universal jurisdiction in those early centuries when there
was no
[Roman] Curia, when
other bishops brooked
no interference in
their dioceses from anyone,
when Rome issued no dispensations and demanded no tribute or taxation, when all
bishops, not just the Bishop of Rome, had the power to bind and loose, when no
bishop or church or individual was censured by Rome?
“Further, for centuries, the Bishop of Rome was chosen
by the local citizens- clergy and laity. If he had jurisdiction over the
universal church, would not the rest of the world want a say in his
appointment? When he was believed to have [universal] supremacy the rest of the
church did demand a say in his
election. This came about only in the Middle Ages”. [Ibid., pp. 248-49]
From Calvary to
Regal Pontiff
It requires ingenious interpolation to derive from the
simple statement “On this rock I will build my church” a Petrine office,
apostolic succession, papal infallibility, and all the pomp, ceremony, and
power surrounding the pope today. As one Catholic writer rather sarcastically points
out: “…it required [great] skill to take statements made by a poor Carpenter to
an equally poor fisherman and apply them to a regal pontiff who was soon to be
called Lord of the World”. [Ibid., p. 25]
Yet such is the only biblical foundation upon which
the entire superstructure of the Roman Catholic Church has been built. It
includes an infallible papacy, apostolic succession, an intricate hierarchy of
priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals et al, the magisterium of bishops
which alone can interpret the Bible, the requirement that for his alleged
infallibility the pope must speak ex cathedra to the entire Church on matters
of faith or morals, etc. etc. That none of these concepts is even remotely
suggested, much less specifically stated, either in Matthew 16:18 or elsewhere
in Scripture is dismissed by Catholic apologists, who then look to “tradition”
for support. There they enter a maze of deceit and actual fraud.
It took centuries of developing ingenious arguments to
finally arrive at the theory that the Christ who had “nowhere to lay his head”
(Matthew 8:20), who lived in poverty and was crucified naked, was to be
represented by a regal pontiff who possessed more than one palace containing in
excess of 1100 rooms each, was waited upon day and night by scores of servants,
and wore the finest gold-embroidered silk robes! That Christ passed on to Peter
such pomp and luxuries, which neither of them knew, is both ludicrous and
blasphemous.
The glories and powers enjoyed by popes are not even
remotely related to Peter's life of purity and poverty. This fisherman-apostle
said, “Silver and gold have I none” (Acts 3:6). Nor were papal luxuries and
pompous claims of authority over kings and kingdoms known in the Church until
centuries later as ambitious popes gradually extended and solidified their
authority and control over earthly rulers. Popes began to call themselves by
such titles as “supreme ruler of the world” and “king of kings”. Others
claiming to be “God on earth,” even the “redeemer” who “hung on the cross as
Christ did,” asserted that “Jesus put the popes on the same level as God”. [August
Bernard Hasler, How the Pope Became
Infallible (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1981), p. 48] Peter would have
denounced such pretentious fraud as blasphemy.
Rome had been the capital of the empire before
Constantine moved his palace to the East, and it continued to be regarded as
the capital of the western half of the empire. With the Emperor Constantine
installed in the city of Constantinople (Istanbul today), the pope developed
near absolute power, not only as the head of the Church but as the emperor of
the West.
When the empire
later fell, it
was the papacy
which gave the
fragmented remains its continuity. Thomas Hobbes would say, “The
papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned
upon the grave thereof”.
W.H.C. Frend, Emeritus Professor of Ecclesiastical
History, in his classic The Rise of
Christianity, points out that by the middle of the fifth century the Church
“had become the most powerful single factor in the lives of the peoples of the
empire. The Virgin and the saints had replaced the [pagan] gods as patrons of
cities”. Pope Leo 1(440-61) boasted that St. Peter and St. Paul had “replaced
Romulus and Remus as the city's [Rome's] protecting patrons”. [H. Chadwick, The Early Church (Wm. B. Eerdmans,
1976), p. 243] Frend writes that “Christian
Rome was the
legitimate successor of
pagan Rome ...Christ had triumphed [and] Rome was ready to extend
its sway to the heavens themselves”. [Frend, op. cit., p. 707]
Shameless Revision
of History
Such was the ambition of most of those who were
scrambling onto the alleged throne of Peter and at times warring with one
another to gain it. Using the name of Christ and piously making the sign of the
cross, they labored mightily to satisfy their lust for power and pleasure and
wealth. No justification
for making themselves
the absolute and
infallible rulers over
the Church, much less the world, could be found in the writings of the
early Fathers and certainly not in Scripture. Therefore the popes had to find
other support. The means they chose was to rewrite history by manufacturing
allegedly historical documents. The first of these bold forgeries was The Donation
of Constantine, which
we have already
mentioned. It was
followed by pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, which were early
papal decrees allegedly compiled by Archbishop Isidore (560-636)
but actually fabricated
in the ninth
century. These frauds
became the foundation for much “tradition”
still relied upon today.
Catholic historian J.H. Ignaz von Dollinger writes
that prior “to the time of the Isidorian Decretals no serious attempt was made
anywhere to introduce the neo-Roman theory of infallibility. The popes did not
dream of laying claim to such a privilege”. [Dollinger, op. cit., p. 62] He goes on to explain that these fraudulent Decretals would — “gradually, but
surely, change the
whole constitution and
government of the Church.
It would be
difficult to find
in all history
a second instance
of so successful and yet so
clumsy a forgery.
“For three centuries past [he wrote in 1869] it [the
fabrication] has been exposed, yet the principles it introduced and brought
into practice have taken such deep root in the soil of the Church, and have so
grown into her life, that the exposure of the fraud has produced no result in
shaking the dominant system”. [Ibid., pp.76-77]
The Isidorian
Decretals involved about a hundred concocted decrees allegedly promulgated
by the earliest popes, along with counterfeit writings of supposed Church
authorities and synods. These fabrications were just what Nicholas I (858-67)
needed to justify his claims that the popes “held the place of God on earth”
with absolute authority over kings, including even the right to “command
massacres” of those who opposed them-all in the name of Christ.
The popes who followed Nicholas were only too happy to
emulate his ways, and each of them used
his predecessors' actions
to justify his
own, thus building
an ever-larger case
for infallibility, but upon
a fraudulent foundation.
Writing in the
nineteenth century, Church historian R.W. Thompson, himself a
Catholic, comments:
“Such times as these were adapted to the practice of
any kind of imposture and fraud which the popes and clergy considered necessary
to strengthen the authority of the papacy.... the personal interest [and]
ambition of Innocent III led him to preserve all these forgeries with care, so
that ... the “pious fraud” might become sanctified by time. .. The result he
hoped and sought for has been accomplished...
“[These] false Decretals,
which are now universally considered to have been bold and unblushing forgeries
... constitute the cornerstone of that enormous system of wrong and usurpation
which has since been built up by the papacy, to revive which Pope Pius IX has
now put forth his Encyclical and Syllabus
[of Errors]... [R. W. Thompson, The Papacy and the Civil Power (New
York, 1876), p.372]
Devout Catholics would be shocked to learn that much
of the “apostolic tradition” they have been told supports Roman Catholicism
(and is to be regarded upon the same level as Scripture) was actually a
deliberately manufactured fraud. The doctrines built upon these forgeries
became so interwoven into Catholicism that even after the hoax was exposed the
popes were reluctant to make the necessary corrections. Pope after infallible
pope endorsed the counterfeit. To make a clean break from centuries of
accumulated lies would tear apart the very fabric of Roman Catholicism.
Pope Pius IX relied upon the fraud, though it had
already been exposed for three centuries, to build his case for pressuring the
bishops to make papal infallibility an official dogma at Vatican I. But the
testimony of history conclusively refutes both apostolic succession and papal
infallibility.
