[boatbums]

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 :

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. Nicholas I (858–867) was the first to use them as the basis for advancing his claims of authority. But it was not until the 11th century with Pope Gregory VII that the these decretals were used in a significant way to alter the government of the Western Church. It was at this time that the Decretals were combined with two other major forgeries, The Donation of Constantine and the Liber Pontificalis, along with other falsified writings, and codified into a system of Church law which elevated Gregory and all his successors as absolute monarchs over the Church in the West. These writings were then utilized by Gratian in composing his Decretum. The Decretum, which was first published in 1151 A.D., was intended as a collection of everything that Gratian could find which could give historical precedent to the teaching of papal primacy, and therefore the authority of tradition, which could then carry the force of law in the Church. It had such success that it became the standard work of the law of the Roman Church and thus the basis of all canon law and Scholastic theology. Some Roman Catholic apologists claim that though there were forgeries in the Church, these really had very little impact upon the advancement and development of the papacy, since it was already an established reality by the time the forgeries appeared. Karl Keating, for example, states that practically all the commentators, with the exception of fundamentalists, agree with this assessment. But this is completely false. The historical facts reveal that the papacy was never a reality as far as the universal Church is concerned.

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:

What was in fact being implied in the western development was the destruction of the Church’s pluralistic structure of government. Papal claims to supreme spiritual and doctrinal authority quite simply, were threatening to transform the entire Church into a vast centralized diocese...Such innovations were the result of a radical reading of the Church’s conciliar structure of government as revealed in the life of the historic Church. No see, regardless of its spiritual seniority, had ever been placed outside of this structure as if it were a power over or above the Church and its government...Mutual consultation among Churches—episcopal collegiality and conciliarity, in short—had been the quintessential character of Church government from the outset. It was here that the locus of supreme authority in the Church could be found. Christendom indeed was both a diversity and a unity, a family of basically equal sister-Churches, whose unity rested not on any visible juridical authority, but on conciliarity, and on a common declaration of faith and the sacramental life. The ecclesiology of communion and fraternity of the Orthodox, which was preventing them from following Rome blindly and submissively like slaves, was based on Scripture and not merely on history or tradition. Quite simply, the power to bind and loose mentioned in the New Testament had been granted during Christ’s ministry to every disciple and not just to Peter alone...In sum, no one particular Church could limit the fulness of God’s redeeming grace to itself, at the expense of the others. Insofar as all were essentially identical, the fulness of catholicity was present in all equally. In the event, the Petrine biblical texts, cherished by the Latins, were beside the point as arguments for Roman ecclesiology and superiority. The close logical relationship between the papal monarchy and the New Testament texts, assumed by Rome, was quite simply undocumented. For all bishops, as successors of the apostles, claim the privilege and power granted to Peter. Differently put, the Savior’s words could not be interpreted institutionally, legalistically or territorially, as the foundation of the Roman Church, as if the Roman pontiffs were alone the exclusive heirs to Christ’s commission. It is important to note parenthetically that a similar or at least kindred exegesis of the triad of Matt. 16:18, Luke 22:32 and John 21:15f. was also common in the West before the reformers of the eleventh century chose to invest it with a peculiar ‘Roman’ significance. Until then, the three proof–texts were viewed primarily ‘as the foundation of the Church, in the sense that the power of the keys was conferred on a sacerdotalis ordo in the person of Peter: the power granted to Peter was symbolically granted to the whole episcopate.’ In sum, biblical Latin exegetes before the Gregorian reform did not view the New Testament texts unambiguously as a blueprint for papal sovereignty; their understanding overall was non–primatial.

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.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"[Catholics should]...undo the many bulls and dogmas, canons and credos that resulted from those now-proven false manuscripts. Any Catholic cleric pursuing that painstaking detective work that you know of?"

Thanks, boatbums, for an apt and reasonably focused comment. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that Orthodox/Byzantine scholars argue that the "Monarchical" form of Church governance (as opposed to the "Conciliar/Collegial" form) derive from Gratian's reliance on the false decretals.

Bless you, now we're finally getting to something that can be fruitfully discussed. Frankly, I regret that we all sniffed Eau de Red Herring and tore down a rabbit trail yelping at Pseudo-Mary-Ann when we should have been discussing Aristeides Papadakis!!

[Incidentally sasportas, this is the very first time somebody clued us in on what this dispute is all about: the monarchical vs conciliar form of church governance, or in shorthand, Catholic vs Orthodox.

I honestly think all the shoot-the-messenger stuff in the first dozen posts came out because we didn't catch that this is about a serious, and very present-day, disputed question in the Church. It looked like just a trawl through an irrelevant 9th century archive by a sketchy self-identified ex-nun, and "ex-nun" hits the buzzer for most of us: "Oh crap, not another Sister Mary Dingbat!"

Now, finally, to the substance of the thing.)

There has been a lot, a whole lot of combing through the canons pertaining to the exact authority of popes, bishops-individual, and bishops-conciliar, since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). It has been "the" top project for Catholic-Orthodox dialogue, which is proceeding diligently right to the present day. I just read some remarks by Metropolitan Hilarion of the Russian Orthodox Church (Link), at once a good friend of Catholic Christians and an exceedingly able proponent of the Orthodox critique of the papacy. (Metropolitan Hilarion was the Russians' representative at Pope Francis' papal consecration --- deeply involved in ecumnical dialogue.)

OK, I'm off to the Social Security office to present them with my wedding certificate and straighten out another can'o'worms.

Will re-join the discussion when I get back! Toodle-oo!