Chapter 27: Forgery, in the Name of Christ. The institutional Church didn't crumble when the Western Roman Empire collapsed. In fact, the fall of Rome only enhanced the Church's power. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Church became the primary institution of civilization in Western Europe. As the Germanic invaders divided the West into smaller Christian kingdoms, the Bishop of Rome took on the status previously enjoyed by the Western Roman Emperor.
He was now better known as simply "the Pope," and he had become one of the most powerful persons in the West. As the centuries rolled by, the Roman Catholic Church continued to grow in wealth and in power. Rome remained the principal city of Western Europe, but now its chief income came from the Church. Thousands of pilgrims traveled each year to see St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome and to look down at the bones of Peter. The good Christians of Rome milked these pilgrims for as much as they could.
All over Rome, Christians were selling pieces of the cross, bones of saints, and other relics. In accordance with the Constantinian hybrid, the Pope now normally ruled in two different capacities. He was the earthly prince of Rome, and he was also the universal bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. In order to justify the Pope's earthly powers, in 750 a papal cleric created a forged legal document that purported to be a donation of earthly kingship from Constantine to the Bishop of Rome and all his successors.
The donation was to last until the end of the world. This fraudulent document, known as the Donation of Constantine, fooled just about everyone in medieval Europe.
This bogus document reads in part: "Because our imperial power is earthly, we (i.e., Constantine) have decided to honor reverently His Most Holy Roman Church and to exalt the Most Holy See of Blessed Peter in glory above our own empire and earthly throne, ascribing to it power and glorious majesty and strength and imperial honor." By this present document, we confer our imperial palace of the Lateran, which surpasses and excels all palaces in the whole world.
We also confer a diadem, which is the crown worn on our head, and at the same time the tiara. We also confer the purple cloak and crimson tunic, and all our imperial garments, to correspond to our own empire and so that the supreme pontifical authority may not be dishonored, but may rather be adorned with glorious power greater than the dignity of any earthly empire.
Behold, we give to the Most Holy Pontiff, our Father Sylvester, the universal Pope, not only the above-mentioned palace, but also the city of Rome and all the provinces, districts, and cities of Italy and the Western regions." So the Pope was claiming not only the secular rulership of Rome, but the rulership of all of Italy and the Western regions as well. By 755, a Germanic people called the Lombards had gained control of most of Italy. The Pope feared that they also had their eyes on the city of Rome.
Please understand that the Lombards were good Christians, but that didn't have anything to do with the matter. Catholics had no hesitancy to invade the lands of other Catholics or to slaughter them. Fearing that the Lombards would take over Rome as well, Pope Stephen journeyed to Gaul to try to convince Pepin, king of the Franks, that he should come to the Pope's aid. The Pope showed Pepin the bogus donation of Constantine, and he urged Pepin, as a good Christian king, to restore the Italian cities to St.
Peter and his successors, the Popes. Falling for the bogus donation, the Franks came to the aid of the Pope, defeated the Lombards, and turned some twenty Italian cities over to the Pope, creating a block of territory thereafter known as the Papal States. Of course, all of this worldly power and all of the vast tax revenue from the Papal States made the office of Pope something quite desirable to men with less than godly motives.
Various factions of powerful families in Rome battled one another to acquire the throne of Peter. In one year, four different men occupied the papal throne, each of the first three being murdered. In 954, Alberic, Prince of Rome, was preparing to go into battle when he was suddenly struck with a deadly fever. Realizing that he was about to die, Alberic summoned the other noblemen of Rome to the tomb of St. Peter.
There, Alberic asked the nobles to swear on the bones of Peter that they would elect his fifteen-year-old son, Octavian, as Prince of Rome upon Alberic's death. He also had them swear that they would make Octavian the next Pope once the reigning Pope died. The nobles so swore. So at the age of fifteen, Octavian became Prince of Rome. A year later, he also became the Pope.
In order to distinguish between when he was acting in his official capacity as the Prince of Rome and when he was acting in his capacity as Pope, Octavian came up with a brilliant idea. As Pope, he took on the artificial name of John XIII. As Prince of Rome, he used his actual name Octavian. He ruled over two kingdoms, so why not have two names? The precedent he set of taking on an assumed name has remained the practice of Popes ever since.
Octavian, Pope John, protected his papacy and his princedom by surrounding himself with gangs of armed thugs. He was so incredibly wicked that one historian has called him a "Christian Caligula." He was addicted to drinking, heavy gambling, and every kind of debauchery one could think of. He essentially turned the Lateran Palace into a house of prostitution. His contemporaries brought charges against him that female pilgrims were being violated inside St. Peter's Church itself.
Finally, through the aid of the German King Otto, some of the priests and bishops called for a council to bring Pope John to ecclesiastical trial. However, Pope John refused to attend, concealing himself in a safe hideaway. Once the German armies left, the Pope returned to Rome and vented his rage on those clerics who had testified against him at the council.
One priest was flogged to the point of death, another one had his tongue torn out, a third priest had his hand chopped off, and a fourth cleric had his nose and fingers cut off. Even though a number of the Popes were wicked monsters, the Church never excommunicated or punished any of them for their murders and debauchery. The only times Popes were removed from office was when rivals killed them or otherwise forcibly removed them.
While ignoring the corruption and wickedness being practiced in its midst, the Church went after heretics with a vengeance. It savagely tortured them and threw them into damp, dark, horrible dungeons. The Church also slaughtered heretics, often in the most gruesome way possible. Some of the Church's victims did actually hold to doctrinal errors, sometimes enormous ones. Others were good Catholics whose only crime was to question the authority of Rome.
Many heretics were actually kingdom Christians who were simply trying to obey their king. One of the German statutes enacted in 1215 is quite representative of the medieval laws passed against heretics. "Where persons are believed to be heretics, they shall be accused before the spiritual courts, for they should in the first place be tried by ecclesiastics. When they are convicted, they shall be taken in hand by the secular courts, which shall properly sentence them.
That is to say, they shall be burned at the stake. If, however, the judge protects them or makes any illegal concessions and does not sentence them, he shall be excommunicated, and that in the most severe form." This statute went on to provide that even a prince who protected heretics or simply failed to prosecute them would also be excommunicated and all of his goods and titles be taken from him. In 1229, the Synod of Toulouse set forth forty-five regulations on how heretics were to be hunted down and punished.
Some of those regulations were: "In each parish, whether inside or outside a city, bishops must bind, by oath, a priest and two or more laymen of good reputation to diligently, faithfully, and frequently search out heretics in their parishes, individual suspicious houses, subterranean rooms and additions to houses, and other hiding places. The house where a heretic is found must be torn down and the property must be confiscated.
Whoever has involuntarily returned to the Church through fear of death or for any other reason must be imprisoned by the bishop. All members of a parish shall vow to the bishop under oath that they will preserve the Catholic faith and will persecute heretics according to their power. This oath must be renewed every two years." Today, the Roman Catholic Church would acknowledge that the unspeakable horrors the medieval Church inflicted on heretics were wrong.
However, Catholics will usually try to excuse the Church's conduct by saying that it was only acting within the norms of medieval society. Society today wouldn't stand for someone being burned at the stake, but medieval society wanted this. The Church was just going along with societal norms for the times. But does this excuse the Church? Not in the least. The values and commandments that Jesus gave us are permanent. They don't change with society. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Since God's kingdom is not of this world, societal norms that violate kingdom norms are irrelevant. Nobody would excuse a Christian for worshiping pagan images just because that was the norm of the society in which he lived. Jesus didn't tell us, "Love your enemies unless the government and church say to torture them."