Papal Quotes

The day was perfect. Hot, yes, but with a refreshing zephyr sidling in from the west. The lagoon was flecked with small islands, and beyond lay the more ominous mainland, the papal army camped somewhere on it. But here, on this beautiful islet far from our usual universe, a warrior pope seemed a figment.

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though....

Hoy ya sé que todo nos espía, que nada pasa inadvertido y que aun el papal pintado de las paredes tiene mejor memoria que los hombres. Y no es el buen Dios el que lo ve todo. No, una silla de cocina, una percha, ceniceros a medio llenar o la imagen de una mujer llamada Niobe bastan para proporcionar de todo acto un testimonio imperecedero.

As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table.

There are many reasons to steer clear of  Christianity. No question. I fully understand why people make that choice. Christianity has survived some unspeakable abominations: the Crusades, clergy sex-scandals, papal corruption, televangelist scams, and clown ministry. But it will survive us, too. It will survive our mistakes and pride and exclusion of others. I believe that the power of  Christianity — the thing that made the very first disciples drop their nets and walk away from everything they knew, the thing that caused Mary Magdalene to return to the tomb and then announce the resurrection of Christ, the thing that the early Christians martyred themselves for, and the thing that keeps me in the Jesus business (or, what my Episcopal priest friend Paul calls “working for the company”) — is something that cannot be killed. The power of unbounded mercy, of what we call The Gospel, cannot be destroyed by corruption and toothy TV preachers. Because in the end, there is still Jesus.

She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets- rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives in the burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections.

Doctrine of papal infallibility.

Blessed also be the Lord, the one living head of the church, who preserves her so effectually in unity that, even now, while there are three so-called papal heads, she remains the one spouse of the Lord Jesus Christ!

Papal decretals are the Devil's excretals.

He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace.

Although these cases are different, Rodríguez, Parolin and Kasper were all considered too moderate for senior leadership positions in the John Paul II and Benedict XVI years, when the top papal priority was Catholic identity.

Do you wish to speak in Provençal, French, or Latin? They are all I can manage, I'm afraid." "Any will do," the rabbi replied in Provençal. "Splendid. Latin it is," said Pope Clement.

the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say.14 When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” (Apoc. 9:2)

Again Pope Clement [VI] attempted to check the hysteria in a [Papal] Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil,” and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres were a “horrible thing.” He pointed out that “by a mysterious decree of God” the plague was afflicting all peoples, including Jews; that it raged in places where no Jews lived, and that elsewhere they were victims like everyone else; therefore the charge that they caused it was “without plausibility.” He urged the clergy to take Jews under their protection as he himself offered to do in Avignon, but his voice was hardly heard against local animus.

The 1216 Magna Carta was distinctive in two further regards. It was not a mere peace treaty, extracted under duress from an embattled monarch, but a freely given assurance of rights. Crucially, the document was also issued with the full and unequivocal support of the papal legate, Guala.

When he was at the Vatican, in Cardinal Bainbridge’s day, he quickly saw that no one in the papal court grasped what was happening, ever; and least of all the Pope. Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything.

Even at the very dawn of Christianity, there was a commonly-accepted theory known as the Blood Libel, which stated matter-of-factly that Jewish people regularly sacrificed non-Jewish babies and used the blood of those babies in Judaic rituals. Later, in medieval times, plagues and other diseases were commonly blamed on Jews, resulting in the enforcement of Apartheid-like conditions, separating Jewish communities from the rest of the population throughout Europe. For example, in the Papal States – territories in the Italian Peninsula that existed throughout the middle ages and medieval times that were governed directly by the Pope – Jews were only allowed to reside in neighborhoods called ghettos. They were regularly forced to convert to Christianity in various barbaric ways such as involuntary baptisms. The stealing of Jewish babies from their parents by Church officials was also not uncommon and the children would often then be brought up as Catholic orphans never knowing of their Jewish heritage.

the Catholic Church not only didn’t oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.8 Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools—plus the doctrine of papal infallibility—so they traded. Also,

The young Church of Scotland was based on the Word of God, anti-papal, free, reformed, and covenanting, and in that character acknowledged by the State.

The only common feature of the three successful Reformations was their rejection of papal authority; otherwise they were quite at odds.

a few months after he penned his Dialogue in Praise of the Papal Court, poor Lapo died of plague at the age of thirty-three.)

Catholics espouse papal infallibility, but no Catholic believes in it. Joseph Smith espoused prophetic fallibility, but no Mormon believes in it.

This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its “efficient market theory” supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star.

He thought that Abraham would never become a Christian once he had seen the Papal Court; but, since it was useless, he gave up trying to dissuade him.

what Cyprian detested may come to pass, that what was a divine thing “may become a human church.

Reported the papal legate: “The concept of liberum veto must have been devised in hell by a special devil charged with the task of destroying Christian Poland.” In

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?

Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in their indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its "bourgeois" pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the "progressives" blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly outdated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether.

If some saw the Indians as living in prelapsarian innocence, there were others who judged them to be savage beasts, devils in the form of men. The discovery of cannibals in the Caribbean did nothing to assuage this opinion. The Spaniards used it as a justification to exploit the natives mercilessly for their own mercantile ends. For if you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him. It was not until 1537, with the papal bull of Paul III that the Indians were declared to be true men possessing souls.

Viviamo nell'attesa permanente di un estraneo a cui consegnarci mani e piedi. A cui saremmo capaci di sacrificare gli affetti più cari, se necessario. Anche quando siamo in malafede. Anche se sappiamo benissimo che al momento opportuno ci tireremo indietro attaccandoci alla più ignobile delle scuse. Conta però il momento in cui siamo disposti a tutto. E tutto significa, papale papale, tutto.

The logical consistency of the papal declaration (the Assumption of Mary) cannot be surpassed, and it leaves Protestantism with the odium of being nothing but a man’s religion which allows no metaphysical representation of woman

as the religious conflicts that animated the seventeenth century began to recede—Christian vs. Muslim; Catholic vs. Protestant—as the filthy wealth generated by slavery and dispossession accelerated, capitalism and profit became the new god, with its curia in the basilicas of Wall Street. This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its “efficient market theory” supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star.

Once, Princess Leigh-Cheri used a papal candlestick for the purpose of self-gratification. She had hoped that at the appropriate moment she might be visited by either the Lamb or the Beast, be, as usual, only Ralph Nader attended her.

We have been slowly and deliberately taught that monarchies and kings are bad things, and papal supervision of any kind of government, even over its morals, is a very bad thing. The obvious truth, that a bad king can be a bad thing, but that a good king is always a blessedly good thing and that the Pope is the divinely constituted guardian of faith and morals for the whole world, is carefully kept from the realization of every school child and man and woman. Scarcely anyone is ever told any more that France, Spain and Portugal, Poland and Hungary, England and Sweden, all had kings and queens who were saints, and who ruled their lands gloriously and brought untold happiness and well-being to their subjects.

Gregory IX created the Papal Inquisition to prevent local rulers or mobs taking on supposed heretics without papal supervision. He burned copies of the Jewish Talmud and ordered that all Jews should be regarded as perpetuam servitus judaeorum – in servitude until Judgement Day.

Indeed, it was illegal to publish papal bulls and decrees in Spain or its possessions without prior royal consent – which is why, decades later, the pope’s decrees against slavery could not be read in Spain’s slave-holding colonies in the New World.38 These same conditions prevailed in Portugal.

I know you don’t want to stand up to the bullies, the peace-breakers, or even the demons among you. You want someone else to handle it, someone else to tell them to stop, someone else to bring the peace. And very often in your life, there will be someone else, and you’ll be able to stay in your place of peace. But other times, the peace you crave can only be found by fighting the battle, and the light you crave can only be seen by fighting the darkness.

Los barrios populares rebosan de una humanidad vociferante y sórdida que evocan, casi con ternura, los poemas en dialecto de Belli; el contraste es brutal entre la miseria de los pobres y el lujo de las familias papale y bancadas; no lo es menos en nuestros días entre el hampa dorada de la dolce Vita y los habitantes de las cuevas y chabolas.

My group had a papal audience at four. I couldn’t miss it, not only because no one stands up the pope but also because he and my father had been friends for years. They had met when my father was studying medicine at the University of Rome and Paul VI, then the young Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was chaplain of an anti-Fascist student group. In his pre-pontiff days, he would visit us whenever church business brought him to the States. Somewhere I still have the photograph of his cat, taken on the balcony of his Vatican apartment, that he sent to me when I was nine or ten. He had to give the cat away when he was elected pope, and I had written to say how sad it was that the pope could not keep a pet.

Do not let your conscience be clouded by unknown storms. Trust in the atmosphere of spirit that breathes so calmly deep within you at all times.

Even if it’s a really funny joke, don’t laugh if the devil’s the one telling it!

Pope Agatho: “Nothing of the things appointed ought to be diminished; nothing changed; nothing added; but they must be preserved both as regards expression and meaning.

Moreover, the papal system has opposed the march of civilization and liberty throughout the world, by denouncing the circulation of the Bible, and the general diffusion of knowledge. Turn to every land where popery predominates, and you will find an ignorant and debased peasantry, a profligate nobility, and a priesthood, licentious, avaricious, domineering and cruel.

Some religions, such as Catholicism, fully endorsed slavery, as Pope Nicholas V made clear when, in 1452, he issued the radically proslavery document Dum Diversas. This was a papal bull granting Catholic countries such as Spain and Portugal “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property … and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.”10 These last few words—to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery—sound not just sinister to us, but also psychotic. They make perfect sense, however, in a Christian context, given that the Bible is itself a heedlessly proslavery tome.

The truth is, that the European nations paid not the slightest regard to the rights of the native tribes. They treated them as mere barbarians and heathens, whom, if they were not at liberty to extirpate, they were entitled to deem mere temporary occupants of the soil. They might convert them to Christianity; and, if they refused conversion, they might drive them from the soil, as unworthy to inhabit it. They affected to be governed by the desire to promote the cause of Christianity, and were aided in this ostensible object by the whole influence of the Papal power. But their real object was, to extend their own power, and increase their own wealth, by acquiring the treasures, as well as the territory, of the New World. Avarice and ambition were at the bottom of all their original enterprises.

Decisive too was the increasing acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian people—the laicus, or ‘laity’—by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their eyes. ‘Futile and ludicrous—for who does not know already that it is unlawful?

Dayananda’s contemporary, Pope Pius IX, had much more conservative views about women, but shared Dayananda’s admiration for superhuman authority. Pius led a series of reforms in Catholic dogma and established the novel principle of papal infallibility, according to which the Pope can never err in matters of faith (this seemingly medieval idea became binding Catholic dogma only in 1870, eleven years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species).

Indeed, no sultan or Muslim ruler in Islamic history ever kneeled to ask forgiveness before a grand mufti in the way that Henry IV was forced to do before the pope in 1077 in Canossa for challenging papal authority on some key secular matters. Henry VIII of England had to break with Rome entirely simply to secure the divorce he sought from his wife. Thus, intimate linkage between religious and state power marked most of Christian history in a way that has had no parallel in Islam.

The Reformation took aim at the power and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and sought an independent religion in which people dealt with God directly rather than one mediated by the church’s rules. At the time, many Catholic bishops and other senior clergy lived like princes in palaces and the church sold “indulgences” (a supposed reduction in time people would have to spend in purgatory). The Roman Catholic Church was a nation as much as it was a religion, directly governing a sizable share of modern Italy (the Papal States).

Celler pressed him on theological details that were only vaguely addressed in the amendment: “Would a Protestant child be taught papal infallibility? Would a Catholic boy or girl be required to listen to divine instruction from the Torah? Might Mohammedan parents insist their child be taught the scriptures of the Koran?” In an unusual statement for an evangelical leader, Cook dismissed those concerns, claiming that there was really “not that much difference” among the texts used in the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions.

Crusading outlived the Middle Ages, and remains today a favored trope of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and Islamist terrorists, all of whom cleave to the decidedly shaky idea that it has defined Christian and Muslim relations for a millennium. They are not right, but they are not original in their error either. Crusading—a bastard hybrid of religion and violence, adopted as a vehicle for papal ambition but eventually allowed to run as it pleased, where it pleased, and against whom it pleased, was one of the Middle Ages’ most successful and enduringly poisonous ideas.

Mr. Shaw himself said once, “I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire.” Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made the remark. It is in fact a bull, a conscious bull. A bull is only a paradox which people are too stupid to understand. It is the rapid summary of something which is at once so true and so complex that the speaker who has the swift intelligence to perceive it, has not the slow patience to explain it. Mystical dogmas are much of this kind. Dogmas are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of mental promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning—an instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the Dons.

But the kingdom of God does not consist in the Law; it consists in the Word of the promise. Today it is commonly said: “He loves the Word. He loves the Word of the Gospel, or the ministry.” But in the papal decretals and canons you will not find even a syllable about the Word. They thunder only about the confession of sins, contrition, satisfaction, obedience to the pope, and the observance of monastic rules. But there is the deepest silence concerning the promises. Accordingly, the papal kingdom was a horrible devastation of the church, and even now promise is an unheard-of word to the pope and the cardinals.

In 1555 the church had a new pope, Paul IV, and he was even more determined to end all heresies than earlier popes had been. Almost immediately, Paul issued a bull in which he stated: It is absurd and inconvenient that the Jews, who through their own fault were condemned by God to eternal slavery, can… show such ingratitude towards Christians and affront them by asking for their mercy. [They] have become so bold as to not only live amongst Christians but near their churches without any distinctive clothing.13 He therefore ordered that Jews in Rome and the Papal States wear special clothing and be confined to ghettos.

I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant. Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!" It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.

Ferdinand and Isabella implored Pope Alexander VI to support Spain’s title to the New World. He responded by issuing papal bulls—solemn edicts—establishing a line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese territories around the globe. The line extended from the North Pole to the South Pole. It was located one hundred leagues (about four hundred miles) west of an obscure archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genoese navigators sailing for Portugal, had discovered them in 1460, and ever since, the islands had served as an outpost in the Portuguese slave trade.

In 1231, Pope Gregory ordered the Dominicans to take charge of papal courts and decisions and so prevent mob rule and guarantee that the accused received a fair trial and the right of defence. This was the foundation of the Inquisition, and it was a move to organize, control, and limit violence, disruption, and division. Of course, it often failed and even achieved the opposite of its stated and original purpose, but it's surprising how often in an age of casual and brutal violence a relative moderation and legality was achieved. Civil law was far harsher than canon law, demanding confiscation of a heretic's property and usually death, something the Church had tried to prevent for generations.

One of the many sacred names by which Tammuz or Nimrod was called, when he reappeared in the Mysteries, after being slain, was Oannes. The name of John the Baptist, on the other hand, in the sacred language adopted by the Roman Church, was Joannes. To make the festival of the 24th of June, then, suit Christians and Pagans alike, all that was needful was just to call it the festival of Joannes; and thus the Christians would suppose that they were honouring John the Baptist, while the Pagans were still worshipping their old god Oannes, or Tammuz. Thus, the very period at which the great summer festival of Tammuz was celebrated in ancient Babylon, is at this very hour observed in the Papal Church as the Feast of the Nativity of St. John.

Michelangelo, who had already spent much time studying Roman architecture in the ruins, proposed a revolutionary “flying bow bridge” scaffold. It was based on the principles of the Roman arch, whose weight presses out against the sides it is spanning. This ingenious structure could be inserted in just a few small holes made in the side walls, since all its pressure would flow there, and none down to the floor. It would also allow Michelangelo to fresco the ceiling a whole strip at a time, moving to the next strip as soon as one was finished, and thus progressing across the length of the chapel. He got approval to construct it, and it was an instant success, allowing the papal court to have its regular processions under it without any obstruction.

True also that Luther, in particular, turned to the Jews for support in his new construing of the Bible and his rejection of papal claims. In his 1523 pamphlet, Das Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei, he argued that there was now no reason at all why they should not embrace Christ, and foolishly looked forward to a voluntary mass conversion. When the Jews retorted that the Talmud conveyed an even better understanding of the Bible than his own, and reciprocated the invitation to convert, Luther first attacked them for their obstinacy (1526), then in 1543 turned on them in fury. His pamphlet Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (‘On the Jews and their Lies’), published in Wittenberg, may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust.

But the ability to hold the means of exchange (in defiance of Say’s law) also awakens a passion, a “lust for gold.” “The hoarding drive,” he says, “is boundless in its nature.” Witness Christopher Columbus: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise” (229–30). Here Marx, quoting Columbus, returns to the idea that once you can hang a price tag on something, you can hang it on anything—even a person’s soul, as his allusion to the Catholic Church’s infamous medieval practice of selling indulgences (i.e., papal pardons that promised entry into heaven) suggests: Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it. (229)

Primer of Love [Lesson 6] Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less. ~ C. S. Lewis Lesson 6) The most important element for lasting love is having the humility to apologize and the divinity to forgive. A lasting life together can be little more than a series of fuck ups connected by a filament of forgiveness. First learn like children to apologize even if you don't mean a word of it -- as a child you knew that instinctually when apologizing to your parents (and underscoring the phony apology with a fake cough at the end). This was your rite of passage, your training wheels into acquiring humanity. Forgiveness is that one uniquely paradoxical attribute which makes us at once human and divine in the casting of absolution. Use that Papal power with dignity -- you'll have them kissing your ring and other naughty bits in no time. Pope Francis may be infallible, but your penis makes you inphallible.

when Napoleon, after reviewing the troops that had returned from Egypt in the Place Bellecour, was elected chief magistrate of the Italian Republic at a meeting in the Jesuit College (today the Lycée Ampère). A Committee of Thirty, headed by Francesco Melzi d’Eril, proposed Napoleon’s name to the 450 Italian delegates present, with the gavel banged down immediately after the question was put just in case anyone had the temerity to demur.5 Melzi had organized the delegates into sections according to whether they had come from the Austrian, Piedmontese, Venetian or Papal areas, thereby deliberately maximizing disunity and minimizing the chances of opposition. Though it was humiliating that the new Italian Republic should be founded in France, where Talleyrand could better keep an eye on the delegates, this was the first time that the word ‘Italy’ had appeared on the political map of Europe since the collapse of Rome in the fifth century AD.

The nature of the case, and the history of the Mysteries, alike show that this book could be none other than the "Book Pet-Rome;" that is, the "Book of the Grand Interpreter," in other words, of Hermes Trismegistus, the great "Interpreter of the Gods." In Egypt, from which Athens derived its religion, the books of Hermes were regarded as the divine fountain of all true knowledge of the Mysteries. In Egypt, therefore, Hermes was looked up to in this very character of Grand Interpreter, or "Peter-Roma." In Athens, Hermes, as is well known, occupied precisely the same place, and, of course, in the sacred language, must have been known by the same title. The priest, therefore, that in the name of Hermes explained the Mysteries, must have been decked not only with the keys of Peter, but with the keys of "Peter-Roma." Here, then, the famous "Book of Stone" begins to appear in a new light, and not only so, but to shed new light on one of the darkest and most puzzling passages of Papal history.

There was no pope in the Nicene and pre-Nicene churches. The Roman Catholic Church as an organization that rules all of western Christendom was not a product of apostolic teaching. The papacy was not a product of the blessing that Jesus conferred upon Peter. The Roman Catholic Church is, instead, the product of the conquest of the western Roman empire by the barbarian hordes in the fifth century. Their conquest politically isolated the bishop of Rome from the other major bishops of the Roman empire and led to his having sole authority over all the churches west of the Byzantine empire. It is that political isolation which would cause the bishops of Rome to begin to imagine that they had entitlement to such authority over all the churches of the world. No one concurred, and eventually the bishop of Rome simply excommunicated eastern Christianity, isolating his own private Christian world. That separation from eastern Christianity and their rejection of papal primacy continues to this day.

If the bulls were allowed to increase their knowledge as the bullfighter does, and if those bulls which are not killed in the allotted fifteen minutes in the ring were not afterwards killed in the corrals but were allowed to be fought again, they would kill all the bullfighters, if the bullfighters fought them according to the rules- Bullfighting is based on the fact that it is the first meeting between the wild animal and a dismounted man. This is the fundamental premise of modern bullfighting—that the bull has never been in the ring before. In the early days of bullfighting bulls were allowed to be fought which had been in the ring before and so many men were killed in the bull ring that on 20th November 1567, Pope Pius the Fifth issued a Papal edict excommunicating all Christian princes who should permit bullfights in their countries and denying Christian burial to any person killed in the bull ring. The Church only agreed to tolerate bullfighting, which continued steadily in Spain in spite of the edict, when it was agreed that the bulls should only appear once in the ring.

Vatika has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus, vatika represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.” Much later, the slope became the circus, or stadium, of the mad emperor Nero. It was here, according to Church tradition, that Saint Peter was executed, crucified upside down, and then buried nearby. This became the destination of so many pilgrims that the emperor Constantine, upon becoming half-Christian, founded a shrine on the spot, which the Romans continued to call the Vatican Slope. A century after Constantine, the popes started building the papal palace there.

Take the fig tree as a parable,” he says; “as soon as its twigs grow supple and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. So with you when you see all these things: know that [the Son of Man] is near, right at the gates. In truth I tell you, before this generation has passed away, all these things will have taken place” (Matthew 24:32-35). It’s interesting to note Jesus’ style here. He doesn’t quote Scripture; that’s why his authority is not like the authority of the scribes and the Pharisees (see Matthew 7:29). He doesn’t quote “papal encyclicals.” He most often uses nature as an authority. He points to clouds, sunsets, sparrows, lilies, corn in the field, leaves unfolding, several kinds of seeds, oxen in a ditch! Nature instructs us everywhere. Look and learn how to see. Look and see the rhythm, the seasons, the life and death of things. That’s your teaching, that’s creation’s plan in front of you. The new world is constantly coming into being as the old world passes. Nothing lives in nature unless something else dies, and it often happens slowly and is unseen—unless you learn how to see. Christians

Prayer was the rhythm of the Holy Father’s life. He made time to pray before and after his meals, and interspersed his Breviary prayers (the Liturgy of the Hours) throughout the day and night, calling it: “very important, very important.” At six in the morning, at noon, and again at six in the evening, he would stop whatever he was doing to pray the Angelus, just as he had done while working in the chemical plant in Poland. He prayed several Rosaries each day, went to confession every week, and did not let a day pass without receiving Holy Communion. Each Friday (and every day in Lent), he prayed the Stations of the Cross, and preferred to do this in the garden on the roof of the Papal Apartments. During Lent, he would eat one complete meal a day, and always fasted on the eve of our Lady’s feast days. He remarked, “If the bishop doesn’t set an example by fasting, then who will?” The Holy Father knew that his first duty to the Church was his interior life. He declared, “the shepherd should walk at the head and lay down his life for his sheep. He should be the first when it comes to sacrifice and devotion.” Each night, he looked out his window to Saint Peter’s Square and to the whole world, and made the sign of the cross over it, blessing the world goodnight.

Leonardo da Vinci, was brought to the Vatican in 1513 by the new pope, Leo X, and given a list of commissions to create for the greater glory of the pope and his family. After three years of living in the papal palace and exploring Rome, the great Leonardo had produced almost nothing. The furious Pope Leo decided to have a surprise showdown with the capricious artist and intimidate him into completing some of his commissions. In the middle of the night, surrounded by several imposing Swiss Guardsmen, the pope burst through the door to Leonardo’s private palace chambers, thinking to shake him out of a sound sleep. Instead, he was horrified to find Leonardo wide awake, with a pair of grave robbers, in the midst of dissecting a freshly stolen corpse—right under the pope’s own roof. Pope Leo let out a nonregal scream and had the Swiss soldiers immediately pack up Leonardo’s belongings and throw them and the divine Leonardo himself outside the fortress wall of the Vatican, never to return again. Shortly afterward, Leonardo decided it was probably healthier to get out of Italy and move to France, where he spent the rest of his days. This, by the way, is why the great Italian genius’s most famous oil paintings, including the Mona Lisa, are all in Paris, in the Louvre museum.

Consider the recent papal visit and apology. Again, I recognize that some people were able to find peace in hearing the pontiff's words. But, for many, his words fell far short. Where was the acknowledgement of genocide against Indigenous Peoples through these schools? Yes, he spoke those words later, but not directly to the people who suffered it. Further, it cannot be ignored that the Catholic Church has failed to meet its financial obligation to survivors and its failure was officially sanctioned by the federal government and the courts. The Catholic Church is one of the richest, if not the richest, corporations in the world. It is worth billions and billions of dollars. I remember visiting the Vatican Museum in Rome. The art and artifacts alone are worth billions of dollars without even considering the vast worldwide holdings of the Catholic Church. I will never forget seeing Nero's bathtub, a huge, circular stone edifice made of material that no longer exists on earth. The bathtub is described as "invaluable beyond calculation." So why not just sell off the tub and meet their obligations to survivors? It is beyond comprehension how the Catholic Church can express remorse while refusing to abide by the terms of the settlement they originally agreed to and still expect their words to be taken seriously.

Imagine someone is fast asleep in a very dark room. The friend who opens the curtains to let the light in will be cursed and hated. But the day had long since started, and the friend still sleeping curses the light, and prefers the darkness. In the same way, those who bring light to a dark situation will be cursed and ridiculed for their optimism and love. They will be scorned and rejected for their joy and hope. But optimism, love, hope, and joy should be pursued anyway. In all things, you must trust in the knowing your brain will never know, the feeling your heart can never reveal, and the Spirit your own soul still hasn’t even begun to explore. This is the profound gift of a firm grasp on faith.

It's an unholy crusade against good people everywhere, all in my name. If I had a stomach, I'd be sick to it. You see now why so many good people just give up out there? You can only take so much evil pretending to be good. You can only handle so many broken souls acting as if good people are the evil ones, before you raise your hands and claim defeat. But I want you all to understand something. There is evil happening. There are spirits from Hell demonizing. There are even wars planned, and dark judgments justified by the self-righteous fanatics. But none of that means good can't also triumph. None of that means good cannot rise up against hatred, against judgment, against the armies of Hell itself, and bring about a tidal wave of joy and love. Evil does, but good always is.

The Church's social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in word with the nature of every human being. It recognizes that it is not the Church's responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest. Building a just social and civil order, wherein each person receives what is his or her due, is an essential task which every generation must take up anew. As a political task, this cannot be the Church's immediate responsibility. Yet, since it is also a most important human responsibility, the Church is duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution towards understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically.

From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, charlatans, swindlers, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, lepers and cripples, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, wandering Jews escaped from the infidels with their spirit broken, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with an ear cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans, simoniacal and embezzling canons and priests, people who lived on the credulity of others, counterfeiters of bulls and papal seals, peddlers of indulgences, false paralytics who lay at church doors, vagrants fleeing from convents, relic-sellers, pardoners, soothsayers and fortunetellers, necromancers, healers, bogus alms-seekers, fornicators of every sort, corruptors of nuns and maidens by deception and violence, simulators of dropsy, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, gout, and sores, as well as melancholy madness. There were those who put plasters on their bodies to imitate incurable ulcerations, others who filled their mouths with a blood-colored substance to feign accesses of consumption, rascals who pretended to be weak in one of their limbs, carrying unnecessary crutches and imitating the falling sickness, scabies, buboes, swellings, while applying bandages, tincture of saffron, carrying irons on their hands, their heads swathed, slipping into the churches stinking, and suddenly fainting in the squares, spitting saliva and popping their eyes, making the nostrils spurt blood concocted of blackberry juice and vermilion, to wrest food or money from the frightened people who recalled the church fathers’ exhortations to give alms: Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless to your hearth, we visit Christ, we house Christ, we clothe Christ, because as water purges fire so charity purges our sins.

During the conversation she [7th-GGM, Anna Maria Hoepflinger Floerl] also talked about the guidance with which God had provided her when they started to expel the Salzburgers. She was born in the state of Bavaria and brought up in ignorance by her seriously erring mother and some relatives. However, when God recognized that He could save her soul, He saw to it that among the twelve journeyman of a papal masterbuilder from Salzburg who worked on a church in Bavaria, there was a Lutheran journeyman, called “the Lutheran,” about whose religion strange things were said. Because he got room and board at the house of her cousin, for whom she worked, she was very much aware of his Christian behavior. And, since she noticed great peace, nonconformance to the world, and diligent prayer and intercession as well as sympathy and tears when he saw the bound Evangelical Salzburgers being led past him, she had the deep desire to talk to this man secretly about his and her religious faith. One evening God arranged for her cousin to be busy with the soldiers who were accompanying the Salzburgers on their way across Bavaria, while the servants were in the tavern. She grasped this opportunity to make this knowledgeable man, who was experienced in Christianity, teach her the Evangelical truth for three hours; upon her request, he also sent her a good book, namely the Schaitberger, in a small well-secured barrel. In it, they eagerly read for three consecutive weeks at night about the Evangelical truth and her previous misunderstandings. Because the people concluded from her overall behavior, especially her absence from monthly confession, observance of brotherhood meetings, participation in pilgrimages, and telling a rosary, that she might have suspicious books, they waylaid her, took the book away from her, and threatened her with jail and death unless she stayed away from this heresy. At the priest’s instigation, her mother, in particular, behaved very badly. Finally God gave her the courage to leave, although she knew neither the way nor the area. A woman potter, also a secret Lutheran, referred her to her very close kinswoman in Austria; but there she was advised in confidence that she was to go to Salzburg rather than to pretend, in violation of her conscience, because here they searched very much after Evangelical people and books. Since the journeyman bricklayer had given her instructions on how to get to the Goldeck jurisdiction and, there, to a Lutheran family, she traveled there without a passport, like a poor abandoned sheep, in the name of God, who was her leader and guide, and she was well received. However, because the Evangelical people were being expelled at that time, she was summoned to appear before the authorities and was threatened that, if she stayed with these Evangelical people, she would enjoy neither God’s care nor any favor from the people in the Empire, but would die a horrible death. Nevertheless, she said that she would go with them regardless of what might happen to her. She preferred all misery and even death itself to renouncing God, her Savior, and the Evangelical truth. She did not start with good days, but with misery and death, as the bricklayer had told her earlier while assuring her of God’s help.

These Claudines, then…they want to know because they believe they already do know, the way one who loves fruit knows, when offered a mango from the moon, what to expect; and they expect the loyal tender teasing affection of the schoolgirl crush to continue: the close and confiding companionship, the pleasure of the undemanding caress, the cuddle which consummates only closeness; yet in addition they want motherly putting right, fatherly forgiveness and almost papal indulgence; they expect that the sights and sounds, the glorious affairs of the world which their husbands will now bring before them gleaming like bolts of silk, will belong to the same happy activities as catching toads, peeling back tree bark, or powdering the cheeks with dandelions and oranging the nose; that music will ravish the ear the way the trill of the blackbird does; that literature will hold the mind in sweet suspense the way fairy tales once did; that paintings will crowd the eye with the delights of a colorful garden, and the city streets will be filled with the same cool dew-moist country morning air they fed on as children. But they shall not receive what they expect; the tongue will be about other business; one will hear in masterpieces only pride and bitter contention; buildings will have grandeur but no flowerpots or chickens; and these Claudines will exchange the flushed cheek for the swollen vein, and instead of companionship, they will get sex and absurd games composed of pinch, leer, and giggle—that’s what will happen to “let’s pretend.” 'The great male will disappear into the jungle like the back of an elusive ape, and Claudine shall see little of his strength again, his intelligence or industry, his heroics on the Bourse like Horatio at the bridge (didn’t Colette see Henri de Jouvenel, editor and diplomat and duelist and hero of the war, away to work each day, and didn’t he often bring his mistress home with him, as Willy had when he was husband number one?); the great affairs of the world will turn into tawdry liaisons, important meetings into assignations, deals into vulgar dealings, and the en famille hero will be weary and whining and weak, reminding her of all those dumb boys she knew as a child, selfish, full of fat and vanity like patrons waiting to be served and humored, admired and not observed. 'Is the occasional orgasm sufficient compensation? Is it the prize of pure surrender, what’s gained from all that giving up? There’ll be silk stockings and velvet sofas maybe, the customary caviar, tasting at first of frog water but later of money and the secretions of sex, then divine champagne, the supreme soda, and rubber-tired rides through the Bois de Boulogne; perhaps there’ll be rich ugly friends, ritzy at homes, a few young men with whom one may flirt, a homosexual confidant with long fingers, soft skin, and a beautiful cravat, perfumes and powders of an unimaginable subtlety with which to dust and wet the body, many deep baths, bonbons filled with sweet liqueurs, a procession of mildly salacious and sentimental books by Paul de Kock and company—good heavens, what’s the problem?—new uses for the limbs, a tantalizing glimpse of the abyss, the latest sins, envy certainly, a little spite, jealousy like a vaginal itch, and perfect boredom. 'And the mirror, like justice, is your aid but never your friend.' -- From "Three Photos of Colette," The World Within the Word, reprinted from NYRB April 1977

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

The leader of Christendom, Pope Clement VI, was preserved in health by this method, though for an unrecognized reason: Clement’s doctor, Guy de Chauliac, ordered that two huge fires should burn in the papal apartments and required the Pope to sit between them in the heat of the Avignon summer. This drastic treatment worked, doubtless because it discouraged the attention of fleas and also because de Chauliac required the Pope to remain isolated in his chambers. Their lovely murals of gardens, hunting, and other secular joys, painted at Clement’s command, perhaps gave him some refreshment. A Pope of prodigal splendor and “sensual vices,” Clement was also a man of great learning and a patron of arts and science who now encouraged dissections of the dead “in order that the origins of this disease might be known.

Liberación fueron duramente reprimidos, todo lo contrario ocurrió con el Opus Dei. La polémica organización católica recibió una gracia extraordinaria: su elevación a la categoría de prelatura personal, mediante la cual la Obra quedaba únicamente bajo la autoridad papal —y la divina, se sobreentiende—, algo que causó un gran malestar en todos los sectores de la Iglesia, incluso en la propia

Here, people arrived from another continent and, by war, disease, and persecution, they eliminated 90 percent of the residents. From 1492 to the end of the Indian Wars, an estimated fifteen million people were killed. A papal bull had instructed Christians to conquer non-Christian countries and either kill all occupants or “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”3 From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs. Whether out of guilt or a justifying belief that the original occupants were not fully human, history was replaced by the myth of almost uninhabited lands.

Yet they also could not forget the devastating critique of the papacy and the church hierarchy unleashed in the previous century. That critique would surface in the works of the devotio moderna’s most sophisticated offspring, Erasmus of Rotterdam.2 It would reach critical mass in 1517, when the storm over papal indulgences forced these devoted and sober citizens to realize that the Church was either too timid or too arrogant to change, or both. The resulting explosion would be the Reformation. It would knock the schoolmen’s Aristotle off his throne and open a new era for the European mind.

Therefore there is one body and one head of this one and only church, namely Christ and Christ’s vicar, Peter and Peter’s successor.” Pope Boniface VIII had written this three years earlier in 1302, and it was that claim of papal sovereignty over Christendom that was the source of all the trouble.

Boniface had no doubt about which was more important. “One sword ought to be under the other,” he proclaimed, “and the temporal power under the spiritual power.” He even stated that as spiritual intermediary, the lowliest parish priest was a higher power than the greatest king or emperor, and he quoted the Pseudo-Dionysius to that effect.16 King Philip IV did not appreciate being relegated to the lower rungs of a pope-dominated Great Chain of Being. He also had a weapon the pope did not: an army. And so in 1303 he sent troops to the papal retreat at Agnani to arrest Boniface and bring him back to France for trial. Outraged and mortified, the elderly pope died on the way.

Cesena asserted that it was perfectly orthodox to teach that Jesus and the apostles owned nothing as their own. So why should his successors not do the same? The pope, for reasons obvious to any visitor to Rome or the sumptuous papal palace at Avignon, thought this a dangerous heresy and innovation. Cesena wanted to know, what did Brother William think? Ockham promised to look into the matter and get back to him. When he returned with his answer, he stunned both the pope and Cesena. There was no doubt, Ockham concluded, that the doctrine of apostolic poverty was sound. To Ockham, this was not a matter just of theology and belief, that realm “up there” in which the man of science avoids involving himself.

Pope John XXII, of course, had read “Feed my sheep” very differently. Like Boniface, he saw it as enshrining papal authority over the sheep of secular society, including its secular rulers. So William of Ockham proceeded to take his famous razor to Boniface’s arguments. The pope had no such plenitude of power, Ockham replied; the faithful are neither sheep nor slaves. Nor are there two swords, as Boniface had claimed. There is only one, the one that kings and magistrates use to govern and protect their subjects. In fact, Christ had specifically forbidden his apostles from exercising the same kind of authority over the faithful that kings exercised over subjects (Matthew 20:25–27).20 By claiming broad authority, as Boniface had done, popes had in effect turned their office into an illegitimate enterprise.

For centuries, however, it was the supreme pontiff who called church councils into existence and ordered them to carry out the papal agenda, as part of his “fullness of power” over the Church. Certainly no bishop or abbot or professor of theology who attended one had ever thought of himself as an elected representative of the faithful, let alone as empowered to depose a pope if he felt so inclined. Yet that was exactly what William of Ockham claimed they were empowered to do. Council members were ex officio intermediaries between the faithful and the pope, acting on behalf of the body of the Church to protect it from harm.

Los piqueteros solariegos, capitaneados por el emisario papal Grasiabó, dejaron de asolar rutas y caminos; y la burguesía feudal y popular, una vez pródiga en altas exigencias para pobres inversiones, aplaudió cada pequeño privilegio concedido por la Corona al grito de Alberto Salvat, Mercatus non. Aliviado, Virrey Alberto, el conciliador, dispuso reducciones de todos los salarios excepto los propios y los de sus siervos. También fueron beneficiados los pajes estatales de la Camarilla de las Espaldas Vírgenes, a quienes el administrador Cafierito Enesimus y el Vizconde Sergio de Mas Sarasa les concedieron un bonus peronistam feudalorum por cada día en que debieran abandonar su juramento de castidad laboral y trabajar.

1870: The Papal Council proclaims the dogma of "infallibility";

All Protestants are Crypto-Papists,’ wrote the Russian theologian Alexis Khomiakov to an English friend in the year 1846. ‘ . . . To use the concise language of algebra, all the West knows but one datum a; whether it be preceded by the positive sign +, as with the Romanists, or with the negative − as with the Protestants, the a remains the same. Now a passage to Orthodoxy seems indeed like an apostasy from the past, from its science, creed, and life. It is rushing into a new and unknown world.’ Khomiakov, when he spoke of the datum a, had in mind the fact that western Christians, whether Free Churchmen, Anglicans, or Roman Catholics, have a common background in the past. All alike (although they may not always care to admit it) have been profoundly influenced by the same events: by the Papal centralization and the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance, by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and by the Enlightenment. But behind members of the Orthodox Church — Greeks, Russians, and the rest — there lies a very different background. They have known no Middle Ages (in the western sense) and have undergone no Reformations or Counter-Reformations; they have only been affected in an oblique way by the cultural and religious upheaval which transformed western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Christians in the west, both Roman and Reformed, generally start by asking the same questions, although they may disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different — the questions themselves are not the same as in the west. (p.1–2)

In a papal bull of April 1482, he uncompromisingly denounced its destruction of innocent lives and its theft of property

As legislators struggled to keep up with social mobility and new fashion trends, the rules took on a frenzied character: almost every aspect of attire was a potential target for legal strictures. Genoa banned the use of sable trims in 1157. In 1249 Siena restricted the length of trains on women’s dresses. In 1258 Alfonso X of Castile reserved scarlet cloaks for the king and silk for the nobility. The papal legate of the Romagna, in 1279, required all women in the region to wear veils; by contrast, Lucca in 1337 outlawed veils, hoods, and cloaks for all women other than nuns. A Florentine law of 1322 forbade women other than widows from wearing black. In 1375 in Aquila, only male relatives of the recently deceased were allowed to go unshaven and grow

Let us not make the same mistakes that the Reformers made. They thoroughly reformed the gospel message of justification by faith but failed to reform some other doctrines. They threw out justification by the works of the law, but held on to sanctification by the law. They rejected the church’s authority over your soul, but hung on to the church’s authority over your conscience. They discarded priestcraft and substituted clericalism. They rejected the authority of church tradition (which taught Papal infallibility) but replaced it with man-made creeds that soon became as authoritative as Scripture. In reality they replaced a two-legged Pope with a paper Pope. They cried “Sola Scriptura,” while waving a creed in one hand and a sword in the other.

El Magisterio del Papa y los obispos de ninguna manera pueden recibir autoridad de un dicasterio romano, incluso apelando a la voluntad personal (voluntarista) del Papa gobernante actual, para complementar, reducir, corregir o hacer compatible con el sentido común o con las ideologías actuales lo que ha sido revelado de una vez por todas en Cristo y presentado normativamente en la doctrina de los apóstoles (Hechos 2:42) para todo tiempo. Los dos dogmas papales del Concilio Vaticano I (infalibilidad, primacía de jurisdicción) no permiten tal interpretación que rompería la hermenéutica de la fe católica. De hecho, la contradicen directamente. No hay margen para sugerir nada en la declaración definitiva del Concilio Vaticano II (Dei Verbum 10).

El Magisterio del Papa y los obispos de ninguna manera pueden recibir autoridad de un dicasterio romano, incluso apelando a la voluntad personal (voluntarista) del Papa gobernante actual, para complementar, reducir, corregir o hacer compatible con el sentido común o con las ideologías actuales lo que ha sido revelado de una vez por todas en Cristo y presentado normativamente en la doctrina de los apóstoles (Hechos 2:42) para todo tiempo. Los dos dogmas papales del Concilio Vaticano I (infalibilidad, primacía de jurisdicción) no permiten tal interpretación que rompería la hermenéutica de la fe católica. De hecho, la contradicen directamente. No hay margen para sugerir nada en la declaración definitiva del Concilio Vaticano II (Dei Verbum 10)

While we condemn papal infallibility, too many of us want to be popes ourselves and have everyone hold to our decision or opinion, as if we were infallible.

Today I bring you victory over the Turk,” the discoverer, Giovanni da Castro, announced to Pope Pius II.2 Mines quickly went into production, and alum was declared a papal monopoly (overseen by a three-man committee featuring the ubiquitous Cardinal Bessarion) whose profits were dedicated to a crusade.

Later, when Bergoglio was already a provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, he was shaped by the violent dialectic opposition dividing the Argentinian church and society during the 1970s.222F[224] In 1975, he would also be deeply influenced by Pope St. Paul VI’s exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (EN), about evangelization in our times. In this papal document, Paul VI mentions several dichotomies presented to the Church as a false choice, namely: between God and the Church,223F[225] between the gospel and human development,224F[226] and between personal conversion and structural change.225F[227] For all of these dichotomies, Paul VI’s answer is: do not choose between one or the other, do not divide what God has united.226F[228] According to Paul VI, the power of evangelization is considerably diminished if the gospel is rent by doctrinal disputes and ideological polarizations.227F[229] This had a significant impact on Bergoglio’s ideas, still resonating to this day on his concept of evangelization.

Roland Bainton in his effort to make the best of Luther declared that Luther's view of the Jews "was entirely religious and by no means racial."'`' True; the crackpot version of social Darwinism that gave rise to "racial" anti-Semitism was a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther hated the Jews because they rejected Christ. But his fury was no less cruel and vicious because its underlying motives were different or because his suggestions for carrying his cruelty to some final solution were less comprehensive and efficient. His fury culminated in his vicious book of 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies. In late 1542 Pope Paul III had issued a call for the great reforming council to assemble at Trent beginning in 1545. It was to become a Catholic and papal triumph. What Trent would become was unclear in 1542, but Luther could see clearly enough that it represented a defeat for the evangelical cause. Through these years his attacks on foes of all kinds became even more vulgar and inflammatory because, as Heiko Oberman has said, he felt his work threatened on every Personal issues may also have been an influence. His beloved daughter Magdalena died in his arms on September 20, 1542. Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ.-'' This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Chrisitians would enjoy no victory over the grave. Whatever the cause, his outrageous attack in On the Jews and Their Lies represents one of those rhetorical horrors that may be explained in the various ways that we explain the cruelties that human beings inflict on others when the tormentors feel their own place in the universe threatened with annihilation. Yet explanation cannot finally excuse the horror. After raging against the Jews for dozens of pages of tedious vehemence, Luther recommended what should be done with them: Their synagogues should be burned down; their books should be taken from them, "not leaving them one leaf"; they should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"; and they should "be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing."22 Christians were guilty for not taking vengeance against the Jews for having killed Christ and for having killed innocent Christians for three hundred years after the Crucifixion, for not "striking them to death."23

If the Hindu story exhibits its "god of gods" in such a degrading light, how much more honouring is the Papal story to the Son of the Blessed, when it represents Him as needing to be pacified by His mother exposing to Him "the breasts that He has sucked." All this is done only to exalt the Mother, as more gracious and more compassionate than her glorious Son.