and documented, with abundant references and concrete details, in many of my books.
Many conservative readers, after reading this highly critical book, will no doubt object that I have not dealt with the positive sides of the Church, but the positive aspects of the Catholic Church have all been set forth at length in my previous books. To repeat them here would only distract from the problem at hand. In particular, my book The Church, published over forty-five years ago, is still considered topical and relevant and, translated into many different languages, is still used as a classic textbook in universities today. My books Christianity: Its Essence and History (1995) and The Catholic Church: A Short History (2001) present detailed, systematic accounts of the Catholic Church’s overall historical development. The present book, therefore, does not deal with the history of the Church in general, but with the Church’s specific medical history, and the causes of the illness of the Church. As already discussed, I will concentrate here on problems with the Church’s constitution and with the central Roman institution of power, the papacy.
It is time to investigate a long and chequered history. Let us start at the beginning.
1. Peter – the First Pope?
Anamnesis
Rome, even papal Rome, was not built in a day. There is no doubt that, from early on, the Church located in the city of Rome, the capital of the Roman empire, and widely renowned for its efficient organization, effective charitable activities and numerous martyrs, played an important role. As a refuge of orthodoxy against Gnosticism and other heresies, it played a key role in formulating the baptismal creed, in limiting the canon of the works included in the New Testament, and, last but not least, as the city with the graves of the two chief apostles, St Peter and St Paul, in developing the tradition of apostolic succession.
But on a closer look, which of these elements can be verified historically? There is no word in the New Testament of St Peter himself ever having visited Rome. Nor is there any unequivocal reference to an immediate successor to St Peter (in Rome of all places). According to the writings of St Matthew, it was St Peter’s personal faith in Christ and not that of his successors that was and remains the ‘rock’, the eternal foundation, on which Jesus built his Church (Matthew 16:18).
On the other hand, the First Epistle of Clement, dating from AD 96, and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written around the transition from the first to the second century, do explicitly state that Peter stayed in Rome and they testify to his martyrdom there. This tradition is therefore very old and, significantly, there are no rival witnesses to contradict it. Even in Antioch, while there is ample evidence in the Acts of the Apostles that St Peter stayed there for a lengthy period of time, no one has ever claimed that the grave of St Peter is located there. As yet, at least, it has not been possible to verify archaeologically whether the grave of St Peter lies underneath the current Vatican basilica, although there are significant indications. More importantly, however, there are no reliable early witnesses that St Peter, an uneducated Galilean fisherman called Simon, who stands in sharp contrast to St Paul, a Roman citizen fluent in Greek, ever functioned as the ‘overseer’ or epískopos (the term from which the word ‘bishop’ derives) of the Church in Rome. He was clearly the spokesman for the circle of disciples around Jesus before Jesus’ death and resurrection, and he continued to exercise this function for some time afterwards, as long as the circle of disciples remained together in Jerusalem and later in Antioch and the surrounding regions. But there is no evidence of his exercising such a function from the city of Rome; under no circumstances can he be called ‘Prince of the Apostles’ in any modern sense of the term ‘prince’. The evidence, on the contrary, indicates that the monarchical episcopacy was introduced only at a relatively late date in the city of Rome, probably shortly after the beginning of the second century, at least thirty years after Peter’s martyrdom. However, already in around the year 160 monuments were raised to Peter and Paul, both of whom were presumably martyred during Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome around AD 64 to 68. It was the graves of the two chief apostles that served, in the first centuries, as the principal justification for the claim to a limited primacy accorded to the church of Rome, although not yet to the bishop of the city.
But does that make Rome ‘the mother of all churches’ as is proclaimed in the pretentious inscription adorning the basilica of St John Lateran, the original cathedral church of the Diocese of Rome: ‘Caput et mater omnium ecclesiarum urbis et orbis’ (‘Head and mother of all the churches of the city and of the earth’)? By no means! The head and mother church of early Christianity was incontestably Jerusalem, not Rome. And to this day there still exist any number of churches in the East such as Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth and others that were founded by apostles completely independently of Rome and its bishop. To this day, these churches insist on their apostolic origin and heritage.
There can be no question, during the first centuries, of the diocese of Rome and its bishop enjoying any jurisdictional primacy over the whole Church, or even of a biblically based claim to primacy without any jurisdictional authority. The Petrine promise of the Gospel of St Matthew (16:18), which, from the middle of the first millennium, has customarily been cited as the biblical justification for the papal claim to primacy – ‘You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church’ – and which ostentatiously adorns the interior of St Peter’s Basilica in enormous black letters on a golden background, finds no corroborating mention in any of the other Gospels. And, with one exception, these words were never quoted, in full at least, in any of the Christian writings before the middle of the third century – the exception being a text by the controversial church father Tertullian who quoted the passage not with reference to Rome and its bishop but with reference to St Peter. It was only in the middle of the third century that Bishop Stephen of Rome (254–7) cited the promise made to Peter to assert his authority in quarrels with bishops in Spain, the Province of Africa and Asia Minor. But he met with vigorous opposition led by Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, who rejected not only Stephen’s decisions and the theology behind them, but also his claims to possess the better apostolic tradition and to exercise jurisdiction over other churches. As it happens, Stephen’s positions on the readmission of lapsed Christians to the sacraments and the validity of baptism performed by heretical and excommunicated priests eventually prevailed, but not by virtue of any decisive papal authority over the other churches. On the contrary, the idea that one church could exercise authority over all the others was generally rejected by bishops and theologians outside of the Roman sphere for centuries to come.
Thus, Rome enjoyed no jurisdictional primacy during the first centuries, and that is understandable, because jurisdictional primacy belonged to the emperor alone. As pontifex maximus, the emperor enjoyed a monopoly on legislation that extended even to church matters (ius in sacris). After the Christianization of the Roman empire in the fourth century and for many centuries to come, it was the emperor who exercised the highest legal authority in the Church as in the State. He was the highest administrative instance with supervisory authority that extended even to the Roman community and its bishops. Without previously consulting any bishops, much less the bishop of Rome, Constantine, also known as Constantine the Great, convened the First Ecumenical Council in 325 at his new residency in Nicaea, east of Byzantium/Constantinople, and he issued laws, professions of faith and other prescriptions regulating the order of the Church. He confirmed the decisions made at the Council of Nicaea and enforced them throughout the empire. He also revamped the organization of the Church to conform to that of the empire, with the bishoprics of each civil province being placed under the authority of the ‘metropolitan’ bishop ruling in the provincial capital city.
Roughly four centuries after Constantine, a document was forged based on legends invented in the fifth century, bearing the title Donation of Constantine. According to this forgery – widely accepted at face value in the West for centuries – Constantine, in 315 or 317, conferred on Pope Sylvester and his successors explicit supremacy over the ancient patriarchal sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem, as well as over ‘all the churches of God in the whole earth’. In addition to administrative rights over estates owned by individual churches throughout the empire, it gave the pope authority over the city of Rome and over the whole Western part of the Roman empire, implying