Lying for God: Papal Forgeries

Catholic children are brought up to believe that popes, bishops and the rest of the clergy are holy men, practicing what they preach. However, after reading up on the history of Christianity by authors known for their objectivity, I have realized that my earlier perceptions about church affairs are not necessarily true.

Hans Kung, in his book The Catholic Church: A Short History, describes some of the papal forgeries that were knowingly done for financial and doctrinal manipulation. The mother of all such forgeries was one that came to be called “The Constantine Donation”.

Peter De Rosa has details about this forgery in his book Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of Papacy. 

Constantine was the Roman Emperor from 306 to 337. During this time, one of the popes was Sylvester I (314-315).

Let us move forward to the year 752 when Stephen III became pope. At that time ‘Pepin the Short’ was king of Franks, a group of Germanic tribes. A year after becoming pope, Stephen III met Pepin and his son Charlemagne to ask for their help in the protection of Rome. In this meeting, Pope Stephen showed Pepin a dusty and crumbling document called The Constantine Donation dated March 30, 315. It was a deed of gift from Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester.

The document tells the moving story of how Constantine contracted leprosy all over his body. He tried, without success, to cure it by immersing himself in the freshly drawn blood of infants. Then one night he had a dream in which apostle Peter told him to contact Pope Sylvester. The pope baptized him and after that, he was cured. Convinced that he was cured by the power of Apostle Peter, Constantine gave a gift to the Vicar of Christ and all his successors. 

In this Donation, he “confers on the pope and his successors primacy over all other bishops, including the eastern patriarchs, senatorial privileges for the clergy, imperial palaces and regalia, Rome itself and the western empire”.

Pepin was impressed. He handed back to the pope all the lands that were rightly his by the Donation.

However, it was later found that the Donation document was a forgery, a fabrication most likely concocted by a Lateran priest. It was only in 1440 that a papal aide, Lorenzo Valla, ‘took it apart line by line and proved it to be a fraud’.

Kung mentions other forgeries that were done in the fifth and sixth centuries. One was the writings of the pseudo disciple of Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite. Another was the ‘Symmachian’ Forgeries’ which were forged documents produced by Pope Symmachus (498-514) and presented in his curia. The object of these forgeries was to produce alleged instances from earlier times to support the position that the Roman bishop could not be judged by any court composed of other bishops. (Wikipedia)

In the second half of the 9^th century, there were the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals. (Decretal is a papal decree concerning a point of canon law.) These were a set of extensive forgeries, probably written by a group of Frankish priests. ‘They created documents purportedly authored by early popes and council documents’ to defend the position of bishops against metropolitans and secular authorities. (Wikipedia)