Apology!
This text is not perfect. The original version ignored quotation marks, such as “gospel” to signal the author's opinion.
  But, more seriously, Wheless could have provided a guide to the possible future. If Jewish power continues, the world faces similar events to those of the early middle ages described by Wheless, disastrous for non-Jews.
  Wheless in 1930 is worlds away from the modern ideas of Jewish psyops against Greece and Rome, and Catholicism as a psyop. Wheless assumes there was hatred between Jews and Roman Catholics; and fails to mention the material reasons for the support of the church—which for its own reasons must have felt thriving and successful.
  Wheless may have considered himself a Jew; he is described as being a banker's son, and was educated at home; he seems to have easily found places to work and (in 1930) may have thought this his duty to the world. So don't expect penetrating comment on Jews, Moslems, or 'pagans'.
—Rae West August 2023
CHAPTER VI THE
CHURCH FORGERY MILL
[THE FORGED APOSTOLIC
CONSTITUTIONS 197 | THE FORGED APOSTOLIC
CANONS 198 | THE
FORGED LIBER PONTIFICALIS 198 | THE CONVERSION OF
CONSTANTINE FRAUD 199 | CHRISTIAN FORGERIES FOR
POWER AND PELF 204 | THE CONSTANTINE
FORGERIES 205 | FORGED DEEDS OF EMPIRE
205 | THE FORGED LETTER
OF ST. PETER 206 | A HOLY CONSPIRATION
206 | THE POPE
SYLVESTER FORGERIES 208 | THE FORGED DONATION OF
CONSTANTINE 208 | THE SYMMACHIAN
FORGERIES 211 | THE FALSE DECRETALS
FORGERIES 211 | THE FORGED DECRETUM OF
GRATIAN 213 | THE
FULL FRUITION OF FORGERY 214 | THE FRUSTRATED EMS
REVOLT 215 | FORGED SAINTS, MARTYRS
AND MIRACLES 215 | SPECULA STULTORUM 218
| OLD PAGAN STUFF
221 | FORGED AND FAKED
RELICS 224 | THE
INVENTION OF THE CROSS, ET AL. 227 | ANCIENT FAKES YET
ACCREDITED 231 | HOLY OILS, WATERS, AND
FETISHES 235 | THE
AGNUS DEI 236 | THE TRAGEDY OF THE
MYSTICAL MARRIAGE 237]
To Table of Contents
of Wheless' 'Forgery in Christianity'
Home Page of Rae West's site
Nevertheless, the forging of papal letters was
even more frequent in the Middle Ages than in the early Church.
(CE. ix, 203.)
LYINGLY FOUNDED on forgery upon
forgery, as has been made manifest by manifold admissions
and proofs, the Church of Christ perpetuated itself and
consolidated its vast usurped powers, and amassed amazing wealth,
by a series of further and more secular forgeries and frauds
unprecedented in human historyfaintly approximated only by
its initial forgeries of the fundamental gospels and epistles of
the New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and of the
countless other forged religious documents which we have so far
reviewed. These first relate to the infance of the
Churchconstitute its false certificates of Heavenly birth
and of Divine civil status. They are, as it were, the livery of
heaven with which Holy Church clothed its moral nakedness until
it attained maturer strength and became adept to commit the most
stupendous forgeries for its own self-aggrandizement and for the
completer domination of mind and soul of its ignorant and
superstitious subjects.
The record which we shall now expose is the most sordid in human
annals,of frauds and forgeries perpetrated for the base
purposes of greed for worldly riches and power, and designed so
to paralyze and stultify the minds and reason of men that they
should suffer themselves to be exploited without caring or daring
to question or complain, and be helpless to resist the crimes
committed against them. Into this chapter we shall compress in
as summary manner as possible the revolting record of Christian
fraud by means of forged title deeds to vast territories, forged
documents of ecclesiastical power spiritual and temporal, forged
and false Saints, Martyrs, Miracles and Relicssurpassing
the power of imagination or accomplishment by any other than a
divinely inspired Church which has never deceived anyone, and
which never has erredin its profound, cynical knowledge and
exploitation of the degraded depths of ignorance and superstition
to which it had sunk its victims, and of their mental and moral
incapacity to detect the holy frauds worked upon them. This was
the glorious Age of Faiththe Dark Ages of human
benightedness and priestly thralldomwhen Holy Church was
the Divinely-illumined and unique Teacher of Christendom, and
when the Christian world was too ignorant to be unbelieving or
heretic,for unbelief is no sin that ignorance was ever
capable of being guilty of.
In those Dark Ages, as the period of Catholic ascendancy is
justly called (Lecky, History of European Morals, ii, 14), men
were credulous and ignorant, says Buckle; they therefore produced
a religion which required great belief and little knowledge.
Again he says: The only remedy for superstition is knowledge. ...
Nothing else can wipe out that plague-spot of the human mind. It
was, indeed, agrees CE.(from 432 to 1461)an age of
terrible corruption and social decadence (xiv, 318); and of its
mental state it says: To such an extent had certain imaginary
concepts become the common property of the people, that they
repeated themselves as auto-suggestions and dreams. (CE. ix,
130.) But exactly this periodthe Dark Ages of Catholic
ascendancy,
{196} with centuries before and since,
was the heyday of Holy Faith and Holy Church: it may well be
wondered who was responsible for such conditions, when only Holy
Church existed, in plentitude of power, the inspired Teacher of
Christendom? During all these centuries, the overwhelming
importance attached to theology diverted to it all those
intellects which in another condition of society would have been
employed in the investigations of science. (Lecky, History of
Rationalism in Europe, i, 275; ef. Bacon, Novum Organum, I, 89.)
What else could be expected, was possible, when a bountyless
intolerance of all divergences of opinion was united with an
equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate
fraud that could favor received opinions? (Lecky, History of
European Morals, ii, 15.) Indeed, few people realize the degree
in which these superstitions were encouraged by the Church which
claims infallibility. (Lecky, Hist. Rationalism, i, 79, n.) It
is confessed: The Church is tolerant of pious beliefs which have
helped to further Christianity! (CE. xix,341.)
THE FORGED APOSTOLIC
CONSTITUTIONS
For more than a thousand years, until their
fraud was exposed by modern historical criticism, these
voluminous and most commodious forgeries formed the groundwork
and foundation of some of the most extravagant pretensions of the
Church and its most potent instrument of establishment and
dominion of its monarchical government The Apostolic
Constitutions, which we have admitted for naivete of invention
with respect to the Apostolic Prince Peter and Simon Magus in
their magic contests in Rome, is in fact a fourth-century
pseudo-Apostolic collection. ... It purports to be the work of
the Apostles, whose instructions, whether given by them
individually or as a body, are supposed to be gathered and handed
down by the pretended compiler, [Pope] St. Clement of Rome, the
authority of whose name gave fictitious weight to more than one
such piece of early Christian literature. ... The Apostolic
Constitutions were held generally in high esteem and served as
the basis for much ecclesiastical legislation. ... As late as
1563 ... despite the glaring archaisms and incongruities of the
collection it was contended that it was the genuine work of the
Apostles ... could yet pretend, in an uncritical age, to
Apostolic origin. (CE. i, 636.)
The Constitutions, pretending to be written by the apostles,
laid down in minute detail all the intricacies of organization
of several centuries later; there being elaborate chapters
concerning bishops, presbyters, deacons, all kinds of clergy,
liturgies, and Church proceedings and services, undreamed of by
apostles, or in the apostolic age. The prescriptions regarding
the selection of bishops are quite democratic, and vastly
different from present papal practices; the Churches, too, are
distinctly episcopal and independent. The nature of these
provisions, as well as the grossly false and fraudulent character
of the whole, a vast arsenal of papal aggression, may be seen by
the following passage in the apostolic first person: Wherefore
we, the twelve apostles of the Lord, who are now together, give
you in charge those divine constitutions concerning every
ecclesiastical form, there being present with us Paul, the chosen
vessel, our fellow apostle, and James the bishop, and the rest
of the presbyters, and the seven
{197} deacons. In the
first place, therefore, I Peter say, that a bishop to be ordained
is to be, as we have already, all of us, appointed, ... chosen
by the whole people, who, when he is named and approved, let the
people assemble, with the presbyters and bishops that are
present, on the Lords day, and let them give their consent. ...
And if they give their consent, etc. (Apost. Const. VIII, 2, iv;
ANF. vii, 481-482.)
THE FORGED APOSTOLIC
CANONS
From the same pious forging hand, says CE.
(i, 637), comes the related Apostolic Canons (composed about
400), a collection of ancient ecclesiastical decrees concerning
the government and discipline of the Church; ... in a word, they
are a handy summary of the statutory legislation of the primitive
Church. ... The claim to be the very legislation of the Apostles
themselves, at least as promulgated by their great disciple
Clement. Nevertheless, their claim to genuine Apostolic origin
is quite false and untenable. ... The text passed into
Pseudo-Isidore, and eventually Gratian included (about 1140) some
excerpts of these canons in his Decretum, whereby a universal
recognition and use were gained for them in the law schools. At
a much earlier date, Justinian (in his sixth Novel) had
recognized them as the work of the Apostles, and confirmed them
as ecclesiastical law. (CE. iii, 279, 280.) Here the pious
priests of God palmed off these self-serving forgeries on the
great but superstitious Emperor and fraudulently secured their
enactment into imperial law. In the same article is a description
of a larger number of forged documents appearing about the middle
of the ninth century, among which the Capitula of Benedict
Levita, Capitula Angilrammi, Canons of Isaac of
Langres,above all the collection of Pseudo-Isidore (Ib.
285), which arch-forgery we shall describe in its turn.
THE FORGED LIBER PONTIFICALIS
This famous, or infamous, official fabrication, The Book of the
Popes, is notorious for its spurious accounts of the early and
mythical successors of St. Peter. The Liber Pontificalis purports
to be a history of the popes, beginning with St. Peter and
continued down to the fifteenth century, in the form of
biographies of their respective Holinesses of Rome. (CE. ix,
224.) It is an official papal work, written and kept in the papal
archives, and preserves for posterity the holy lives and
wonderful doings of the heads of the Church universal. Historical
criticism, says CE., has for a long time dealt with this ancient
text in an exhaustive way ... especially in recent decades. The
Liber starts off in a typically fraudulent clerical manner: In
most of its manuscript copies there is found at the beginning a
spurious correspondence between Pope Damasus and St. Jerome.
These letters were considered genuine in the Middle Ages. ...
Duchesne has proved exhaustively and convincingly that the first
series of biographies, from St. Peter to Felix III (IV, died 530)
were compiled at the latest under Felixs successor, Boniface II
(530-532). ... The compiler of the Liber Pontificalis utilized
also some historical writings, a number of apocryphal fragments
(e.g. the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions), the Constitutum
Sylvestri, the spurious Acts of the alleged Synod of the 275
Bishops under
{198} Sylvester, etc., and the fifth
century Roman Acts of Martyrs. Finally, the compiler distributed
arbitrarily along his list of popes a number of papal decrees
taken from unauthentic sources, he likewise attributed to earlier
popes liturgical and disciplinary regulations of the sixth
century. ... The authors were Roman ecclesiastics, and some were
attached to the Roman Court. (CE. ix, 225.) The general falsity
of the Liber is again shown and the fraudulent use made of it by
the later Church forgers, thus indicated: For instances, in the
Liber it is recorded that such a pope issued a decree that has
been lost, or mislaid, or perhaps never existed at all. Isidore
seized the opportunity to supply a pontifical letter suitable for
the occasion, attributing it to the pope whose name was mentioned
in the Liber. (CE. v. 774.) Thus confessed forgery and fraud
taint to the core this basic record for some five centuries of
the official histories and Acts of Their Holinesses of the
primitive and adolescent years of the Holy Church. Pope Peter and
his Successors for a century or more are thus again proven pious
fictions and frauds.
THE CONVERSION OF CONSTANTINE
FRAUD
As several of the most monumental of these
holy Church forgeries are associated with the first Christian
Emperor, Constantine, and His contemporary Holiness, Pope
Sylvester I (314-335), we may first notice the pious forged
miracles which brought Constantine to Christrather to the
Christians, and thus blightingly changed the history of the
world. Constantine, Augustus of Rome, was the bastard son of the
Imperator Constantius Chlorus and a Bythnian barmaid who became
his mistress, and, later, by virtue of opulent gifts to the
Church, was raised to Heaven as St. Helena. Constantine was a
picturesque barbarian Pagan, with a very bloody record of
familyand othermurders to his credit, mostly made to
further his political ambitions. He was rival of the four Caesars
who shared the divided government, against whom he was engaged
in titanic struggle, to win the sole crown of empire. The
Christians were now become rather numerous in East and West, some
two and a half or three millions out of the hundred millions of
the Empire, sufficient to make their adherence and support
important to the contestant who could gain control of them. To
curry their favor and support Constantine adopted the tactics of
his sportive father, Constantius, and made show of friendly
disposition to them and even of possible adoption of the new
faith.
The occasion and the purely selfish and superstitious motive for
the alliance of Constantine with the Christians and their God,
are described by the three noted Church historians of the
period,all writing after his death,Eusebius, Socrates
and Sozomen, all of whom give substantially the following
account, here abbreviated from Eusebius, Father of Church
History, and an intimate of the Emperor, in his ludicrously
laudatory Life of Constantine:
Being convinced that
he needed some more powerful aid than his military forces could
afford him, on account of the wicked and magical enchantments
which were so diligently practiced by the tyrant Maxentius, he
sought divine assistance. ... He considered, therefore, on what
God he might {199} rely for protection and assistance.
While engaged in this enquiry, the thought occurred to him, that,
of the many emperors who had preceded him, who had rested their
hopes on a multitude of gods. ... none had profited at all by the
pagan deities, whom they sought to propitiate ... all had at last
met with an unhappy end, ... while the God of his father had
given to him, on the other hand, manifestations of his power. ...
Reviewing, I may say, all these considerations, he judged it to
be folly indeed to join in the idle worship of those who were no
gods, and therefore felt it incumbent on him to honor his fathers
God alone. (Eusebius, Life of Constantine, I, 27; N&PNF. I,
489; cf. Socrates, Eccles. Hist. I, 2; Ib. II, 1-2; Sozomen,
Eccles. Hist. I, 3; Ib. p. 241.) So, Constantine chose the
Christians God to offset the magical enchantments of the Pagan
gods in favor of his rival, Maxentius. The Christians flocked to
his court and armies, and proud prelates of the Church hung
around him and flattered his hopes. After several military
successes aided by the Christians, the rival armies faced for
decisive contest near the historic Milvian Bridge, in the
environs of Rome, in the year 312. All are familiar with the
fabulous priestly story of the miraculous Fiery Cross said to
have been hung out in heaven just before the battle in the sight
of Constantine and all his army, blazing with the famous device
In Hoc Signo VincesBy this Sign Conquerthough it was
in Greek and read En Touto Nika,and by virtue of which
Constantine was himself conquered for Christ or for His
Church.
Here we may again see the god in the machinea pious
Christian fraud in the making, and watch its growth from nothing
in proportion of wonder from lying Father to Father as it is
handed on. Very remarkable it is, that Father Bishop Eusebius
wholly omits this portentous event, though he devotes a large
part of Book IX and all of Book X of his History of the Church
(written in 324), to Constantine, and enthusiastically describes
the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Although he lugs divine
intervention by the Christian God into every phase of the
campaign, he is content with this colorful, naive, account: But
the emperor (Constantine), stimulated by the divine assistance,
proceeded against the tyrant, and defeating him in the first,
second, and third engagements, he advanced through the greatest
part of Italy, and came almost to the very gates of Rome. Then
God himself drew the tyrant [Maxentius], as if bound in fetters,
to a considerable distance from the gates [i.e. to the Milvian
Bridge]; and here He confirmed those miraculous events performed
of old against the wicked, and which have been discredited by so
many, as if belonging to fiction and fable, but which have been
established in the sacred volume, as credible to the believer.
He confirmed them, I say, as true, by an immediate interposition
of his power, addressed alike I may say to the eyes of believers
and unbelievers. As, therefore, anciently in the days of Moses,
the chariots of Pharaoh and his forces were cast into the Red
Sea, thus also Maxentius, and his combatants and guards about
him, sunk into the depths like a stone, when he fled before the
power of God which was with Constantine. And, in commemoration
of such signal divine aid, Constantine immediately commanded a
trophy of the Saviors passion [a Cross] to be placed
{200}
in the hand of his own statue in Rome. (Eusebius, HE. IX,
ix, p. 397-9.) And with all this miraculous embellishment, not
a word of the Fiery Cross in Heaven, nor of the miraculous
conversion of Constantine.
The pious fable, whether by him invented or not, is first
recorded by Father Lactantius, tutor to Constantines son Crispus
before the pious father murdered his son; he tells itafter
Constantines deathin its primitive and more modest
forma simple dream by night, in which Jesus the Christ
appeared to Constantine, and was seen or heardor was
fabledto tell Constantine to decorate the shields of his
soldiers with the holy sign of the Cross before they went into
the fight; this he did and won the battle-post hoc, ergo propter
hoc. Constantine may perhaps quite naturally have had such a
dreamdreams have many vagaries, and the priests were ever
at his ear. But the heavenly sign, the Labarum or Monogram of
Christ, which Constantine was by divine revelation or priestly
suggestion directed to place on the shields of his soldiers, was
no novel thing requiring a divine revelation, even in a dream,
to suggest to the Christian priests of a Pagan emperor; for it
had been a familiar Christian symbol prior to his conversion.
(CE. viii, 718.) By a similar divine revelation or
priest-prompting, the Persian Cambyses had tied cats to the
shields of his soldiers in their campaign in 525 B.C. against the
cat-worshipping Egyptians, who thus dared not strike with their
swords; the Christians worshipped the Cross of which the Pagans
were superstitiously afraid, as we have seen from Father
Lactantius. The result was at least the same, as related by
Father Lactantius:
And now a civil war broke out
between Constantine and Maxentius. ... At length Constantine ...
led his whole forces to the neighborhood of Rome, and encamped
them opposite to the Milvian Bridge. ... Constantine was directed
in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the
shields of his soldiers, and to proceed to battle. He did as he
had been commanded, and he marked on their shields the letter X,
with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus
at the top, being the cipher of Christ. ... The bridge in the
rear (of Maxentius) was broken down. The hand of the Lord
prevailed, and the forces of Maxentius were routed. (Lact., On
the Death of the Persecutors, ch. xliv; ANF. vii,
318.)
These Christ-monogram crosses were probably, to the minds eye
of Lactantius, simple wooden or painted miniatures like the more
life-sized one which a modern Holiness specially exorcised and
sent along as an amulet or pious fetich of success on a recent
disastrous Polar Expedition. But by the time Bishop Eusebius came
on to embellish the tale, the model at least was a thing truly
of beauty and wonder. In his Life of Constantine, the holy
Bishop, who was on the Emperors pay-roll, thus in substance
relates:
Constantine, having resolved to liberate Rome from the tyranny
of Maxentius, and having meditated on the unhappiness of those
who worshipped a multitude of idols, as contrasted with the good
fortune of his own father Constantius, who had favored
Christianity, resolved to worship the One True God; and while he
{201} was in prayer to God that He would reveal Himself
to him, and stretch forth His right hand to succor him, he had
a vision after midday, when the sun was declining, in a luminous
forin over the sun, and an inscription annexed to it, Touto
Nika(by this conquer), and at the sight of it he and all
his forces were astounded, who were spectators of the miracle.
... The following night, when Constantine was asleep, Christ
appeared to him with that sign, which had been displayed to him
in the heavens, and commanded him to make a standard according
to the pattern of what he had seen, and to use it as a defense
against his enemies; and as soon as it was day Constantine called
together the workers in gold and precious stones, and ordered
them to fashion it accordingly(it being, by his
description, certainly rich, if not gaudy). And bishop Eusebius
states that Constantine, a long time after the event affirmed
with an oath the truth of what the Bishop had recorded of this
wonderful unhistorical fact. (Eusebius, Life of Constantine, I,
26-31; N&PNF. i, 489-491; CE. viii, 717-8; Wordsworth, op.
cit. i, 358-9.) In a note to the last reference, the acute
Protestant clerical mind, in eager defense of even the most
absurd Catholic fables, is seen at play: It has been objected (by
Dean Milman and others) that it is incredible that a warlike
motto on the Cross, converted into a military standard, should
be suggested by Him who is Prince of Peace. But He Who is Prince
of Peace is also Lord of Hosts; and Christ is revealed not only
in the Psalms, but also in the Apocalypse, as a Mighty Warrior
going forth conquering and to conquer. Clerical persons are
really Funny-mentalists!
The pious Bishop Eusebius, exemplar of Christian historical
un-veracity to the glory of God and Church, begins his Life of
Constantine with this rhapsody over Constantine dead: When I
raise my thoughts even to the arch of heaven, and there
contemplate his thrice-blessed soul in communion with God
himself, freed from every mortal and earthly vesture, and shining
in a refulgent robe of light, honored with an ever-blooming
crown, and an immortality of endless and blessed existence, I
stand as it were without power of speech or thought and unable
to utter a single phrase, but condemning my own weakness, and
imposing silence on myself, I resign the task of speaking his
praises worthily to the immortal God, who alone has power to
confirm his own sayings. (Eusebius, Life, 1, 2; N&PNF. i,
481-2.)
Here is the thrice-blessed Holy Emperors record before he was
freed from every mortal and earthly vesture, and before his
blood-stained earthly vestments were exchanged for that refulgent
robe of light in which he communed with God himself; this record
is of the one item only of family murderings: Maximian, his wifes
father, 310; Bassianus, his sister Anastasias husband, 314;
Licinianus, his nephew, son of his sister Constantina, 319;
Fausta, his wife, in a bath of boiling water, 320; Sopater, Pagan
philosopher and his former intimate Counsellor, 321; Licinius,
his colleague Caesar and his sister Constantines husband, 325;
with this last, and the beheading of his own son Crispus, 326,
he fitly inaugurated and consecrated the celebrated Council of
Nicaeaa, which he invoked to settle the famous puzzle, whether
Jesus Christ, the Son, being born of the Father, were not
consequently less ancient than his Sire, so that there was a time
when the Begotten Son did
{202} not exist, and whether
they were of the same substance, or different. It may be noticed,
that the devout Christian Emperor regarded this as a trifling
matter of dispute not justifying the terrible row which it kicked
up among the clericals, splitting the subjects of the Empire into
throat-cutting factions for four centuries. In his opening
Address to the Council which he called to establish peace among
the priests, he turned to Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, and
to Arius, his presbyter, and their respective howling factions,
and declared: I understand, then, that the origin of this
controvers is this[the question stated by Alexander on this
point, and the negative reply of Arius]. Let therefore both the
unguarded question and the inconsiderate answer receive your
mutual forgiveness. ... For as long as you continue to contend
about these small and insignificant questions, it is not fitting
that so large a portion of Gods people should be under the
direction of your judgment, since you are thus divided among
yourselves! (Eusebius, Life of Constantine, II, 69-71; N&PNF.
i, 516-7.)
With respect to the Christian Emperors murderings, the good
Bishop Lardner, with truly Christian modern moderation, admits
that the murderous atrocities of Constantine above listed seem
to cast a reflection upon him! But the holy Emperor was truly
conscientious and scrupulously concerned for his souls salvation
on account of them; for it is recorded by the Church historian
Sozomen, that Constantine is said to have sought first Pagan,
then Christian, absolution from these murders, first from
Sopater, then from the Christian bishops. He relates the anxious
solicitations of the murderer thus: It is reported by the Pagans
that Constantine, after slaying some of his nearest relations,
and particularly after assenting to the murder of his own son
Crispus, repented of the evil deeds, and inquired of Sopater, the
philosopher, concerning the means of purification from guilt. The
philosopher, so the story goes, replied that such moral
defilement could admit of no purification, The Emperor was
grieved at this repulse; but happening to meet some bishops who
told him that he would be cleansed from sin, on repentance and
on baptism, he was delighted with their representations, and
admired their doctrines, and became a Christian, and led his
subjects to the same faith. It appears to me that this story was
the invention of persons who desired to vilify the Christian
religion. ... It cannot be imagined the philosopher was ignorant
that Hercules obtained purification at Athens by the celebration
of the mysteries of Ceres after the murder of his children, and
of Iphitus, his guest and friend. That the Greeks held that
purification from guilt of this nature could be obtained, is
obvious from the instance I have just alleged, and he is a false
calumniator who represents that Sopater taught the contrary, ...
for he was at that period esteemed the most learned man in
Greece. (Sozomen, i, 5; ii, 242-3.) It is said that the rebuff
of Sopater denying Pagan absolution was the motive of his murder
by the Christian Emperor. Howbeit, Constantine cautiously denied
himself the saving Christian rite of baptism until he was on his
deathbed, in Nicomedia, in the year of his forgiving Lord 337.
(Euseb., Life, iv, 62; Soc., i, 39; Soz., ii, 34; CE. i, 709.)
But none can deny the superiority of Christianity over Paganism
in this point of saving grace. The Christian historian, however,
clearly avers that some of the divinest sacraments of Christian
Revelation,
{203} forgiveness of sin by God and
absolution per priests, were ancient features of the Pagan
Mysteries, of which even sinful Pagan demigods might be the
beneficiaries.
But the mighty and victorious Constantine, adorned with every
virtue of religion, with his most pious son, Crispus Caesar,
resembling in everything his father,as his doxology is
sungbefore the murder of Crisptisby good Bishop
Eusebius (HE. ix, p. 443),was rather dubiously a practicing
Christian; he remained until death Pontifex Maximus, or Sovereign
Pontiff of the Pagan religion, a title which the Christian
Bishops could not arrogate until the Christian Emperors abandoned
it; he ordered the auspices or divination by inspection of the
entrails of birds, and on his death, amply baptized with blood
and by the deathbed heretic Christian rite, he was apotheoisized
according to Pagan custom and raised as a god to heavento
rank along with his Christian Sainted Mother, St. Helena, of whom
more anon.
In this ecstatic vision of the celestial beatitude of
Constantine, the good Bishop Eusebius was, from the orthodox or
right-thinking viewpoint sadly mistaken. Constantine went
unshriven to Hell and everlasting torment; not indeed for his
crimes but for his errant creed, as a disbeliever in the Divinity
of Jesus Christ and in the Holy Trinitywhich, indeed, had
not been yet invented. The majority of the Council of Niceea had
by force and terrorism decreed that Jesus Christ was of the same
substance as his father God, co-eternal and coequal, ergo also
God. But Constantine heretically disbelieved this inspired dogma;
he banished Athanasius and other Trinitarian? prelates; even the
death of Arius did not stay the plague. Constantine now favored
none but Arians; he was baptized in his last moments by the
shifty [Arian] prelate of Nicomedia; and he bequeathed to his
three sons [themselves either Pagans or Arian heretics] an empire
torn by dissensions which his weakness and ignorance had
aggravated. (CE. i, 709.) To such a weak and ignorant Emperor is
due, however, the salvation of Christianity from oblivion, and
upon him is lavished the adulations of the now indefectible
Church which his favor alone made possible. As for the pious
Bishop Eusebius, he was himself an Arian heretic, and from his
point of view he may have thought that he visioned Constantine
glorious in Heaven. So much for divergent religious standpoints,
which at the first Church Council proved a beginning of strife,
... bequeathed an empire torn with dissensions, ... [until] the
Catholic bishops, the monks, the sword of Clovis, and the action
of the Papacy, made an end of it before the eighth century (CE.
i, 710),thus nearly four hundred years of throat-cutting
and persecutions before Constantine was finally proved a
villainous heretic, the fatal effects of his weakness and
ignorance overcome, and Catholic Truth began to assume its full
sway undisputed through the long intellectual night of the
Christian Dark Ages of Faith.
CHRISTIAN FORGERIES FOR POWER AND
PELF
The league with Death and covenant with Hell
whereby the new Paganism called Christianity became the official
State religion being now signed and sealed, and soon enforced by
laws of bloody persecution, we shall now admire the most
monumental of the holy {204} forgeries by which the
Church consolidated its vast and nefast dominion over the minds
and bodies of the quickly degraded populations under its sway.
THE CONSTANTINE FORGERIES
A series of Church forgeries of the greatest magnitude and most
far-reaching evil consequences grew up around the name of
Constantine, forged in his name or falsely associated with it in
the nefarious work of almost limitless larceny of territorial
possessions and of papal sovereignty. A bit of historical
background is necessary to properly appreciate the underground
workings of Providence in disposing the success of these
designs,whereby, as said by Dr. McCabe, Pope Adrian I
induced Charlemagne to found the papal states by producing two
of the most notorious and most shameless forgeries ever
perpetrated: The Acts of St. Sylvester, and The Donation of
Constantine, documents which mendaciously represented the emperor
Constantine as giving most of Italy to the papacy, and which were
fabricated in Rome in the eighth century and were used by the
popes to maintain this gigantic fraud.
The intricate intriguing and conspiracies of the embryo papacy
under their Holinesses Zacharias, Stephen II, Adrian I, Leo III,
and of the semi-barbarian aspirants for the Frankish monarchy,
Clovis, Charles Martel, Pepin, Charlemagne, cannot be here
recounted. According to the picturesque account of Bishop St.
Gregory of Tourswhose History is a thesaurus of the
revolting social and moral degradation of the times, Clovis was
converted as the result of his vow to the God of his Christian
wife Clotilda, that if victory were granted to him in a great
battle against the Alemanni, in which he was hard pressed, he
would become a Christian. Miracles at once attested the Divine
favor: St. Martin showed him a ford over the Vienne by means of
a hind; St. Hilary preceded his armies in a column of fire. (Von
Ranke, i, 12.) It will be remembered that all the barbarian
nations of the time were heretic Christians of the hated Arian
sect, who denied the divinity of Christ and derided the Holy
Trinity; the Franks thus became the only orthodox Christians and
the defenders of the True Faith on behalf of the Popes. Winning
the fight, Clovis and 3000 of his army were baptized on Christmas
day by Bishop St. Remigius of Rheims. When this good Bishop came
to perform the baptismal ceremony on the king in the cathedral
of Rheims, the chrism for the baptismal ceremony was missing, and
was brought from heaven in a vase (ampulla) borne by a dove. This
is what is known as the Sainte Ampoule of Rheims, preserved in
the treasury of the Cathedral of that City, and used for the
coronation of the kings of France from Philip Augustus down to
Charles X! (CE. v, 71.)
FORGED DEEDS OF EMPIRE
The Merovingian kings of the Franks had
become mere puppets in the hands of their Mayors of the Palace,
in league with the bishops of Rome. At last Pepin addressed to
the pope the suggestive question: In regard to the Kings of the
Franks who no longer possess the royal power, is this state of
things proper? ... Pope Zacharias replied that such a state of
things was not {205} proper[that he should be king
who possessed the royal power]. After this decision the place
Pepin desired was declared vacant. ... Still this external
cooperation of the pope in the transfer of the Kingdom would
necessarily enhance the importance of the Church. Pepin was also
obliged to acknowledge the increased power of the Church by
calling on it for moral [?] support. (CE. xi, 663.) In pay or
reward for this moral support given by the Church, Pepin, it is
said, gave to the Church some considerable territories around
Rome, which at the incitation of the Pope he had wrested by arms
from the neighboring Lombards.
THE FORGED LETTER OF ST.
PETER
To this alleged gift Pepin was induced not
alone by the sentiment of guilty gratitude to Zacharias and
Stephen, the latter of whom crowned him King of the Franks in
751; for further persuasion His Holiness Stephen II procured from
the Vatican Forgery Mill the identical autograph letter of St.
Peter himself, prophetically addressed To the King of the Franks,
and so mystically worded that: When Stephen II performed the
ceremony of anointing Pepin and his son at St. Denis, it was St.
Peter who was regarded as the mystical giver of the secular
power! (CE. xi, 663.) This cunning Papal forgery and fraud is
thus described by a high authority: The pontiff dictated his
letter in the name of the apostle Peter, closely imitating his
epistles, and speaking in a language which implied that he was
possessed of an authority to anoint or dethrone kings, and to
perform the offices, not of a messenger, of a teacher sent from
God, which is the highest characteristic of an apostle, but of
a delegated minister of His power and justice. (Historians
History of the World, vol. viii, p. 557.)
Also: The Frankish king received the title of the former
representative of the Byzantine Empire in Italy, i.e. Patricius,
and was also assigned the duty of protecting the privileges of
the Holy See. ... After the acknowledgment of his territorial
claims the pope was in reality a ruling sovereign, but he had
placed himself under the protection of the Frankish ruler, and
had sworn that he and his people would be true to the king (CE.
xi, 663),the divine birthright thus swapped for a mess of
political potage: for over a thousand years since it has been a
mess indeed. Thus by conspiracy, fraud, and unrighteous conquest
was laid the foundation of the sacred Patrimony of Peter, and the
unholy league between the papacy and the French kings, which
reached full fruition in the holy massacres of the Albigenses,
of the Vendee, and of St. Bartholomew.
A HOLY CONSPIRATION
The next step in the progress conquering and
to conquer of Christs prostituted Church was on a broader stage
and with yet vaster consequences. Pepin died in 768, dividing his
realms between his two sons, Carloman and Charles, later by the
Grace of God and great villainy known to fame as Charles the
Great or Charlemagne; Charles receiving the German part, Carloman
the French. On the death of Carloman, in 771, Charles seized the
Frankish kingdom. The widow and young heirs of Carloman fled for
protection and aid to {206} Desiderius, king of the
Lombards, part of whose stolen territory the pope held for God
and Church. Desiderius was also father of the repudiated first
wife of Charles; the holy matrimonial mess is thus defined:
Charles was already, in foro conscientiae, if not in Frankish
law, wedded to Himiltrude. In defiance of the popes protest,
Charles married Desiderata, daughter of Desiderius (770); three
years later he repudiated her and married Hildegarde, the
beautiful Swabian. Naturally, Desiderius was furious at this
insult, and the dominions of the Holy See bore the first brunt
of his wrath. (CE. iii,.612.) Charles thereupon had to protect
Rome against the Lombard; finally the Lombards were put to utter
rout; Charles proceeded to Rome; and history records with vivid
eloquence the first visit of Charles to the Eternal City. ...
Charles himself forgot pagan Rome and prostrated himself to kiss
the threshold of the Apostles, and then spent seven days in
conference with the successor of Peter. It was then that he
undoubtedly formed many great designs for the glory of God and
the exaltation of Holy Church, which, in spite of human
weaknesses, and, still more, ignorance, he did his best to
realize. (Ib. 612.) The principal fruit of this weakness and
ignorance of Charles seems to be that he could so easily let
himself be duped by His Holiness through the enormous forgeries
for Christs sake that were now imposed upon him. In 774 Charles
finally defeated Desiderius and assumed the crown of Lombardy,
and renewed to Adrian [now Holiness of Rome] the donation of
territory made by Pepin. The genuineness of this donation, as
well as of the original gift of Pepin, have been much questioned,
says CE., but are now generally admitted,which is none too
assuring; but another document, this time favorable to Charles,
is just the other way: The so-called Privilegium Hadriani pro
Carolo granting him full right to nominate the pope and to invest
all bishops, is a forgery. (CE. xi, 612). Here is precisely the
reason and only effective use of this forged Donation of
Constantineit was the basis for the inducement to
Charlemagne to win the Lombard territories for the Church and to
reinstate it in the Patrimony of Peter, largely swollen by the
pretended new gifts of the ambitious king, who, in the seven days
conference with His Holiness, had, undoubtedly, formed together
some great designs for the glory of God and the exaltation of
Holy Church, now begun to be realized.
The quarter of a century passed, and much history was made. The
Roman emperors ruled from Constantinople; Roman popes and kings
were legitimately their liegemen; the Emperor of Constantinople,
legitimate heir of the imperial title, now becomes the victim of
papal and kingly conspiration, thus brought to its climax: On
Christmas Day, 800, took place the principal event of the life
of Charles. During the Pontifical Mass celebrated before the high
altar beneath which lay the bodies of Sts. Peter and Paul, the
pope (Leo III) approached him, placed upon his head the imperial
crown, did him formal reverence after the ancient manner, saluted
him as Emperor and Augustus and anointed him, while the Roman
rabble shouted its approval. Thus, again by collusion and
usurpation, began that Holy Roman Empire, of nefast history,
which Bryce qualifies as neither holy, nor Roman, nor empire; but
the Vicars of God were now well started on their way to worldly
grandeur and moral degradation. Now for their forgeries.
{207}
THE POPE SYLVESTER
FORGERIES
The monumental forgeries which were boldly
used by their Holinesses to dupe Charlemagne and Christendom into
recognizing the papal claim of right of ownership and sovereignty
over a great part of Italy are a series of spurious documents
harking in pretended date and origin back to the first Christian
emperor Constantine and to His Holiness Pope St. Sylvester
(314-335). About the name of Sylvester arose the Sylvester Legend
later surrounded with that network of myth, that gave rise to the
forged document known as the Donation of Constantine. (CE. xiv,
257.) This fable, says Prof. Shotwell, made its way, gathering
volume as it went, reinforced eventually by a forged Donation,
until it had imposed upon all Europe the conception of Sylvester
as the potent influence behind Constantines most striking
measures and of Constantine himself as the dutiful servant of the
See of Peter. (See of Peter, xxvi.) The extensive variety but
common general nature of these Sylvester forgeries is thus
indicated:At an early date legend brings
Pope St. Sylvester into close relationship with the first
Christian emperor, but in a way that is contrary to historical
fact. These legends were introduced especially into the Vita
beati Sylvestri, and in the Constitutum Sylvestrian
apocryphal account of an alleged Roman council which belongs to
the Symmachian forgeries and appeared between 501 and 508, and
also in the Donatio Constantini. The accounts given in all these
writings concerning the persecution of Sylvester, the healing and
baptism of Constantine, the emperors gift to the pope, the rights
granted to the latter, and the council of 275 bishops at Rome,
are entirely legendary (CE. xiv, 370-371).
THE FORGED DONATION OF
CONSTANTINE Ah, Constantine!
to how much ill gave birth,
Not thy conversion, but that
plenteous dewer,
Which the first wealthy Father gained from
thee!
- Dante, Inferno, xix, 115.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, artless revealer of the frauds of the
Church for which it is an authorized spokesman, gives this
account of the famous Donatio Constantini, which is describes as
a forged document of Emperor Constantine the Great, by which
large privileges and rich possessions were conferred on the pope
and the Roman Church. ... It is addressed by Constantine to Pope
Sylvester I (314-35), and consists of two parts. ... Constantine
is made to confer on Sylvester and his successors the following
privileges and possessions: the pope, as successor of St. Peter,
has the primacy over the four Patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria,
Constantinople, and Jerusalem, also over all the bishops in the
world. ... The document goes on to say that for himself the
Emperor has established in the East a new capital which bears his
name, and thither he removes his capital, since it is
inconvenient that a secular emperor have power where God has
established the residence of the head of the Christian religion.
The document concludes with maledictions against all who violate
these donations and with the assurance that the emperor has
signed them with his own hand and placed them on the tomb of St.
{208} Peter. This document is without doubt a forgery,
fabricated somewhere between the years 750 and 850. As early as
the 15
th
century its falsity was known and demonstrated. ... Its genuinity
was yet occasionally defended, and the document still further
used as authentic, until Baronius in his Annals Ecclesiastici
admitted that the Donatio was a forgery, whereafter it was soon
universally admitted to be such. It is so clearly a fabrication
that there is no reason to wonder that, with the revival of
historical criticism in the 15 th century, the true character
of the document was at once recognized. ... The document obtained
wider circulation by its incorporation with the False Decretals
(840-850). (CE. v, 118, 119, 120.)
By Lord Bryce a graphic sketch of this notorious fraud is given,
with comments as to the mental and moral qualities of the
priestcraft which it reflects. It is, he says, themost
stupendous of medieval forgeries, which under the name of
Donation of Constantine commanded for seven centuries the
unquestioning belief of mankind. Itself a portentous falsehood,
it is the most unimpeachable evidence of the thoughts and beliefs
of the priesthood which framed it, sometime between the middle
of the eighth and the middle of the tenth century. It tells how
Constantine the Great, cured of his leprosy by the prayers of
Sylvester, resolved, on the fourth day of his baptism, to forsake
the ancient seat for a new capital on the Bosphorus, lest the
continuance of the secular government should cramp the freedom
of the spiritual, and how he bestowed therewith upon the Pope and
his successors the sovereignty over Italy and the countries of
the West. (Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, Ch. vii, p. 97; Latin text,
extracts, p. 98.) In addition to these extraordinary
investitures, all forms of imperial pomp, privileges and
dignities were spuriously granted to the Pope and his clerics,
all of them enjoyed by the Emperor and his senate, all of them
showing the same desire to make the pontifical a copy of the
imperial office. The Pope is to inhabit the Lateran palace, to
wear the diadem, the collar, the purple cloak, to carry the
scepter, and to be attended by a body of chamberlains. Similarly
his clergy are to ride on white horses and receive the honors and
immunities of the senate and patricians, including the practice
of kissing the popes foot, adopted in imitation of the old
imperial court. (Ib. pp. 97-98.)
The grossness and absurdity of these stupendous forgeries, with
their pious recitals of Constantines leprosy cured by Sylvesters
prayers, the consequent conversion and baptism of the Emperor in
the Lateran font, and the abandonment of Rome by Constantine in
order to leave it free for Gods Vicar, just up from the
catacombs, to ape imperial pomp, is made manifest by a moments
notice of dates, and recollection of contemporary history.
Sylvesters Holiness dates from 314, he died in 335; Constantine
in 337. Constantines conversion by the In Hoc Signo miracle, was
in 312, before Sylvester became pope; at no time did Constantine
have leprosy, other than moral, therefore no physical cure was
wrought by Sylvesters prayers, and certainly no moral cleansing
worthy of note; Constantine was not baptized by Sylvester in
Rome, but heretically received that rite long after Sylvesters
death, and just before his own, in Nicomedia of
{209}
Asia Minor. (CE. i, 709.) But Christians were too sodden in
ignorance to know these things, and it was only with the revival
of historical criticism which marked the beginning of the end of
the Ages of Faith, that the truth was disclosed, or could have
been perceived. In words that blast and sear with infamy the
perpetrators and the conscious beneficiaries of this monumental
fraud and forgery, Gibbon says:
Fraud is the
resource of weakness and cunning; and the strong, though ignorant
barbarian, was often entangled in the net of sacerdotal policy.
... The Decretal and the Donation of Constantine, the two magical
pillars of the spiritual and temporal monarchy of the popes. This
memorable donation was first introduced to the world by an
epistle of Adrian the first, who exhorts Charlemagne to imitate
the liberality, and revive the name, of the great Constantine.
... So deep was, the ignorance and credulity of the times, that
the most absurd of fables was received, with equal reverence, in
Greece and in France, and is still enrolled among the decrees of
the canon law. The emperors, and the Romans, were incapable of
discerning a forgery, that subverted their rights and
freedom.
... The popes themselves have indulged a smile at the
credulity of the vulgar; but a false and obsolete title still
sanctifies their reign; and, by the same fortune which has
attended the decretals and the Sibylline Oracles, the edifice has
subsisted after the foundations have been
undermined.
(Gibbon, Rise and Fall
of the Roman Empire, ch. xiv, pp. 740, 741,
742.)
The falsity of the Donation was first alleged and proved, in
1440, by the acute Humanist critic Lorenzo Valla, who has the
exposure of more than one Church forgery to his credit, and who
narrowly escaped the Holy Inquisition; and yet the document was
still used as authentic by Holy Church until the great Churchman
critic Baronius forced the confession of the fraud, but the
Church still for centuries clung to the fruits of its fraud, and
would not give them up, with their revenues and rotten
sovereignty. The ancient forgery of Donation was finally canceled
by Italian patriot bayonets in 1870, and the stolen territories
of Peters Patrimon restored to United Italy. That these Papal
territories were not of divine right, nor of even forged
muniments which can be plausibly urged, is thus confessed: All
of this, of course, is based upon painstaking deductions since
no document has come down to us either from the time of
Charlemagne or from that of Pepin. (CE. xiv, 261.) This is
confirmed, and the precarious nature of the usurped tenure thus
stated: Nominally, Adrian I (772-775) was now monarch of about
two-thirds of the Italian peninsula, but his sway was little more
than nominal. ... It was in no slight degree owing to Adrians
political sagacity, vigilance, and activity, that the temporal
power of the Papacy did not remain a fiction of the imagination.
... The temporal power of the popes, of which Adrian I must be
considered the real founder. (CE. i, 155-156.)
In a paragraph which gives a word of credit to Valla for his
exposure of the forgeries of the Donation and the immense and
remarkable Pseudo-Areopagite Forgeries, previously mentioned,
{210} the vast extent of the output of the Vatican
Forgery-Milland the evil persistence of the Church in
clinging to them after exposure, is thus admitted: Lorenzo Valla,
1440, counselled Engenius IV not to rely on the Donation of
Constantine, which he proved to be spurious. ... It was Valla who
first denied the authenticity of those writings which for
centuries had been going about as the treatises composed by
Dionysius the Areopagite. Three centuries later the Benedictines
of St. Maur and the Bollandists were still engaged in sifting out
the true from the false in patristic literature, in hagiology,
in the story of the foundation of local churches (CE. xii,
768),such Liars of the Lord were the pious parasites of
Holy Church.
THE SYMMACHIAN FORGERIES
Among the sheaf of forged documents above
confessed by CE. are the so-called Symmachian Forgeries, forged
by or in behoof of His Holiness Pope St. Symmachus (498-514),
products of the Church Forgery Mill operated by the Pope to
further papal pretensions of the independence of the Bishops of
Rome from the just criticisms and judgment of ecclesiastical
tribunals, and putting them above law clerical and secular.
Whenever there was need for false precedents, a simple turn of
the crank of the wheel of the papal forgery-mill produced them
just to order. Thus, in this instance: During the dispute between
Pope St. Symmachus and the anti-pope Laurentius, the adherents
of Symmachus drew up four apocryphal writings called the
Symmachian Forgeries. ... The object of these forgeries was to
produce alleged instances from earlier times to support the whole
procedure of the adherents of Symmachus, and, in particular, the
position that the Roman bishop could not be judged by any court
composed of other bishops. (CE. xiv, 378.) Our Confessor is
careful twice to impute these confessed forgeries to the
adherents of His Holiness; but they were forged for him, used,
of course with his knowledge and consent, to further his cause
in the dispute; they are thus distinctly forgeries by His
Holiness.
THE FALSE DECRETALS
FORGERIES
A record of forgery in the interest of the
Church which resembles nothing else in history, in the words of
Dr. McCabe, has so far been presented; the climax and capstone
is now to be seen in what Voltaire terms the boldest and most
magnificent forgery which has deceived the world for centuries,
the so-called False Decretals of Isidore. While it is true, as
said by Reinach, that never yet has the papacy acknowledged that
for 1000 years it made use of forged documents for its own
benefit, yet we have seen a thousand confessions of the fact of
forgery, and either the admission or the inevitable inference,
that they were used by the Church in the fraudulent obtention of
viciously illicit ends. The following brief paragraph of further
confession from CE., is pregnant with suggestion of the moral
depravity of popes and priests, the whole Church, the sodden
ignorance of the votaries of Holy Church, cleric and lay, the
darkness of the life of mind and spirit till at the Renaissance
men were reborn indeed, and after slow and painful growth of
learning and of freeing from fear, began to expose the Church in
its forgeries, {211} frauds, and vices. The tone of CE.
is quite apologetical for this particular monument of Church
fraud; it seeks palliation in the conditions of ignorance of the
Middle Ages; but it forgets that Holy Church purposely produced
this ignorance, and that Popes and Church are illumined by the
Holy Ghost of their God against all ignorance and error so that
its Church never has erred and never shall: but maybe this
statement is itself an error. CE. now speaks for this gigantic
fraud of Holy Church, the False Isidorian
Decretals:Isidorian Decretals is the name
given to certain apocryphal letters contained in a collection of
canon laws composed about the middle of the ninth century. ...
Nowadays every one agrees that these so-called papal letters are
forgeries. These documents, about 100 in number, appeared
suddenly in the ninth century and are nowhere mentioned before
that time. ... The pseudo-Isidore makes use of documents written
long after the times of the popes to whom he attributed them. The
popes of the first three centuries are made to quote documents
that did not appear until the fourth or fifth century, etc. Then
again there are endless anachronisms. The Middle Ages were
deceived by this huge forgery, but during the Renaissance men of
learning and the canonists generally began to recognize the
fraud. ... Nevertheless the official edition of the Corpus Juris,
in 1580, upheld the genuineness of the false decretals. (CE. vi,
773.) But the God-guided Vicars of God knew they were
forgeries.
Upon these spurious decretals, says Hallam, was built the
great fabric of papal supremacy over the different national
churches; a fabric which has stood after its foundations crumbled
beneath it; for no one has pretended to deny, for the last two
centuries, that the imposture is too palpable for any but the
most ignorant ages to credit. (History of the Middle Ages, Bk.
VII, ch. ii, 99.) Though on their face affecting only matters
spiritual and causes ecclesiastical, they soon had all Europe
strangled as in the tentacles of a giant octopus, by a process
thus described by Lord Bryce: By the invention and adoption of
the False Decretals it (the Church) had provided itself with a
legal system suited to any emergency, and which gave it unlimited
authority through the Christian world in causes spiritual and
over persons ecclesiastical. Canonical ingenuity found it easy
in one way or another to make this include all causes and persons
whatsoever; for crime is always and wrong is often sin, nor can
aught be done anywhere which may not affect the clergy. (Holy
Roman Empire, ch. x, 152.) The Forgery, says Dr. Draper, produced
an immense extension of papal power, it displaced the old Church
government, divesting it of the republican attributes it had
possessed, and transforming it into an absolute monarchy. It
brought the bishops into subjection to Rome, and made the pontiff
the supreme judge of the whole Christian world. It prepared the
way for the great attempt, subsequently made by Hildebrand, to
convert the states of Europe into a theocratic priest-kingdom,
with the pope at its head.
(Conflict between Religion and Science, ch. x, 271.)
{212}
The false pretense back of the huge forgery was that the
documents included were genuine papal letters and decretals of
the earliest popes, thus carrying back the Churchs late
pretensions to the very first of the Church and to the pretended
and fictitious associates and Successors of Peter. These spurious
documents are taken up seriatim by the critical Father Dupin, as
outlined in ANF., viii, and each in its turn pronounced a
forgery. From the Introductory Notice to the Decretals, I think
it pertinent to quote the following
paragraph:
These frauds, which, pretending to be
a series of papal edicts from Clement and his successors during
the ante-Niccne ages, are, in fact, the manufactured product of
the ninth century,the most stupendous imposture of the
worlds history, the most successful and the most stubborn in its
hold upon enlightened nations. Like the masons framework of lath
and scantlings, on which he turns an arch of massive stone, the
Decretals served their purpose, enabling Nicholas I to found the
Papacy by their insignificant aid. That swelling arch of vanity
once reared, the framework might be knocked out; but the fabric
stood, and has borne up every weight imposed upon it for ages.
Its strong abutments have been ignorance and despotism. Nicholas
produced his flimsy framework of imposture, and amazed the whole
Church by the audacity of the claims he founded upon it. The age,
however, was unlearned and uncritical; and, in spite of
remonstrances from France under lead of Hincmar, bishop of
Rheims, the West patiently submitted to the overthrow of the
ancient Canons and the Nicene Constitutions, and bowed to the
yoke of a new canon law, of which these frauds were not only made
an integral, but the essential, part. The East never accepted
them for a moment. ... The Papacy created the Western schism, and
contrived to call it the schism of the Greeks. The Decretals had
created the Papacy, and they enabled the first Pope to assume
that communion with himself was the test of Catholic communion:
hence his excommunication of the Easterns, which, after brief
intervals of relaxation, settled into the chronic schism of the
Papacy, and produced the awful history of the medieval Church in
Western Europe. (ANF. viii, 601.)
THE FORGED DECRETUM OF
GRATIAN
Great and pernicious as were the influences
of the forged Isidorian Decretals, there yet remained a step to
bring the Forger Church to the height of its age-old ambitious
scheme to completely imitate the olden Roman Empire and dominate
the world. The School of Bologna had just revived the study of
Roman law; Gratian sought to inaugurate a similar study of canon
law. But while compilations of texts and official collections
were available for Roman law, or Corpus juris civilis, Gratian
had no such assistance. He therefore adopted the plan of
inserting the texts in the body of his general treatise; from the
disordered mass of canons, collected from the earliest days, he
selected the law actually in force. ... The science of canon law
was at length established. (CE. ix, 57.) But this disordered mass
out of which Gratian selected was very largely the old {213}
forged reliances of the Church; thus in making his
selections Gratian alleges forged decretals (CE.
iv,),including the Constantine Donation, the Isidore
forgeries, etc. Yet, withal, the Decretum of Gratian was
considered in the middle of the twelfth century as a corpus juris
canonici, i.e. a code of ecclesiastic laws then in force.
(CE. iv, 671.) It clinched the rivets in the forged fetters of
the Church upon the neck of Christendom, and sanctioned the
principles which in the next century were invoked to found and
justify the Holy Inquisition. Of this celebrated document, the
beginning of the science of Church legistic sophistry, Draper
says: The most potent instrument of the new papal system was
Gratians Decretum, which was issued about the middle of the
Twelfth Century. It was a mass of fabrications. It made the whole
Christian world, through the papacy, the domain of the Italian
clergy. It inculcated that it is lawful to constrain men to
goodness, to torture and execute heretics, and to confiscate
their property; that to kill an excommunicated person is not
murder; that the pope, in his unlimited superiority to all law,
stands on an equality with the Son of God. (Conflict between
Science and Religion, ch. x, p. 273.)
THE FULL FRUITION OF
FORGERY
As said by Dr. McCabe: There was no need of
further forgeries. Now securely established on its basis of
forged donations of temporal power and territory, forged
decretals stating its spiritual powers, and forged lives of
saints and martyrs, the papacy was so strong and prosperous that
the popes actually dreamed of forming a sort of United States of
Europe with themselves as virtual presidents. Nearly every
country was in some ingenious way made out to be a fief of the
Papacy and bound to recognize the Pope as its feudal monarch.
(LBB. 1130, 44-5.)
Founding thus its religion, that newer form of Paganism called
Christianity, on falsehood and forged Scripture documents; its
pretensions to superiority and primacy on gross interpolations
into the forged Scriptures; its spurious claims to territorial
possessions and temporal sovereignty upon forged title-deeds and
Donations; its spiritual and legal domination upon forged Church
law and constitutions,thus was the visible Church of Christ
brought to the perfection of its power and degradation. For
fifteen hundred years every document under which it claimed, it
forged; it forged until it had no longer need of forgery, for
nothing was left to forge; forged so long as it could forge with
impunity, for with the Renaissance its old forgeries began to be
discovered and exposed, and it could commit undetected no further
documentary forgeries.
Such is the objective side, as it were, of the Christian
religion and its Church. Its subjective side, the subjugation of
its victims by imposed ignorance and superstition, through
limitless forgeries of miracles, martyrs, saints and relics,
remains to be briefly noticed as a sort of by-product of the Holy
Church Forgery Mill.
{214}
THE FRUSTRATED EMS REVOLT
Not to mention the revolt known as the Reformation, the
discovery of the unholy and criminal practices of the Church in
the matter of its claims of primacy and jurisdiction, as defined
in the Isidorian False Decretals, led to one tardy and half-way
ecclesiastical effort of revolt within the Roman Church, which
might have developed into something worth while to humanity as
a whole, but that political considerations intervened to bring
it to naught. It is cited simply by way of historical reminder,
and as suggestive of what may yet be effectively accomplished to
the full extent of popular repudiation.
The Congress of Ems, in 1786, was a gathering of the
representatives of a number of German Archbishops and other
clergy, for the purpose of protesting against papal interference
in the exercise of episcopal powers and fixing the future
relations between these archbishops and the Roman pontiff. ...
On 25 August, 1786, these archiepiscopal representatives signed
the notorious Punctation of Ems, consisting of twenty-three
articles, which aimed at making the German archbishops
practically independent of Rome. Assuming that Christ gave
unlimited power of binding and loosing to the Apostles and their
successors, the bishops, the Punctation maintains that all
prerogatives and reservations which were not actually connected
with the primacy during the first three centuries owe their
origin, to the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, universally
acknowledged as false, and, hence, that the bishops must look
upon all interference of the Roman Curia with the exercise of
their episcopal functions in their own dioceses as encroachments
on their rights. ... It may easily be seen that the articles of
the Punctation lower the papal primacy to a merely honorary one
and advocate an independence of the arch-bishops in regard to the
pope which is entirely incompatible with the Unity and
Catholicity of the Church of Christ,such are the unctuous
objections made by Christs Church. However, the Punctations were
ratified by the Archbishops, and sent to Emperor Joseph ii for
his support. The Emperor was pleased with the articles, and would
have pledged his unqualified support if his councillors had not
for political reasons advised him otherwise. (CE. v, 409-10.)
Rejecting the assumption, now known to be false and forged, that
Christ had anything at all to do with Peter and the Rock-and-Keys
forgery, all may now feel free to discard these primitive
Scripture frauds just as all the others of the Church which have
been exposed as false and abandoned.
FORGED SAINTS, MARTYRS AND
MIRACLESThroughout
Church History there are miracles so well authenticated that
their truth cannot be denied. (CE. x, 345.)
... after the working of Satan with all power and signs and
lying wonders. (2 Thess. ii, 9.)
Look we for a moment on this picture and on that, the
counterfeit presentment, to slightly adapt Hamlet, of two modern
Miracles, published to the world in the Metropolitan
press,a sort of study in what may be called Comparative
Credulity. The
{215} first, although they read it in the
paper, no Christian or no Infidel will hesitate to laugh at or
commiserate as a ridiculous superstition, taken advantage of by
greedy priests to exploit their credulous dupes. Only benighted
heathen Buddhists religiously believe the
following:
Peasant says Buddha Arose and Cured
Him.
Chinese Tale of a Miracle by Stone Image Causes Religious
Revival at Peking
Peking, Sept. 7. A tremendous revival of religious
superstition is being experienced by the Buddhists of Peking and
vicinity, because an aged peasant vows that he was cured (last
week) of a long-standing ailment when one of the stone images of
the sitting Buddha at Palichwang Pagoda rose to its feet, stepped
forward, and then raised its arm in sign of benediction.
The old peasant, named Chang Chi-kuang, is a farmer, living
near Palichwang Pagoda [a short distance from the Peking gate of
the Great Wall]. Chang Chi-kuang, who, his neighbors say, has
long suffered from lung trouble [passing by with a load of
garden-truck which he was carrying afoot into the city], became
exhausted, and stopped for rest and for refuge from the heat in
the shade of an old tree near the Pagoda, which is thirteen
stories high and was built 500 years ago, and in the days of the
Ming emperors.
Chang Chi-kuang, as he lay resting in the shade, found his
gaze focused on the figure of the sitting Buddha, in the third
story of the Pagoda. ... The figure rose, Chang says, took two
steps, and raised its arms with a gesture of blessing. At this
point, according to Chang, he nearly swooned. He then fell to his
knees in devout worship, and when he raised his head after a long
prayer the Buddha had gone back to the place and position of the
last few hundred years.
The story of this miracle has spread rapidly. Every day now
thousands of pilgrims go to Palichwang from Peking and from the
villages and farms in this part of the province.
Both sides of the road from the Peking gate to the Pagoda are
now lined with booths where incense is sold, and hundreds of Lama
priests, with their begging bowls, now reap a rich gathering from
the pious pilgrims. ... And old Chang swears that he is now in
better health than he has enjoyed since he was a boy. (Special
Correspondence of the New York Times, October 14,
1928.)
The foregoing religious news item is found archived in the
Morgue of the Great Religious Daily under the discrediting
caption Superstitions; it will be noticed that the word Miracle
in the headline is printed in quotes. No such skeptical note is
to be found in its nextChristianreport.
Hundreds of millions of pious priest-ridden Christians do
believe the following, testified under oath in a military
court,other hundreds of millions will regard it as they do
the Buddhist tale above related,and the Christian one
below:
{216}Soldiers
Story of a Miracle Saves Him at Court-Martial.
Croatian newspapers tell how a miracle figured as a
determining factor in a court-martial trial. During the Austrian
invasion of Upper Italy a Croatian soldier was suspected of
having stolen a pearl necklace from a statue of the Holy Virgin
in a pilgrims church and was brought to trial. He admitted having
taken the necklace. but insisted that it was a gift to
him.
He said that he had gone into the church to pray, and had
lamented before the statue of the Virgin the sad lot of his
family, whom he had been compelled to leave destitute. Thereupon,
he said, the Holy Virgin bowed her head, and took the pearls from
her neck and handed them to him.
The Court could not venture to reject this story offhand, as
there was general belief in the miracle-working power of the
statue. So it referred the matter to two Bishops, asking them
whether such a miracle was within the domain of
possibility.
The Bishops were perplexed. If they answered Yes, they might
be protecting a rascal. But if they said No, they would destroy
the repute of that church for miraculous power and phenomena.
Finally they answered that such a miracle was within the range
of possibility; and in consequence the soldier was
acquitted.
But the Colonel of the regiment to which the soldier belonged
was either skeptical or of a most prudent turn of mind, for after
the verdict of the court had been announced he issued his order:
In future no soldier under my command is permitted, under heavy
penalty, to accept a gift from anybody. (New York Times, Oct. 10,
1926.)
It is not reported whether this episcopal pair of men of God
were unfrocked for perjury and the perversion of justice, or even
gently chided by His Holiness.
The lying wonders of saints, martyrs and miracles are so
intimately related, and so inextricably interwoven the one form
of pious fraud with the others, that they must needs be bunched
together in this summary treatment of but few out of countless
thousands, millions perhaps, of them recorded for faith and
edification in the innumerable Acts and Lives and wonder-works
of the Holy Church of God. Those which are here mentioned are
picked at random from a turning of the pages of the fifteen
ponderous tomes of CE., where they may be verified under the
respective names of the Saints. With scarcely an exception they
are soberly recounted as actual verities of the past and living
realities of the present.
The degraded state of mind of the Faithful, and the moral
depravity of the Church which for nearly two millennia, and yet
into the twentieth century, peddles these childish fables as
articles of Christian faith, may be known by the mere fact of the
{217} existence in limitless numbers of these precious
myths. Founded by Jean Bolland, of Belgium, in the early years
of the 1600s, an important Church Society, known as the
Bollandists, yet exists and industriously carries on its labors.
This monumental work, the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, has
become the foundation of all investigation in hagiography and
legend. (CE. ix, 129.) For some three centuries its task has been
and yet is, to edit and publish in official Acta Sanctorum the
Lives and Actsauthenticated recordsof every Saint in
the Holy Roman Calendar. Arranged in order of dates of their
feast days, so numerous is this heavenly mill-made host that up
to the month of October over 25,000 officially authenticated
Saints are recorded; the Saint-library of the Society has over
150,000 saintly volumes. As it costs about $50,000 to turn out
one Saint by canonization, and not less than $20,000 for
beatification or the bestowal of the title of Blessed (CE. ii,
369),the Church revenue from this single source is seen to
have been considerable.
Holy Church is very careful and conscientious in its processes
of certifying Saints; at least two allegedly genuine and fully
authenticated miracles must be proven to have been performed by
the candidate alive or worked by his relics after death, before
final payment is required and the name certified as a Saint to
the Calendar. A fairly modern instance showing this clerical
scrupulosity may be cited, that of the Venerable Mary de Sales,
who died in 1875 -- Wishing to save the world over again, Jesus
Our Lord had to use means till then unknown, that is, The Way
invented by Mary; but no miracles were satisfactorily proved to
justify making her a Saint; however, her sanctity was proved, and
she was decreed Venerable; some miracles must later have been
proved up in her behalf, or the requisite $20,000 paid,for
in 1897 her Beatification was decreed. (CE. ix, 754.)
However, even Infallibility may be fooled sometimes, even if not
all the time. The most notorious instance is that of the holy
Saint Josaphat, under which name and due to an odd slip of
inerrant inspiration, the great Lord Buddha, The Light of Asia,
was duly certified a Saint in the Roman Martyrology (27 Nov.; CE.
iii, 297). More modernly, in 1802, an old grave was found
containing a cadaver and a bottle supposed to contain the blood
of a martyr; the relies were enshrined in an altar, and the
erstwhile owner of the remains was duly and solemnly canonized
as Saint Philomena; but this was by mistake; and thus were fooled
two infallible Holinesses, Gregory XVI and Leo III. (CE. xii,
25.)
SPECULA STULTORUM
Before thumbing the wonder-filled pages of CE. to pick out from
thousands, sundry examples of the inspired and truthful histories
of Saints and Martyrs, recorded for the moral edification and
mental stultification of the Faithful of the Twentieth
Century,when only the miracles of Science in benefit of
humanity are recognized by many as real,we may note the
comment of that Exponent of Catholic Truth conscientiously
questioning a case or two of the certified Saint-
{218}
records. With respect to one of the notable female Saints, St.
Catherine of Alexandria, it is candidly explained: Unfortunately
these Acts have been transformed and distorted by fantastic and
diffuse descriptions which are entirely due to the imagination
of the narrators[a notable one of whom was the great
Bossuet of France],who cared less to state authentic facts
than to charm their readers by recitals of the marvelous. (CE.
iii, 445.) Speaking of another case, St. Emmeram: The
improbability of the tale, the fantastic details of the Saints
martyrdom, and the fantastic account of the prodigies attending
his death, show that the writer, infected by the pious mania of
his time, simply added to the facts imaginary details supposed
to redound to the glory of the martyr. (v, 406.) How often have
we heard from this same exponent of Catholic Truth this same
exculpation of priestly pious mendacity in wondermongering!
Questioning a few such instances, implicitly carries with it the
moral assurance that all the others, related as unquestioned
fact, are free from such taint of fraud,are, indeed, among
those miracles so well authenticated that their truth cannot be
denied. Indeed, the reality and authenticity of very many, for
example, the bubbling blood of the sixteen-hundred-year-old
martyred St. Januarius, and its frequent efficacy in stopping
eruptions of the Volcano Mt. Vesuvius, are explicitly affirmed
by the Catholic Encyclopedia, which is now to be quoted. It may
be suspected, however, that even these certified Saint-tales,
like so many others, are fakes and belong to the common
foundation of all legends of saints (CE. i, 40), the fraud of
which is confessed.
Very portentous is this St. Januarius, martyred about 305: His
holy blood is kept unto this day in a phial of glass, which being
set near his head, bubbles up as though it were fresh, in the
church of St. Januarius at Naples; a long article is replete with
plenary proofs of this and other miracles of the Saint. He was
thrown into a fiery furnace, but the flames would not touch him
and his companions; his executioner was struck blind, but the
Saint cured him. His holy remains were brought to Naples, and are
famous on account of many miracles, as recorded in the official
papal present Roman Martyrology, a longer account being given in
the Breviary, as quoted in these words of assurance: Among these
miracles is remarkable the stopping of eruptions of Mount
Vesuvius, whereby both that neighborhood and places afar off have
been like to be destroyed. It is also well known and is the plain
fact, seen even unto this day, that when the blood of St.
Januarius, kept dried up in a small glass phial, is put in sight
of the head of the same martyr, it is wont to melt and bubble up
in a very strange way, as though it had but freshly been shed.
... For more than four hundred years this liquefaction has taken
place at frequent intervals; elaborate tests, the last reported
in 1902 and 1904, have been unable to account for the phenomenon
except as due to miracle. It has had much to do with many
conversations to Catholicism. Unfortunately, however, allegations
have often been made as to the favorable verdict expressed by
scientific men of note, which are not always verifiable. The
supposed testimony of the great chemist, Sir Humphrey Davy, who
is declared to have expressed his belief in the genuineness of
the miracle, is a case in point. (CE. viii, 295-7.)
{219}
This Holy Bottle of blood might well be borrowed to stop the
present eruption of Mt. Ætna in Sicily, which (as this is
written), is destroying several populous towns and the most
intensively cultivated land in Sicily, by a torrent of lava a
mile in width, against which the local Patron seems impotent: The
lava struck Mascali, a town of 10,000 inhabitants last night,
just after the townsfolk had finished celebrating the feast of
their patron, St. Leonardo, whose statue was carried on the
shoulders of four old men. (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Nov. 8, 1928.)
But such pious thaumaturgies do not seem to be overly potent this
year. In this unguarded a priori surmise I find myself mistaken,
and apologize to the gentle reader and to Holy Church. There is
no need to borrow the Vesuvius-stopping Blood of St. Januarius;
Sicily has its own local Ætna-stopper, the Holy Veil of St.
Agatha, which, according to tradition, has arrested the flow of
lava toward Catania in the past. This sacred and potent relic,
a bit tardily, after several large towns have been wiped out, has
now been exposed in the cathedral by order of the Archbishop
Cardinal Nava, who also issued an appeal for prayers by all in
the diocese. He exhorted the population to remain calm and
maintain their faith. On previous occasions prayers to St. Agatha
were said when an eruption occurred, and the lava stopped short
before Nicolosi and Linguaglossa, twenty-five miles north of
Catania. (N.Y. Sun, Nov. 13, 1928.) This tardy exposition of the
Relics and order for prayers,after scientific examinations
and airplane explorations had shown that the fiery forces were
about spent and the lava showing signs of solidification and
emissions from the smoking mountain lessening,is somewhat
posthumous, or humorous; the devastation was already wrought. If
St. Agathas anti-volcano Veil had been gotten out of storage and
waved or hung up on the first signs of eruption, some of this
history, one way or another, would have been different. But if
the Saint can stop volcanoes after the evil deed is
done,Well, one miracle of prevention is better than a
larger number of miracles of cure,which are ineffective to
repair the havoc in such cases. Like miracles of liquefaction of
Holy Blood yet occur abundantly, as in the noted cases of Saints
John the Baptist, Stephen, Pantaleone, Patricia, Nicholas,
Aloysius, et id omne genus; so with the bottled Milk of our Lady
and the canned fat of St. Thomas Aquinas, on their respective
Saint-days!. (CE. viii, 297.)
The sacred Council of Trent, in 1546, decreed: That the saints
who reign with Christ offer to God their prayers for men; that
it is good and useful to invoke them by supplication and to have
recourse to their aid and assistance in order to obtain from God
His benefits through His Son and Our Savior Jesus Christ, who
alone is our Savior and Redeemer. (Session xxv.) But the sacred
Council, in its preoccupation of combating the nascent outraged
revolt and protest of Protestantism, which was filching its most
plausible counterfeits for circulation in a hostile
camp,seems to have overlooked this scrap of forged
Scripture: For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and
men, the man Christ Jesus. (I Tim. ii, 5.) The effect, however,
of this multiplication of saintly mediators is picturesque; it
is finely exemplified in the great painting The Intercession of
the
{220} Saints, in the Royal Gallery at Naples: In the
background is the plague-stricken city; in the foreground the
people are praying to the city authorities to avert the plague;
the city authorities are praying to the Carthusian monks; the
monks are praying to the Blessed Virgin; the Virgin prays to
Christ; and Christ prays to his Father Almighty. The Holy Ghost,
who itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot
be uttered, is quite left out of the picture. Just how good and
useful it is to invoke the Saints directly, saving Doctors bills
and other inconveniences, will be noticed in the catalogue of
Saints below inscribed.
It was in the fifth century, says Dr. McCabe, that Rome began
on a large scale the forgery of lives of martyrs. Relics of
martyrs were now being discovered in great numbers to meet the
pious demand of ignorant Christendom, and legends were fabricated
by the thousands to authenticate the spurious bits of bone. (LBB.
1130, p. 40.) Such, says CE., are the Martyrium S. Polycarpi,
admitting, though it does, much that may be due to the pious
fancy of the eye-witness; also the Acta SS. Perpetuae et
Felicitas.
The Saint-mill of Holy Church began operations very early, or
reached for grist far back into antiquity for the beginnings of
its Calendar of Saints. The first Saint who greets us among the
countless hordes of canonized Holy Ones is no less a primitive
personage that St. Abel, the younger son and second heir of our
mythical Father Adam, of Eden, who was canonized by Jesus Christ
himself, we are told, as the first of a long line of prophets
martyred for justices sake, as is the clerical interpretation of
Matt. xxiii, 34-35, That upon you may come all the righteous
blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel unto the blood
of Zacharias,a bloody invocation in later centuries
peculiarly appropriate to the Church of Jesus Christ. This is a
genuine surprise, for no miracles wrought by St. Abel are
recorded, and no generous canonization fees seem to have been
paid for his account into the Treasury of the Lord in Rome.
OLD PAGAN STUFF
Many of the Pagan gods were converted into Christian Saints, and
seem to have brought over with them the special curative or
prophylactic attributes for which they were invoked as specifics.
Indeed, the whole system was purely Pagan: Cures, apparitions,
prophecies, visions, transfigurations, stigmata, pleasant odor,
incorruptionall these phenomena were also known to
antiquity. Ancient Greece exhibits stone monuments and
inscriptions which bear witness to cures and apparitions in
ancient mythology. History tells of Aristeas of Proconnessus,
Hermotimus of Claxomenae, Epimenides of Crete, that they were
ascetics and thereby became ecstatic, even to the degree of the
soul leaving the body, remaining far removed from it, and being
able to appear in other places. (CE. ix, 129.) The pious plan of
temporal salvation in the Ages of Faith is thus historically
vouched: The whole social life of the Catholic world before the
Reformation was animated with the idea of protection from the
citizens of heaven. There were patrons or protectors in various
forms of
{221} illness, as for instance: St. Agatha,
diseases of the breast; Apollonia, toothache; Blaise, sore
throat; Clare and Lucy, eyes; Benedict, against poison; Hubert,
against bites of dogs. (CE. xi, 566.) Catania honours St. Agatha
as her patron saint, and throughout the region around Mt. Ætna
she is invoked against the eruptions of the volcano, as elsewhere
against fire and lightning. (i, 204.)
To the infamous sanctified fable of St. Hugh are imputed sundry
unholy accusations and persecutions against the Jews,(here
only repeated because they are falsely affirmed in the inspired
Bull of Canonization. A Christian child was lyingly alleged to
have been crucified by the Jews; the earth refused to receive its
body, and it was thrown into a well, where it was found with the
marks of crucifixion upon it; nineteen Jews were infamously put
to death for the fabulous crime, and ninety others were condemned
to death but released, for the sake of greed, upon payment of
large fines; Copin, the leader, stated that it was a Jewish
custom to crucify a boy once a year! (CE. vii, 515); similar
infamies of falsehood are related in connection with St. William
of Norwich. (CE. xv, 635.)
Here is a monumental miracle with every assurance of verity. St.
Winefride was a maiden of great personal charm and endowed with
rare gifts of intellect. The fame of her beauty and
accomplishments reached the ears of Caradoc, son of the
neighboring Prince Alen. She refused all his advances; frightened
by his threats she fled towards the church where her uncle St.
Beuno was celebrating Mass. Maddened by a disappointed passion,
Caradoc pursued her and, overtaking her on the slope above the
site of the present well, he drew his sword and at one blow
severed her head from the body. The head rolled down the incline
and, where it rested, there gushed forth a spring. St. Beuno,
hearing of the tragedy, left the altar, and accompanied by the
parents came to the spot where the head lay beside the spring.
Taking up the maidens head be carried it to where the body lay,
covered both with his cloak, and then re-entered the church to
finish the Holy Sacrifice. When Mass was ended he knelt beside
the Saints body, offered up a fervent prayer to God, and ordered
the cloak which covered it to be removed. Thereupon Winefride,
as if awakening from a deep slumber, rose up with no sign of the
severing of the head except a thin white circle round her neck.
Seeing the murderer leaning on his sword with an insolent and
defiant air, St. Beuno invoked the chastisement of heaven, and
Caradoc fell dead on the spot, the popular belief being that the
earth opened and swallowed him. Miraculously restored to life,
Winefride seems to have lived in almost perpetual ecstasy and to
have had familiar converse with God. The place where this signal
miracle occurred was at the time called Dry Hollow, but with its
miraculous spring its name was changed to Holywell, and it stands
there in Wales to this day, a bubblingly vocal witness to the
verity of this holy yarn. Born in 600, beheaded and reheaded at
sweet sixteen, she died Nov. 3, 660; her death was foreshown to
her in a vision by Christ Himself. (CE. xv, 656-657.) For more
than a thousand years this Miraculous Well has attracted numerous
pilgrims; documents preserved in the British Museum give us its
history, with the
{222} earliest record of the miraculous
cures effected by its waters. These ancient cures included cases
of dropsy, paralysis, gout, melancholia, sciatica, cancer,
alienation of mind, blood spitting, etc. etc., also deliverance
from evil spirits. (CE. repeats the history of St. Winefride, or
Gwenfrewi, in vii, 438.)
St. Wolfgang, by a unique miracle, forced the devil to help him
build a church.Et id omne genusad nauseam. Such is
a handful of the holy chaff of faith, purveyed by Holy Church to
all Believers to this day. Scores of like saint-lies are here
omitted to save space.
These gross and degrading impostures by forged miracles not only
went unrebuked and unchecked by the Vicars of God; many of the
vice-Gods were among the most prolific miracle-mongers of the
ages of Faith. One of the most notorious wonder-workers and
wonder-forgers of Holy Church was no less a personage than His
Holiness Pope St. Gregory the Great (590-604). He has the
doubtful distinction of being the author of four celebrated
volumes of Dialogi, which are a veritable thesaurus of holy
wonders. From this treasury of nature-fakery we have seen the old
Pagan example, affirmed as Christian fact by Gregory, as quoted
by CE., of the man carried off by mistake by the Angel of Death,
but restored to life when the oversight was discovered. He also
relates a great flood of the Tiber which threatened to destroy
Rome, until a copy of His Holinesss Dialogi was thrown into the
swollen waters, which immediately subsided, and the Holy City was
thus saved. His Holiness solemnly records the case of an awful
belly-ache suffered by a holy nun, which he avers was caused by
her having swallowed a devil along with a piece of lettuce which
she was eating without having taken the due precaution of making
the sign of the cross over it to scare away any lurking imps of
Satan; and this devil, when commanded by a holy monk to come out
of the nun, derisively replied: How am I to blame? I was sitting
on the lettuce, and this woman, not having made the sign of the
cross, ate me along with it! (Dial. lib. i, c. 4.) When elected
Pope in 590 the city of Rome was afflicted by a dreadful
pestilence; the angels of the angry God of all mercies were
relentlessly flinging fiery darts among the devout Christian
populace. To conjure away the pestilencedue perhaps
primarily to the filth of the Holy City and its
inhabitantsHis Holiness headed a monkish parade through the
stricken city, when of a sudden he saw the Archangel Michael
hovering over the great Pagan mausoleum of Hadrian, just in the
act of sheathing his flaming sword, while three angels with him
chanted the original verses of the Regina Caeli; the great Pope
made the Sign of the Cross and broke into Hallelujahs(that
is, Praise to Yahveh, the old Hebrew war-god). In commemoration
of the wondrous event, the pious Pope built a Christian chapel,
dedicated to St. Michael, atop the Pagan monument, and over it
erected the colossal statue of the Archangel in the
sword-sheathing act, which stands there in Rome to this
daythe Castel Saint Angelo, in enduring proof of the
miracle and of the veracity of papal narratives. (CE. vi, 782.)
The authorship of this monkish Hymn to the Queen of Heaven being
unknown, pious invention supplied its true history: that St.
Gregory the Great heard the first three lines chanted by angels
on a certain Easter
{223} morning in Rome while he walked
barefoot in a great religious procession, and that the Saint
thereupon added the fourth line. (C.E. xii, 719.)b Such is
ecclesiastical history.
The literary attainments of His Holiness Gregory were tempered,
if not corrupted, by his holy zeal, for in his commentary on Job,
Gregory I warns the reader that he need not be surprised to find
mistakes of Latin Grammar, since in dealing with so holy a work
as the Bible a writer should not stop to make sure whether his
cases and tenses are right. (Robinson, The Ordeal of
Civilization, p. 62.) However, his zeal for more material things
was not thus hampered: Pope Gregory I contrived to make his real
belief in the approaching end of the world yield the papacy about
1800 square miles of land and a revenue of about $2,000,000. He
used bribes, threats and all kinds of stratagems to attain his
ends. (McCabe, LBB. 1130, p. 40.)
His Holiness Gregory I was himself one of the greatest
thaumatur-gists of the Ages of Faith: the miracles attributed to
Gregory are very many. (CE. vi, 786.) When Mohammed was forging
his inspired Book of Koran, the illuminating spirit, in the guise
of a dove, would perch on his shoulder and whisper the divine
revelations into his ear,a miracle which none but quite
devout Mohammedans believe. But Peter the Deacon, in his Vita of
His wonder-working Holiness, records that when St. Gregory was
dictating his Homilies On Ezekiel: A veil was drawn between his
secretary and himself. As, however, the pope remained silent for
long periods at a time, the servant made a hole in the curtain
and, looking through, beheld a dove seated on Gregorys head with
his beak between his lips. When the dove withdrew its beak the
holy pontiff spoke and the secretary took down his words; but
when he became silent the secretary again applied his eye to the
hole and saw that the dove had replaced its beak between his
lips. (CE. vi, 786.) No good Christian can doubt, after this
proof, that their Holinesses are constantly and directly inspired
and guided by the Holy Ghost, as Holy Church assures. Wonderful
as this bit of Gregorys history is, to recommend him to lasting
remembrance, his great claim to remembrance lies in the fact that
he is the real father of the medieval papacy. (Ibid.) These
qualities of the Holy Father which we have noticed may to an
extent explain some of the eccentricities of the Medieval Papacy.
FORGED AND FAKED RELICS Making every
allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the
history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an
amount of imposture probably unequalled in the annals of the
human race.
Lecky, History of Rationalism, i, 164.
As loathsome an example as is to be found in the annals of
Christian apologetics for fraud and imposture is this from CE.,
following a long and revolting exposition of the Christian frauds
with respect to holy Relics of the Church:
{224}
Still, it would be presumptuous in such cases
to blame the action of the ecclesiastical authority in permitting
the continuance of a cult which extends back into remote
antiquity. [i. e. into Paganism.] ...
Supposing the relic to be spurious, NO DISHONOR IS DONE TO GOD
by the continuance of an error handed down in perfect good faith
for many centuries! (CE. xii, 387.)
It may well be that the holy God of the Christians is immune to
dishonor by worship through lying Christian frauds; but one may
question the dishonor to the human mind wrought by the impostures
of Gods Vicars and his Church, cozening men into holy faith in
lies; to say nothing of the shaming dishonor of Church and
priest, who with utter want of good faith and common honesty
created and fostered all these degrading Churchly cheats.
Before viewing some of these priestly impostures, never once
rebuked or prevented by pope or priest, but, rather,
industriously stimulated by them for purposes of perpetuating
ignorance and superstition, and of feeding their own insatiate
avarice, CE. will be invoked to give a graphic, though clerically
casuistic and apologetic review of the debauchery of morals and
mind which made possible these scandalous unholy practices of
Holy Church.
Naturally it was impossible for
popular enthusiasm to be roused to so high a pitch in a matter
which easily lent itself to error, fraud, and greed for gain,
without at least the occasional occurrence of many, grave abuses.
... In the Theodosian Code the sale of relics is forbidden (vii,
ix, 17), but numerous stories, of which it would be easy to
collect a long series, beginning with the writings of Pope St.
Gregory the Great and St. Gregory of Tours, prove to us that many
unprincipled persons found a means of enriching themselves by a
sort of trade in these objects of devotion, the majority of which
no doubt were fraudulent. At the beginning of the ninth century
the exportation of the bodies of martyrs from Rome had assumed
the proportions of a regular commerce, and a certain deacon,
Deusdona, acquired an unenviable notoriety in these transactions.
What was in the long run hardly less disastrous than fraud or
avarice, was the keen rivalry between religious centers, and the
eager credulity fostered by the desire to be known as the
possessor of some unusually startling relic. In such an
atmosphere of lawlessness doubtful relics came to abound. There
was always disposition to regard any human remains accidentally
discovered near a church or in the catacombs as the body of a
martyr ... the custom of making facsimiles and imitations, a
custom which persists to our own day in the replicas of the
Vatican statue of St. Peter[itself a fraud] or of the
Grotto of Lourdesall these are causes adequate to account
for the multitude of unquestionably spurious relics with which
the treasuries of great medieval churches were crowded. ... Join
to this the large license given to the occasional unscrupulous
rogue IN AN AGE NOT ONLY UTTERLY UNCRITICAL but often curiously
morbid in its realism, and it becomes easy to understand the
multiplicity and extravagance of the entries in the relics
inventories of Rome and other countries. {225}
Such tests [to secure the Faithful against deception] were
applied as the historical and antiquarian science of that day
were capable of devising. Very often, however, this test took the
form of an appeal to some miraculous sanction, as in the well
known story repeated by St. Ambrose, according to which, when
doubt arose which of the three crosses discovered by St. Helena
was that of Christ, the healing of a sick man by one of them
dispelled all further hesitation. Nevertheless it remains true
that many of the more important ancient relics duly exhibited for
veneration in the great sanctuaries of Christendom or even at
Rome itself must now be pronounced to be either certainly
spurious or open to grave suspicion. To take one example of the
latter class, the boards of the crib (Praesaepe) a name which for
more than a thousand years has been associated, as now, with the
basilica of Santa Maria Maggiorecan only be considered to
be of doubtful authenticity. ... Strangely enough, an inscription
in Greek uncials of the eighth century is found on one of the
boards, the inscription having nothing to do with the Crib but
being apparently concerned with some commercial transaction. It
is hard to explain its presence on the supposition that the relic
is authentic. Similar difficulties might be urged against the
supposed Column of the Flagellation venerated at Rome in the
church of Santa Prassede, and against many other famous relics.
... Neither has the church ever pronounced that any particular
relic, not even that commonly venerated as the wood of the Cross,
is authentic; but she approves of honor being paid to those
relics which with reasonable probability are believed to be
genuine, and which are invested with due ecclesiastical
sanctions. (CE. xii, 737.) Such sophistry!
The pettifogging sophistry of the foregoing argumentation, as
of that which follows from the same clerical source, needs no
comment. The Church of God, headed by his own Vicar General on
earth, divinely guided against all error in matters of faith and
morals, and which can detect the faintest taint of heresy of
belief further than the most gifted bird of rapine can scent a
carcass, can make no apology for permitting these degrading
superstitions, which it not only tolerates but actively
propagates and encourages, for the rich revenues they bring in.
What a catalogue of its most sacred mummeries is branded with the
infamy of fraudulent in the following:
The worship
of imaginary saints or relics, devotion based upon false
revelations, apparitions, supposed miracles, or false notions
generally, is usually excusable in the Worshipper on the ground
of ignorance and good faith; but there is no excuse for those who
use similar means to exploit popular credulity for their own
pecuniary profit. The originators of such falsehoods are liars,
deceivers, and not rarely thieves; but a milder judgment should
be pronounced on those who, after discovering the imposture
tolerate the improper cults [!] ... The Catholic devotions which
are connected with holy places, holy shrines, holy wells, famous
relics, etc., are commonly treated as superstitions by non-
Catholics. ... It must be admitted that {226} these
hallowed spots and things have occasioned many legends; that
popular credulity was in some cases the principal cause of their
celebrity; that here or there instances of fraud can be adduced;
yet, for all that, the principles which guide the worshipper, and
his good intentions, are not impaired by an undercurrent of error
as to facts. [!] Moreover ... the Church is tolerant of pious
beliefs which have helped to further Christianity Thus, alleged
saints and relies are suppressed as soon as discovered, but
belief in the private revelations to which the feast of Corpus
Christi, The Rosary, the Sacred Heart, and many other devotions
owe their origin is neither commanded nor prohibited; here each
man is his own judge. ... The apparent success which so often
attends a superstition can mostly be accounted for by natural
causes. When the object is to ascertain, or to effect in a
general way, one of two possible events, the law of probabilities
gives an equal chance to success and failure, and success does
more to support than failure would do to destroy superstition.
(CE. xiv, 340, 341.) All these holy cults are thus confessed
frauds and superstitions fostered by ecclesiastic
greed.
Let us remember that no True Church in Christendom can be built
and consecrated without a box of dead mans bones or other fetid
human scraps and relics deposited under the holy altar of God.
The decree of the second council of Nice, A.D. 787, reaffirmed
by the Council of Trent in 1546, forbade the consecration of any
Church without a supply of relics. (CE. xii, 737.) Thus the
ancient superstition is sanctioned and its observance made
mandatory; an unceasing demand is created, and the market supply
is more than equal to the pious demand. Hence the great and
valuable, and fraudulent, traffic above confessed and clerically
palliated.
THE INVENTION OF THE CROSS, ET
AL.
The Legend as to the discovering of the
Cross of Christ (CE. vii, 203). The Holy City, Jerusalem, was,
twice destroyed by the Romans, in 70 A.D. by Titus, and again as
the result of the rebellion of Bar-Cochba, 132-135 A.D. The work
was peculiarly thorough,; not one stone was left upon another;
the site was plowed over as a mark of infamy, and the ground is
said to have been sown with salt so that nothing might ever grow
there again: though pious myths soon flourished exuberantly.
Later a pagan city was established on the site, named Ælia
Capitoline, and a great Temple of Venus was erected on a suitable
spot. Over two centuries later, about 326 A.D., a great and
venerated Catholic lady Saint made a pious pilgrimage to the Holy
City, namely, St. Helena, sainted mother of the new Christian
Emperor Constantine. This is the St. Helena who got her start as
a Pagan barmaid in a wild country village; she fell into the
graces of the Roman Imperator Constantius as he marched through
the country, became his mistress
Emperor Constantine. (CE. iv, 300.) Upon the pilgrimage of the
pious Dowager-mother to Jerusalem, great pomp and ceremony
attended her visit, under the auspices of
{227} the good
Bishop Macarius. By order of the Bishop and in honor of the
Christian Saint, the Temple of Venus was torn down; it was found
to have been built over an empty rock grave therefore identically
the authentic sepulchre of Jesus Christ. is it true, that this
destroyed Temple of Venus and the inclosed Holy Sepulchre were
inside the walls of the City, while the Gospels inspiredly aver
that the grave was outside the walls: a trifling discrepancy for
Faith.
Rummaging the ruins, a vaulted underground room or cellar was
found: its wonderful contents make to pale into triviality the
lately discovered tomb-treasures of Tut-ankh-Amen. There propped
against the cellar-wall was the whole apparatus of the
Crucifiction: the three identical Crosses whereon had hung the
Christ and the two thieves; the very Nails wherewith they had
been fastened; the autograph trilingual Inscription set by Pilate
over the head of the Christ; the precise Spear which had pierced
his side; the cruel Crown of Thorns which tore his brow; the holy
Seamless Coat which he had worn and for which the Roman soldiers
gambled in the hour of death (its curious that the winner should
have left it behind); the sacred Shroud in which the dead God
was. buried. The Pilatic Inscription was not in situ; it had
evidently been knocked off and lay apart, a separate piece of
wood, on which were inscribed in white letters in Hebrew, Greek
and Latin, the following words: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of
the Jews, as recorded by Sozomen, the Church historian. (Eccles.
Hist, ii, 1; N&PNF. II, p. 258.)
Due to its unfortunate separation from its original position,
it was for the moment impossible to distinguish the True Cross
of Christ from those of the thieves. A miracle was vouchsafed,
however, to identify the real Cross of the Christ: the True Cross
bowed itself down before the Saintly Empress; or, a sick
womanor a sick manwas cured upon touching the True
Cross after having tried the other two in vainaccording to
which priestly version is the more truthful. Sozomen (supra) says
that it was a certain lady of rank in Jerusalem who was inflicted
with a most grievous and incurable disease, whose miraculous
curing attested the True Cross; a dead person was also restored
to life by its thaumaturgic touch:all as predicted by the
prophets and by the Sibyl. Some tinge of dubiety may be thrown
upon the report of Bishop Macarius, who made the wondrous
discoveries first recorded by the Church historians Socrates,
about 439 A.D. (Eccles. Hist. I, xvii), and Sozomen, who wrote
a little later (Eccles. Hist. II, i), by the fact that the
earliest Church Historian, the very informative and fabling
Bishop Eusebius (d. 340), in his Life of Constantine (III, iii,
and III, xxviii), gives a very circumstantial account of the
visit of the ex-Empress St. Helena to Jerusalem, and of the
erection of a Christian Church over the Holy Sepulchre, but he
is silent as the grave about the discovery of any Cross of Christ
or any of the other holy marvels. The notable event is known, in
Church parlance, as The Invention of the Crosswhich exactly
it was.
{228}
The subsequent history of the Cross of Christ is a tangle of
typically clerical contradictions and impossibilities. Very soon
after the discovery of the True Cross, its wood was cut up into
small relics and scattered throughout Christendom. (CE. iv, 524.)
We learn from St. Cyril of Jerusalem (before 350) that the wood
of the Cross, discovered about 318, [it was in 326] was already
distributed throughout the world. (CE. xii, 736.) But these
assurances of St. Cyril and of CE. seem out of harmony with the
accredited history of the capture and asportation of the reputed
integral True Cross by Chosroes (Khosru) II, King of Persia, who
took Jerusalem in 614, massacring 90,000 good Christians,
captured the Cross of Christ among his booty, and carried it off
whole in triumph to Persia! (CE. iii, 105),with results
very disastrous to the Faith: The shock which religious men
received through this dreadful event can hardly now be realized.
The imposture of Constantine bore bitter fruit; the sacred wood
which had filled the world with its miracles was detected to be
a helpless counterfeit, borne off in triumph by deriding
blasphemers. All confidence in the apostolic powers of the Asiatic bishops was lost; not one of them could work a wonder for
his own salvation in the dire extremity. (Draper, The
Intellectual Development of Europe, i, 328; Gibbon, p. 451.) The
truly miraculous nature of this True Cross is thus described by
Draper: The wood of the Cross displayed a property of growth, and
hence furnished an abundant supply for the demands of pilgrims
and an unfailing source of pecuniary profit to its possessors.
In the course of subsequent years there was accumulated in the
various churches of Europe, from this particular relic, a
sufficiency to have constructed many hundred crosses. (Op. cit.
i, 309.) On a great porphyry column before the Church of St.
Sophia at Constantinople, stood a statue of the Pagan god Apollo;
the face was altered into the features of the Emperor
Constantine, and the Nails of the True Cross, set around like
rays, were used to garnish the crown upon his head. Another of
these holy Nails has for centuries adorned and consecrated the
crown of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. The horses of a
regiment of cavalry could probably be shod with the copious
supply of these Holy Nails now venerated as sacred relies.
It is remarkable, says CE., that St. Jerome, who expatiates upon
the Cross, the Title, and the Nails, discovered by St. Helena,
says nothing either of the Lance or of the Crown of Thorns, and
the silence of Andreas of Crete in the eighth century is still
more surprising. But in due time this oversight was piously
repaired. Bishop Gregory of Tours, among other faithful Church
chroniclers, produces the Crown of Thorns, and, as an eyewitness
to it, avers that the thorns in the Crown still looked green, a
freshness which was miraculously renewed every day; which
episcopal assurance, skeptically remarks CE., does not much
strengthen the historical testimony for the authenticity of the
relic. But, in any case, Justinian, who died in 565, is stated
to have given a thorn to St. Germanus, which was long preserved
at Saint-Germain-des-Pres, while the Empress Irene sent
Charlemagne several thorns which were deposited by him at Aachen.
... In 1238 Baldwin II, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople,
{229} anxious to obtain support for his tottering empire,
offered the Crown of Thorns to St. Louis, King of France. It was
then actually [in pawn] in the hands of the Venetians as security
for a heavy loan, but it was redeemed and conveyed to Paris,
where St. Louis built the Sainte Chapelle for its reception. The
further history of the holy spurious relic is traced in detail;
as late as 1896 a magnificent new reliquary of rock crystal was
made for it; but by that time the holy relic, like a
fighting-cock with his tail-feathers clawed out, was a sorry
sight: The Crown, thus preserved, consists only of a circlet of
rushes, without any trace of thorns. A ray of light on Church
fakery is thrown by the closing comment: That all the reputed
holy thorns of which notice has survived cannot by any
possibility be authentic will be disputed by no one; more than
700 such relics have been enumerated! (CE. iv, 540, 541.)
As for the Holy Lance, which pierced the side of the dying God,
also resurrected by pious diligence of invention, its devious and
dubious history is thus traced by our modern ecclesiastical
mummery monger: A spear believed to be identical with that which
pierced our Saviors body, was venerated at Jerusalem at the close
of the sixth century. The sacred relics of the Passion fell into
the bands of the pagans. Many centuries afterwards (i.e. in
1241), the point of the Lance was presented by Baldwin to St.
Louis, and it was enshrined with the Crown of Thorns in the
Sainte Chapelle. Another part of the Lance is preserved under the
dome of St. Peters in Rome. ... Rival lances are known to be
preserved at Nuremberg, Paris, etc. Another lance claiming to be
that which produced the wound in Christs side is now preserved
among the imperial insignia at Vienna; another is preserved at
Cracow. Legend assigns the name of Longinus to the soldier who
thrust the Lance into our Saviors side; according to the same
tradition, he was healed of ophtbalmia and converted by a drop
of the precious blood spurting from the wound. (viii, 773-4.)
There was also timely discovered, by some notable chance or
miracle, the very stairway, consisting of twenty-eight white
marble steps, ... the stairway leading once to the PrÆtorium of
Pilate, hence sanctified by the footsteps of Our Lord during his
Passion, as we are assured by CE. (viii, 505.) This famous relic,
the Holy Stairs, which somehow escaped the two destructions of
Jerusalem and the ravages of time for nearly three centuries, was
brought from Jerusalem to Rome about 326 by St. Helena, mother
of Constantine the Great. ... It is now before the Sancta
Sanctorum (Holy of Holies) of the Lateran Palace. The Sancta
Sanctorum receiving its name from the many precious relics
preserved there, also contains the celebrated image of Christ,
not made with hands, which on certain occasions used to be
carried through Rome in procession. ... The Holy Stairs may only
be ascended on the knees. ... Finally Pius X, on 26 February,
1908, granted a plenary indulgence [i.e. a permanent escape from
Purgatory]to be gained as often as the Stairs are devoutly
ascended after confession and communion. (CE. viii, 505.) It is
related that Father Luther was performing this holy penitential
climb of the Scala Sancta, when suddenly the vast sham and fraud
of his religion burst upon his consciousness: the
{230}
Reformation was a consequence. In passing this famous Mother of
Churches, St. John Lateran, we may admire the wonderful portrait
of Jesus Christ which adorns its sacred walls; the painting of
it was begun by Dr. St. Luke himself, but being left incomplete,
it was finished by an angel.
ANCIENT FAKES YET ACCREDITED
Think not that these ancient frauds of the Church have been
discarded in shame by the Church now that their fraudulent origin
and purpose are exposed to public obloquy and ridicule. In full
blaze of world attention and publicity of the Twentieth Century,
Gods own Vicar vouches before the world for these tawdry
impostures, brought forth before the world to lend climax of
superstitious solemnity to his crazy Crusade of prayer and
incited pious hatred against the brave efforts of the Russians
to undo the fell work of the Church in that unhappy land.
Associated Press dispatches from Vatican City announce: To lend
emphasis to the protest here, celebrated relics kept at St.
Petersa portion of the true cross; St. Veronicas Veil, with
which Christ is said to have wiped His face on His way to
Calvary, and the centurions lance which pierced His
Sidewill be displayed. (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, March 19,
1930.) After the ceremony those present will receive benediction
with the sacred relics. (N.Y. Sun, Mch. 13, 1930.) Nearby, the
stones of the pavement on which the Apostles [Peter and Paul]
knelt in prayer and which are said to contain the impression of
their knees, are now in the wall of the Church of Santa Francesca
Romana. (CE. xiii, 797.) Such lying vouchers are fit setting for
the crusade of unholy lies and hate against a people which for
centuries has been kept in grossest ignorance and superstition
by greedy priestcraft, now repudiated by its victims.
The foregoing solemn vouching for antique fakeries provoked a
deal of skeptical ridicule throughout the world, even among some
of the Faithful: so it must needs be emphasized by repetition,
with some notable other Fake Relics added for assurance doubly
sure. So, when the Pagan Festival of Easter dawned on the Pagan
Day of the Venerable Sun, His Royal-Holiness came forth in the
full splendor of the Pagan Pontifex Maximum to celebrate the
Event, and by his Infallible presence to vouch again for the
genuineness of these holy spurious Relics. Probably he wore and
ostentated in the joy of its recovery, the celebrated so-called
Episcopal Ring of St. Peter, rich with sapphires and diamonds,
stolen from the Vatican treasury in 1925, and recently recaptured
with the thief. (Herald-Tribune, Dec. 3, 1929.) It is possible
that he sat in state in the very Throne or Chair of St. Peter,
which the Fisherman Pope used, as dubiously vouched by CE. under
that caption. In any event, whatever throne he used was planted
immediately above the grave where lies the headless cadaver of
St. Peter himself, for the skulls of Sts. Peter and Paul were
later viewed at the Lateran, and there shown for the adoration
of the Faithful. As announced in several Press dispatches, an
inventory of the holy Relies and ceremonials is here recorded.
In preparation for the Sacred Event in the Twentieth Century: The
major basilicas will all have on display their most precious
relics. ... The purported Cradle of
{231} Bethlehem [made
out of an eighth century packing case] will be brought forth.
Those attending mass at the Lateran will be able to view the
skulls of Sts. Peter and Paul, and a bit of what is believed [by
whom, not stated] to be the True Cross[carried off entire
in 614 by the Persians]; ... the reputed Lance of the Roman
centurion who speared the side of Christ, and the Holy Veil or
napkin offered to Christ by St. Veronica,who is a myth
forged from vera icon. (A.P. dispatch, Apl. 19, 1930.) Also: A
fragment of the Cross and two Thorns from the crown of the
Savior. ... The Sancta Scala (Holy Stairs), ... drew the usual
Good Friday throngs of the Faithful today. ... Processions were
held inside the ancient edifices to honor the relics, [including]
what, according to tradition, are the heads of the apostles St.
Peter and St. Paul ... shown for the adoration of the Faithful.
(Herald-Tribune, Apl. 19, 1930.) Then came the consummation and
solemn Infallible accrediting of these most precious
relics:Pope Celebrates Easter Mass. ... Relics of the
Passion [surrounded him],a reputed fragment of the Cross,
a piece of the Spear which pierced [reputedly] the side of the
Savior, and the Veil of St. Veronica. ... were displayed from the
balcony above the Papal Altar. (Ibid, Apl. 21, 1930.) Now at
last, in Twentieth Century, Roma locuta estcausa finita
estand these originally bogus frauds are genuine and
authentic Relicsfor the Faithful who may believe it.
Samples of the seed of the Serpent of Eden, the scales that fell
from the eyes of Elijahs servant, the original wicked flea, the
two dwarf mummies of Bildad the Shu-hite and Ne-hi-miah, the 200
Philistine trophies (foreskins) brought in by David as his
marriage dot (1 Sam. xviii, 25-27), the horn of salvation, and
the instruments of Corneliuss Italian Band, are about the only
honest-to-goodness authentic Biblical relics which seem not to
be preserved among the countless holy fake treasures of Holy
Church. The famous juvenile pocket-inventories of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn, and the monstrous fakeries of the late lamented
Phineas Barnum, are paltry trivialities beside the countless and
priceless Relic-treasures of Holy Church, religiously guarded for
veneration by True Believers blessed by the privilege of
payingthe more you pay the more you merit is the maxim -
to gaze in rapt awe at, and to kiss and fondle, these ghastly and
ghoulish, false and forged, bloody scraps and baubles of
perverted piosity. The foreskin of the Child Christ miraculously
preserved exists to this day; enough of his diapers and
swaddling-cloths, as of the sanitary draperies of his Ever-Virgin
Mother, are of record to stock a modern department store. During
the era of the unholy Crusades the soldiers of Christ brought
from the Holy Land countless numbers of duly certified bottles
of the Milk of the Virgin Mother of God, and drove a thrifty
business selling them to churches and superstitious dupes through
Europe.
Yet in existence are several portraits of the Mother of God,
said to have been painted by St. Luke; they belong to the Sixth
century. (CE. xv, 471.) There is still preserved at Messina a
letter attributed to the Blessed Virgin, which, it is claimed,
was written by her to the Messenians when Our Lady heard of their
conversion by St. Paul (x, 217; cf. list of several: i, 613.) The
Shroud of the Blessed Virgin is preserved in the Church of
{232} Gethsemane. (xiv, 775.) The Holy Winding Sheet or
shroud of the Christ was formerly exposed for veneration at
Troyes; but the Bishop declared after due inquiry that the relic
was nothing but a painting and opposed its exposition. Clement
VI, by four Bulls (1390), approved the exposition as lawful.
After being stolen and hawked about, this sacred relic is now
exposed and honored at Turin. (xv, 67-68.) There must be
something wrong about this, for The Diocese of Perigueux has a
remarkable The Holy Shroud of Christ, brought back after the
first crusade. An official investigation in 1444 asserted the
authenticity of the relic. (xi, 668.) The Minster treasury of the
Cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, where Charlemagne
enshrined the Holy Thorns, includes a large number of relics,
vessels, and vestments, the most important being those known as
the four Great Relics, namely, the cloak of the Blessed Virgin,
the swaddling-clothes of the infant Jesus, the loin-cloth worn
by Our Lord on the Cross, and the cloth on which lay the head of
John the Baptist after his beheading. They are exposed every
seven years, and venerated by thousands of Pilgrims (139,628 in
1874, and 158,968 in 1881)! (i, 92.)
Without comment we let CE. record for the faith of its readers,
several of the very notable and most remunerative Relics
treasured by Holy Church. That they are all impossible, are all
bogus, all crude forgeries and fakes only possible of credit by
the most credulous child-minds, needs no comment. The sordid
debasement of the human mind to the degree of credulity here
displayed, the crass dishonesty of the false pretenses which give
credit to these things for purposes of extortion from silly dupes
of religion, the vastness of the grand larceny thus perpetrated
in the name of God,are beyond orderly comment.
The possession of the seamless garment of Christ is claimed by
the Cathedral of Trier and by the parish church of Argenteuil;
the former claims that the relic was sent by the Empress St.
Helena, basing their claim on a document sent by Pope Sylvester
to the Church of Trier, but this cannot be considered genuine.
... The relic itself offers no reason to doubt its genuineness.
Plenary indulgences were granted to all pilgrims who should visit
the cathedral of Trier at the time of the exposition of the Holy
Coat, which was to take place every seven years. (vii, 400-1.)
The Church venerates the Holy Innocents, or Martyrs, the children
massacred by Herod, estimated in various Liturgies as 14,000,
64,000, 144,000 boys. The Church of Pauls Outside the Walls is
believed to possess the bodies of several of the Holy Innocents.
A portion of these relics was transferred by Sixtus V to Santa
Maria Maggiore. The Church of St. Justina at Padua, the
cathedrals of Lisbon and Milan, and other Churches also preserve
bodies which they claim to be those of some of the Holy
Innocents. It is impossible to determine the day or the year of
the death of the Holy Innocents, since the chronology of the
birth of Christ and the subsequent Biblical events is most
uncertain (CE. vii, 419.)
In the cathedral of Cologne are preserved the skulls of the
Three Wise Men who followed the Star of Bethlehem. In the
neighboring Church of St. Gereon are distributed over the walls
{233} the bones from a whole cemetery, dug up and
displayed as those of that mythical Saint and his Theban Band of
10,000 Martyrs; in fitting competition are the spoils of the
neighboring graveyard, yielding the bones of St. Ursula and her
11,000 Virgin Martyrs. The miraculous bones of Santa Rosalia in
Palermo are the bones of a deceased goat!
The city
of Tarascon has for its patron, St. Martha, who, according to the
legend, delivered the country from a monster called Tarasque. The
Church of Saintes Marias de la Mer contains three venerated
tombs; according to a tradition which is attached to the legends
concerning the emigration of St. Lazarus, St. Martha, St. Mary
Magdalene, and St. Maximus, these tombs contain the bodies of the
three Marys of the Gospels.
(CE. i, 238.)
The Abbot Martin obtained for his monastery in Alsace the
following inestimable articles: A spot of the blood of our
Savior; a piece of the True Cross; the arm of the Apostle James;
part of the skeleton of John the Baptist; a bottle of the Milk
of the Mother of God. (Draper, The Intellectual Development of
Europe, ii, 57.) But perhaps none of these impostures surpassed
in audacity that offered by a monastery in Jerusalem, which
presented to the beholder ONE OF THE FINGERS OF THE HOLY GHOST!
(Draper, Conflict between Science and Religion, p. 270.) Also
there were displayed sundry choice collections of the wing and
tail feathers of the said Holy Ghost, from time to time shed off
or pulled out when, in the disguise of a Dove, It (or He or She)
came down and perched on people. In England at the time of Henry
VIII (1501), Our Ladys girdle was shown in not less than eleven
places, and Our Ladys milk, in a condensed form, in eight places.
One of these girdles the good Queen-mother procured for Catherine
of Aragon, on her marriage with Henry, to present to her when the
expected time should come. During the plague of 1531, Henry VIII,
for a goodly price, bought some precious relic waters to avert
the plague from himself: a tear which Our Lord shed over Lazarus,
preserved by an angel who gave it in a phial to Mary Magdalene;
and a phial of the sweat of St. MichÆl when he contended with
Satan, as recorded in the Book of Enoch and vouched for in the
sacred Book of Jude. (Hackett, Henry VIII, pp. 11, 234.) The
Cathedral of Arras, in France, possesses some highly venerated
and remarkable relies, to wit, some of the Holy Manna which fell
from Heaven in the year 371 during a severe famine; and the
identical Holy Candle, a wax taper, which was presented by the
Blessed Virgin to Bishop Lambert, in 1105, to stop an epidemic.
(CE. i, 752.) This same waxen Holy Candle has burned continuously
from 1105 to at least 1713 without being to the slightest degree
diminished, as his view of it was then reported by Anthony
Collins, in his Discourse of Free Thinking; he expresses the
doubt whether the attendant clergy would permit a careful
scrutiny to be made of the phenomenon.
A final job lot of these holy fetishes as recorded by Dr. McCabe
with some pertinent comments, may be admired: At Laon the chief
treasures shown to the public were some milk and hair of the
Virgin Mary. This was Laons set-off to the rival attraction at
Soissons, a neighboring town, which had secured one of the
{234} milk-teeth shed by the infant Jesus. There seems
to have been enough of the milk of the Virginsome of it was
still exhibited in Spanish churches in the nine-teenth
centurypreserved in Europe to feed a few calves. There was
hair enough to make a mattress. There were sufficient pieces of
the true cross to make a boat. There were teeth of Christ enough
to outfit a dentist (one monastery, at Charroux, had the complete
set). There were so many sets of baby-linen of the infant Jesus,
in Italy, France and Spain, that one could have opened a shop
with them. One of the greatest churches in Rome had Christs
manger-cradle. Seven churches had his authentic umbilical cord,
and a number of churches had his foreskin (removed at
circumcision and kept as a souvenir by Mary). One church had the
miraculous imprint of his little bottom on a stone on which he
had sat. Mary herself had left enough wedding rings, shoes,
stockings, shirts, girdles, etc. to fill a museum; one of her
shifts is still in the Chartres cathedral. One church had Aarons
rod. Six churches had the six heads cut off John the Baptist. ...
Every one of these things was, remember, in its origin, a cynical
blasphemous swindle. Each of these objects was at first launched
upon the world with deliberate mendacity. ... One is almost
disposed to ask for an application to the clergy of the law about
obtaining money under false pretenses. (McCabe, The Story of
Religious Controversy, p. 353.)
HOLY OILS, WATERS, AND FETISHES
These sacred and sanctified wonder-working objects are too
numerous to more than mention a few of the most celebrated.
Miraculous waters were in great profusion distilled or in some
weird way extracted from numbers of dead Saints, blessed for a
variety of purposes, and vended under the names of the productive
Saints; as The Water of St. Ignatius, of Sts. Adelhaid, Vincent
Ferrer, Willibrord, etc. That of St. Hubert was notably a
specific for the bite of mad dogs. The formula for these holy
extracts or emulsions, with their properties and miraculous
effects, are set forth in the official Rituale Romanum. (CE. xv,
564.) The widely celebrated Oil of Saints was in immense vogue
and possessed wonderful properties, as vouched by CE. under that
title. This holy unction was an oily substance which is said to
have flowed, or still flows, from the relics or burial places of
certain saints, and water which has in some way come in contact
with their relics. These oils are or have been used by the
faithful, with the belief that they will cure bodily and
spiritual ailments the custom prevailed of pouring oil over the
relics or reliquaries of martyrs and then gathering it in vases,
sponges or pieces of cloth. This oil, oleum martyris, was
distributed among the faithful as a remedy against sickness. ...
At present the most famous of the oils of saints is the oil of
St. Walburga (Walburgis oleum). It flows from the stone slab and
the surrounding metal plate on which rest the relies of St.
Walburga in her church in Eichstadt in Bavaria. The fluid is
caught in a silver cup and is distributed to the faithful for use
against diseases of the body and soul. Similarly of the Oil of
St. Menas, of which thousands of little flasks have recently been
discovered, found at many Places in Europe and Africa; there is
also a like Oil of St. Nicholas of Myra, which emanates from his
{235} relics at Bari in Italy, whither they were brought
in 1087. A certain substance like flour, is recorded by St.
Gregory of Tours, to emanate from the sepulchre of St. John the
Evangelist; also that from the sepulchre of the Apostle St.
Andrew emanated manna in the form of flour and fragrant oil. A
list half a column long is given of other saints from whose
relics or sepulchres oil is said to have flowed. (CE. xi, 228-9.)
THE AGNUS DEI
These are discs of wax impressed with the
figure of a lamb; and blessed at stated seasons by the Pope. The
rule still followed is that the great consecration of the Agnus
Dei takes place only in the first year of each pontificate and
every seventh year afterwards. It seems probable that they had
their beginning in some pagan usage of charms or amulets, from
which the ruder populace were weaned by the employment of this
Christian substitute [charm or amulet] blessed by prayer. The
early history of Catholic ceremonial affords numerous parallels
for this Christianizing of pagan rites. ... So the purpose of
these consecrated medallions is to protect those who wear or
possess them from all malign influences. In the prayers of
blessing, special mention is made of the perils from storm and
pestilence, from fire and flood, and also of the dangers to which
women are exposed in childbirth. Miraculous effects have been
believed to follow the use of these objects of piety. Fires are
said to have been. extinguished, and floods stayed. They were
much subject to counterfeit, the making of which has been
strictly prohibited by various papal bulls,(this proving
the obtaining of money by false pretenses in the papal. monopoly
of peddling them to the moron Faithful). There are also Agnus
Deis made from wax mingled with the dust which is, believed to
be that of the bones of martyrs; these are called Paste de SS.
Martiri, or Martyrs Paste. (CE. i, 220.) The peddling of these
frauds has not yet been forbidden by the criminal code, nor by
the Vicars of God who gain by them. Three pages of a separate
article, are devoted to the potent prayers in Liturgies, several
in doggerel Latin verse, on pages 221-223. One of these inspired
Papal invocations over the sacred amulets is quoted by Dr.
White:O God, ... we humbly beseech thee
that thou wilt bless these waxen forms, figured with the image
of an innocent lamb, .... that, at the touch and sight of them,
the faithful shall break forth into praises, and that the crash
of hailstorms, the blast of hurricanes, the violence of tempests,
the fury of winds, and the malice of thunderbolts may be
tempered, and evil spirits flee and tremble before the standard
of the holy cross, which is graven upon them.
(White, Warfare between Science and Religion. i,
343.)
The recurrence in modern times of the above recited catastrophes
raised by imps of the devil, not unseldom doing damage even to
the Faithful and to their sacred edifices, must be due to the
punible neglect to have a supply of these thaumaturgic crackers
on hand at the time and place of the flagellations of the Evil
One.
{236}
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MYSTICAL MARRIAGE
What to a Rationalist may seem a very inhuman
superstitionthough often attenuated by the clerical formula
With all my worldly goods I thee endow, pronounced to his earthly
vicar by the happy Bride of Jesus Christ, is the unctuously
so-called Mystical Marriage, the nuptial ceremony whereby a
deluded female enters into the joys of her Lord without actually
sharing them. This holy mummery is thus described by the
oft-cited Exponent of Catholic Truth:
Christian
virginity has been considered from the earliest centuries as a
special offering made by the soul to its spouse, Christ. ... In
many of the lives of the Saints, the mystical marriage consists
of a vision in which Christ tells a soul that He takes it for His
bride, presenting it with the customary ring, and the apparition
is accompanied by a ceremony; the Blessed Virgin Mary, saints and
angels are present. ... Moreover, as a wife should share in the
life of her husband, and as Christ suffered for the redemption
of mankind, the mystical bride enters into a more intimate
participation of His sufferings,[casus omissus being the
sharing of the nuptial joys also involved in the notion of
marriage]. Accordingly, in three cases out of four, the mystical
marriage has been granted to stigmatics. History [priest-written,
of course] has recorded seventy-seven mystical marriages, in
connection with female saints, blesseds and venerables;a
number of whom are named, including, appropriately, St. Mary
Magdalene dei Pazzaof the Crazy Onesas were they all.
(CE. ix, 703.) {237}
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