The Use of Forgeries in Protestantism.

One of the evergreen tropes of Protestantism is the "Donation of Constantine." I've been in a few internet debates where all of sudden my Protestant interlocutor will utter something along the lines of "What about the Donation of Constantine?" and then scurry off as if some telling blow had been landed.  My reaction is along the lines of "eh?" or "what?" or "how is that relevant to the price of tea in China?" 

As a lifelong Catholic, I know about the "Donation of Constantine" as an interesting bit of history.  The Donation of Constantine was fabricated in approximately the 8th Century, probably in France, and probably for the purpose of bolstering the Carolingian claim against the Emperor in Constantinople. The Donation of Constantine was picked up in the 12th Century by papal apologists who used it as a way of supporting the already on-going "papal revolution," which was a fait accompli by way of the reform of canon law, not because of fabricated documents from the 8th Century. (See Harold Berman's Law and Revolution.)

Did the papacy use forgeries? Absolutely, but the papacy did not forge the documents and was taken in by them as much as anyone else.  An interesting fact is that the Lorenzo Valla, who famously unmasked the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, subsequently became an apostolic secretary and a favorite of Pope Callixtus.  It seems that Valla's historical revisionism did not entirely poison his career with the Vatican, although he did have some rocky moments.

Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas was apparently taken in by the "False Decretals of Isidore," although presumably at the time they were merely the "Decretals of Isidore," in his "Against the Errors of the Greeks."  The Decretals was a series of purported quotations from Eastern Church Fathers that were also created in the 8th Century as part of the project of ramping up Western prestige against the powerful Eastern emperor.  However, the fact that the Decretals was itself a forgery, many of the quotes contained in it were authentic, and Aquinas could have sustained his argument by using other quotes from Eastern Fathers.  An example of the former is found in Section 33, where he quotes Chrysostom as saying that "he allocated James a determined territory, but he appointed Peter master and teacher of the whole world." Although this was taken from the Decretals, which was a forgery, in fact, Chrysostem did say in his Homily on John that "And if any should say, "how then did James receive the chair at Jerusalem? I would make this reply that He appointed Peter teacher, not of the chair, but of the world."  An example of the latter is provided by James Likoudis.

So, the significance of these forgeries seems to be overstated, albeit it seems to have a particulalry strong resonance in the mind of some Protestants for whom it is the dispositive evidence of "perfidious Rome."

Mind you, this is all new to me.  I wouldn't have spent time learning this stuff except for the fact that it was brought up on a fever-swamp anti-catholic site on Facebook.  Although I pointed out the above, the stated views of the residents - particularly one individual named Dominic Macelli - was that none of this mattered because a forgery is a forgery.

The conversation turned to the issue of the Deuterocanonical texts.  As part of this discussion, Macelli quoted the following:

“St. Jerome distinguished between canonical books and ecclesiastical books. The latter he judged were circulated by the Church as good spiritual reading but were not recognized as authoritative Scripture. The situation remained unclear in the ensuing centuries...For example, John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, Walafrid, Nicolas of Lyra and Tostado continued to doubt the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books. According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church at the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the Old Testament Canon. That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent” (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Canon).

That looks like a particularly impressive bit of evidence: the Catholic Encyclopedia appears to be saying that there was no defined canon until Trent in the 16 Century.

But it smelled funny because based on my extensive historical reading it was so wrong.

And there were problems with the quote. First, it is entirely inconsistent with the historical evidence. Second,  I couldn't find it in the Catholic Encyclopedia on the New Advent site.

I pressed Macelli for his source.  He had consistently taken the position that he would not provide jumplinks for his sources because he was afraid of his interlocutors reading his sources and pointing out his errors. Apparently, people were supposed to take his quotes on "faith alone."  After pressing him, he pointed nebulously to a message board.


 "New Catholic Encyclopedia" article on "Canon, Biblical," p. 26.

Another strange thing was that this quote could only be found on anti-catholic sites.


It turns out that there is a "New Catholic Encyclopedia," which is nowhere to be found online.

So, I went to the local library and looked for the quote, and found out that the anti-catholic apologists had done a "False Decretal of Isidore" number and provided a forged and fabricated quote.  



Here is what the relevant passages actually say:

"St. Jerome (A.D. 340 - 420) distinguished between "canonical books" and "ecclesiastical books." The latter, he judged, were circulated by the Church as good "spiritual reading," but were not recognized as authoritative Scripture.  St. Augustine, however, did not recognize this distinction.  He accepted all the books in the LXX as of equal value, noting that those designated as apocryphal by Jerome were either unknown or obscure origin. Augustine's point of view prevailed and the deuterocanonical books remained in the Vulgate, the Latin version, that received official standing at the Council of Trent.

The situation remained unclear in the ensuing centuries, although the tendency to accept the disputed books was becoming all the time more general.  In spite of this trend, some, e.g., John Damascene, Gregory the Great, Walafrid, Nicholas of lyra and Tostado, continued to doubt the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books.  St. THOMAS AQUINAS has for a long time been listed as a dissenter because of his supposed doubts about Wisdom and Sirach, but P. Synave has argued convincingly to clear him of this imputation (Revue biblique 212 (1924) 522 - 533). The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the OT Canon. That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent."

Obviously, this text is far different from the fabricated quote being circulated on such anti-catholic sites as "Just for Catholics."  I would, however, dissent from the New Catholic Encyclopedia's insinuation as to the level of uncertainty.  The deuterocanonical works had been used in the liturgy for over a thousand years by the time of Trent.  In De Libero Arbitrio (Discussion of Free Will), Erasmus directs Luther to the text from the Wisdom of Sirach (aka Ecclesiasticus) 15:14 - 18 that:

"God created man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel. He added his commands and precepts: if you will keep the commandments, and keep acceptable faith forever, they will keep you. He set water and fire before you; stretch out your hand to whatever you desire.  Before man are life and death, good and evil; whatever he pleases shall be given him."

Erasmus follows up his quote from Sirach/Ecclesiasticus with the following:

"I do not suppose that anyone will plead here against the authority of this work that it was not originally in the Hebrew canon (as Jerome points out), seeing that the Church of Christ has unanimously received it into its canon, and I see no reason why the Hebrews should have thought this book ought to be excluded from the canon, given that they accept the Proverbs of Solomon and the Amatory Song."

(See Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 76, p. 21 - 22.)

In short, Erasmus - one of the leading scholars of Hebrew, Greek and Latin of his age - was aware of Jerome's dissent as a kind of intellectual abstraction, which did not bear a great deal of weight in the face of the actual practice, which was that Christians had been reading Sirach/Ecclesiasticus as part of the divine liturgy throughout Christian history!

In any event, the irony of the situation is that anti-catholic apologists who condemn the Catholic Church on account of the Donation of Constantine seem to have no problem using fabricated documents of their own.

The final irony was that after I pointed out that Dominick Macelli was probably using a fabricated quote, I was ejected from the Facebook group.

Lorenzo Valla received better treatment.

Papias and Polycarp and Irenaeus...oh, my....

The comments to my post on Ehrman have turned into a good discussion on whether, and why, we can accept the tradition that Mark wrote the Gospel of Mark.  Along the way there are discussions about the trustworthiness of tradition and testimony and the role of testimony in history.  Things I learned include the fact that Justin Martyr writing circa 150 AD identified one of the "gospels" - at that time called a "memoir" of the apostles - as being the memoir of Peter.  Also, I am even more confirmed in my opinion that the Gospel of Peter was a late invention given its use in one church in Syria and its first recorded discovery after 190 AD.

The nut of the argument is that "Mark" is quoted used in First Clement (circa 90 AD) and Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (circa 150 AD), so we know the content of "Mark."  Papias, writing circa 100 to 140 AD, relates that he was told by the "presbyter," a disciple of Jesus, that the author of "Mark" was Mark who wrote down the stories of Peter.  Justin Martyr in the Dialogue with Trypho links the content we know is found in "Mark" to "his (i.e., Peter's) memoirs."  By circa 190 AD, or earlier, Irenaeus confirms that there is a "Gospel of Mark."

In order to avoid this textual support of the traditional position, the critic has to make all kinds of assumptions such as Papias had a different text than that which is referred to by Irenaeus which was lost in some way and never referred to and which has never been found outside of the need to assert the existence of this ad hoc text.  A problem with this argument - apart from the linking of "Mark" to Mark by Clement to Justin to Papias to Irenaeus - is that Papias was the "companion of Polycarp" and Irenaeus was the student of Polycarp.  It begs the imagination that in a culture which read things aloud and swapped texts back and forth that Polycarp would never have learned that there were two different texts of something ascribed to Mark.

It ends with an ad hominem against lawyers, naturally.

The historical background to Agora.

Faith L. Justice has some interesting posts on the actual history concerning the history distorted in the film Agora.

Concerning arguments about "going beyond the text" and "stealing second base."

A little while ago, over at Theology for Dummies, I attempted to respond to Russ's buried argument that Aquinas - and other attempts to reason to theological doctrines - were suspect because they "went beyond Scripture":

Likewise, when Russ says that we have to be careful about "going beyond the text" that assumes that we are going beyond the text. As I pointed out on Saturday, no Church Father ever felt that they were "going beyond the text." Aquinas didn't feel that he was "going beyond the text." Rather they, and Aquinas, felt that they were staying within the text by properly applying reason to the the text.


They might have been wrong. Maybe they are going beyond the text. However, saying that we have to be careful not to go beyond the text is problematic because it assumes that the person who says "let's be careful about going beyond the text" is in a privileged position to know where the text ends.

Where a text "ends" depends on how the community that reads the text actually reads the text. This tells us a lot about where a given community says a text ends, but little about the proper reading of the text. Moreover, if we really were going to know where a text "ends" then we ought to give a lot of weight to how the text was originally read, since the best way of knowing what a text means is what its original writers and readers thought it meant. (But this is not always the case since texts can have latent meanings and implications.) This, then, means that if we want to know where a text "ends" we should give weight to the original understanding, which would mean looking at the Early Church Fathers, but, ironically, they tended to say things like that which we have been saying and which Russ says "goes beyond the text."

Over at Called to Communion, the ever-perspicacious Bryan Cross explains the problem with the "going beyond Scripture" argument better than I could ever hope to.

I hear this “over-realized eschatology” claim quite often. The problem with this frequent appeal to “over-realized eschatology” is that the principled basis for the standard for what is “properly-realized eschatology” is usually not provided. So in practice the claim amounts to “anything that goes beyond what I myself get out of Scripture.” For that reason, the standard by which to judge what is “over-realized eschatology” and what is “under-realized eschatology” is in that way subjective and relative, and so is no standard at all. My statement that persons have an unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification has nothing to do with eschatology. My statement follows from the very nature of persons as rational beings. For example, if you ask me to clarify something I have said, and then you still need further clarification, you can ask for it, and, because I can hear you and understand you and have memory and communicative ability, I can provide it. And if you need still more clarification you can ask me for it, and I can provide it. So long as I remain alive and conscious and capable of communication, I can provide interpretive self-clarification. That’s what I mean when I say that persons have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. We can get to the point where you say, “Are you saying x?” And I can reply, “Yes”. And that point, with respect to that question, the hermeneutical spiral comes to an end.

Books do not have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. And because books don’t have that, they cannot function as interpretive adjudicator when there are competing interpretations facing the Church: each side can appeal to the book to support its own position, and without a magisterium, the disagreement can be a perpetual deadlock or impasse. But a living magisterium can not only adjudicate an interpretive dispute, it can also provide clarification regarding previous statements or judgments it has made. That is why having a living magisterium does not leave us in the same epistemic quandary that we would be in if we had only a book and no interpretive authority.

This is what has made it possible within the history of the Catholic Church for theological disputes to be resolved. The reason the Church is not still wrestling with Arianism and Nestorianism and Monophysitism, etc. is precisely because she could speak definitively and authoritatively in condemning them. But the Bible alone could not do that. Because the Bible does not explicitly address those questions, persons on both sides could and did appeal to the Bible to defend their interpretation. And so a living personal divinely authorized voice was necessary in order to provide the authoritative interpretive decision in those cases.

As for St. Paul’s statement about seeing through a glass dimly, we (Catholics) understand that to be referring to the Beatific Vision. Faith is the evidence of things unseen. The object of faith is presently unseen, but we have some awareness of it, by way of the gift of faith. So we are neither ignorant of the object of faith, nor do we see the object of faith. But then, in the paraousia, we will see Him face to face, we will see even as we are seen. We do not take this verse to be teaching that until Christ returns we cannot have certainty regarding doctrinal or interpretive questions. In other words, the verse is not denying that we can know with certainty what are the dogmas of the faith and which positions are heretical; rather, it is talking about our present inability to see the object of the faith, and that object is God Himself.

Cross also makes this interesting empirical point about the claim that we don't need a human authoritative interpreter for scripture:

In other words, at this present point in history, almost five hundred years down the road from the start of the Protestant experiment, it seems safe to say that the historical evidence shows that Scripture is not sufficiently perspicuous to maintain unity of the faith, without a divinely authorized teaching and interpretive authority. Apart from the magisterium, Scripture cannot fulfill its authoritative function within the Church, because apart from a magisterium, there can be no unified Church preserved for Scripture to govern and guide. Without a magisterium, the situation necessarily reduces (in principle) and collapses (in time) into solo scriptura. So for these reasons, Scripture functions authentically as the divine word only as divinely interpreted by a living and divinely authorized magisterium. The content of the Sacred Scriptures can be understood only by the same Spirit who inspired them, and thus only with the guidance of those persons to whom Christ gave that gift of the Spirit by which it became true to say, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” (Luke 10:16)

A rose in the slaughter-house.

Steven Greydanus reviews the new movie on Germany's "White Rose," which is based on transcripts of Scholl's interrogation and which Greydanus gives an A+:

The sheer intellectual and emotional rigor of the back-and-forth between this terrible old lion and his cagey young prey is both crushing and exhilarating; my friend and colleague Jeffrey Overstreet compared it (brilliantly, I think) to the electrifying exchanges between Clarisse Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.


Throughout her ordeal, Sophie’s guiding light — symbolized by the rays of the sun, often regarded by Sophie with upturned face — is her Christian faith, a cornerstone of her critique of Nazi ideology and atrocities, and a taproot of her moral strength. A devout Protestant, Sophie unapologetically invokes God and conscience under cross-examination as the basis for her actions, the source of human dignity and the necessary guiding light to put the German people on the path to recovery. In her private moments, when she allows herself to be vulnerable and afraid, Sophie opens her heart to God, pleading for help and strength. In an hour of extreme need she gladly prays with a prison chaplain, receiving his blessing in the name of the Holy Trinity.

As the interviews progress, there are hints that, despite himself, Mohr — a family man with a son of about Sophie’s age — is ultimately somewhat taken with his prisoner’s luminous intellect and conviction. It is almost a kind of cognitive crisis for him: Here is this young woman, to all appearances the flower of German womanhood, an initially enthusiastic member of the girls’ wing of Hitler Youth, educated at National Socialist expense — yet she inexplicably rejects the world the Nazis are trying to build. “You’re so gifted,” he finally says in frustration. “Why don’t you think like us?”

This article argues that Scholl was influenced in her views on the primacy of conscience by Cardinal John Henry Newman.  Scholl gave her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel - a German officer serving on the Eastern Front - a copy of Newman's writing:

On arriving in the town of Mariupol, Russia, Hartnagel saw corpses of Soviet soldiers who had been shot by their German guards and began to hear reports of mass killings of local Jews.


He later wrote to Scholl to say that reading Newman's words in such an awful place were like tasting "drops of precious wine".

"What a fallacy it is to take nature as our model for our actions and to describe its cruelty as 'great'," he said in a letter of July 1942. "But we know by whom we were created and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. Conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil."

Mr Knab has identified Hartnagel's words as being taken verbatim from a sermon given by Newman called "The Testimony of Conscience".

Newman taught that conscience was an echo of the voice of God enlightening each person to moral truth in concrete situations. Christians, he argued, had a duty to obey a good conscience over and above all other considerations.

Lieutenant Hartnagel's convictions later led him to protest against the mass murders of the Jews.

There were protests by German soldiers against German atrocities - all too rare, perhaps, and all the more courageous for their rarity.

The article also connects Scholl to Newman in this way:

In his speech Fr Fenlon explained that Sophie, a Lutheran, was introduced to the works of Newman by a scholar called Theodor Haecker, who had written to the Birmingham Oratory in 1920 asking for copies of Newman's work, which he wanted to translate into German.


On reading Newman, Haecker converted to Catholicism and he later became such an outspoken critic of Nazism that he was forbidden to publish his work by the regime. Early in the Second World War he became a good friend of the Scholls and a direct inspiration of the White Rose movement, which opposed Nazism by circulating thousands of leaflets telling German Christians that they had a "moral duty" to rise up against Hitler, the "messenger of Anti-Christ".

The movement, made up mostly of German students, also condemned the persecution of the Jews in 1942 - the year Hitler began to implement the Final Solution - as the "most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history".

Much of the language of the fourth pamphlet in particular directly echoed Newman's theology, said Fr Fenlon.

He said: "Newman's influence on the movement took the form of a light which questioned the darkness."

"Newman had won Haecker to the Church," he said. "Haecker sought to win the younger generation to Newman understood on his own terms."

Ideas have consequences.  The New Atheists attempt to link Nazism to Christianity, but the question they should answer is, "where were the atheist Sophie Scholls?"

"If we had to summarize Christianity's history, we would probably reference the apostle Paul, Billy Graham, and our congregation's building committee."



Carl Olson on a particular kind of historical illiteracy.

The Curious Case of Junia

We all remember Junia - who was the leader or deacon of a house church and therefore is presently in fashion among feminist theologians, Womynchurch activists and liberal professors of Bible Studies. 

The version I've heard expounded is that Paul recognized Junia as "equal to the apostles" but during the dark ages of misogyny, Junia's name was changed to the male counterpart, Junias, until modern scholarship could throw off the blinders of sexism and reclaim this lost trace of true feminism.

Not so fast with the Dan Brown theme-song, apparently.  As with a lot of things, it seems that tradition had it right:

As far as translations are concerned, the Latin Vulgates give either Juniam or Juliam, a manifestly feminine name; and the sixteenth-century English translations, including the Authorized Version and the Roman Catholic version from Rheims, regarded the name as feminine. Belleville and Epp show that the overwhelming number of writers and commentators in the first Christian millennium and a half believed St. Paul was addressing a female Junia; and like Burer and Wallace, whose 2001 NTS article (arguing that Junia was not an apostle) ignited the present phase of this controversy, they agree that the feminine form of the name is overwhelmingly more probable (or, to use Eppspeak, certain).


So how did the idea get around that the female Junia was really a male Junias? Perhaps a monkish hand can, after all, be detected in this; the ex-Augustinian Martin Luther seems to have set this ball rolling. It is probably due to him that some north European Protestant translations went for “Junias” (masculine), while versions in Spain and Italy, where the dead repressive hand of Romish tyranny had more influence, stayed with “Junia” (feminine). But even despite Luther’s influence, with only one exception, Greek New Testaments down to 1927 continued to give her the feminine accent. Yes! Even through the dark oppressive decades of Victorian patriarchy, Junia’s femaleness remained unproblematic as far as editors were concerned.

Who, then, is guilty of the sex change? Stand up the thirteenth (1927) edition of Nestle: the standard Greek Testament beloved of twentieth-century “scientific” and “modern” biblical scholarship! Again—Yes! Not Dark Age monks; not obscurantist popes; not medieval misogynist conspirators; not pre-Enlightenment bigots; it is the brightest and the best of liberal European and North American modern scholarship that took a reconstructive scalpel to Junia’s groin. All subsequent Greek Testaments, including the influential United Bible Society editions, slavishly followed the obviously infallible magisterium of the younger Nestle without qualm or hesitation.

I must confess that I am a victim of the "instant tradition" that Junia's sex was covered-up by the Church.  I must have had that tale in a number of different lectures on the early Church, but this is entirely new.

There may be a problem with the claim that Junia was an apostleish kind of gal:

Andronicus and Junia were episemoi en tois apostolois; does this mean distinguished among the apostles or merely well known to the apostles? Epp’s treatment of this central question is light and unimpressive.


Preliminaries are in order. This is not entirely a matter of the highest philology; a fair bit of it is nearer what we call Common Sense. “ X is well known/renowned/notorious among Y”: This can have two meanings— inclusive, where X is a member of the class of objects Y; and exclusive, where X is not a Y. But it is often far from clear whether a particular statement is inclusive, exclusive, or both.

“The New York Times is well known among politicians”: That is quite clear; the newspaper is not itself a politician and so the sense is exclusive—politicians know the newspaper well.

However, take “Condoleeza Rice is well known among politicians.” Surely, this can bear the implications both that other politicians know Dr. Rice well (“exclusive”) and that the world at large knows her well as belonging to the category “politician” (“inclusive”). Because both propositions are true, we probably will not often need to try to distinguish.

If we were to distinguish, we would need information external to the proposition itself.

The former reading is more likely given the absence of tradition that Junia founded churches, or did much of anything else other than providing Paul a reference.

The post I'm linking to ends with this eminently common sense observation:

His influence is clear in a paper written in 2006 by a brace of English Anglican bishops. David Stancliffe (Salisbury) and Tom Wright (Durham) felt the need to attack a paper by Walter Kasper in which the cardinal had begged the Church of England not to terminate the movement towards communicatio in sacris by admitting women to the episcopate. They followed Epp in his simplistic conviction that the only thing needing to be proved is Junia’s gender. If this is to be established, they claim, “then even Roman tradition might be forced to recognize the possibility that women could be apostles, and therefore presumably could hold ordained ministry in the apostolic succession.” This is quite staggering in its implication that if New Testament women exercised “leadership roles,” this feeds in directly to a conclusion that women be ordained to priestly ministries.


For nearly two millennia, women have unashamedly (and laudably) exercised “leadership roles” in the Church, but nobody in all the centuries before Epp’s generation was clever enough to spot that this points to their call to ministerial priesthood. Recent popes have made powerful women saints “doctors of the Church” or “patrons of Europe” without—the pontifical simpletons!—apparently realizing that these actions logically imply that women can be called to episkope. Most Christians for some eighteen hundred years have regarded Junia as a woman, without its for one moment occurring to their confused minds that this makes her some sort of proof of, or paradigm for, women in the sacerdotal ministry of the Catholic Church.

The conviction that all you need to do is to prove that Junia was a woman (which the Tradition had in any case overwhelmingly asserted until modern liberal scholarship decided it knew better) in order to demonstrate the need to expunge the semiotics of gender from the theology of priesthood, simply shows that Epp and his running dogs have not begun to understand what the discussion is all about.

Again, fair point.  Just this morning I was listening to a lecture from the Teaching Company on the Catholic Church where Junia was again trotted out for the proposition that women were leaders in the early church.  Now, this was after the professor had said that the early church didn't have deacons really, but where Junia was concerned, it was the case that she was a leader because she was a deacon, all of which leads to head scratching moments.  The professor never rehearsed the contrary argument that women have been leaders in the Church without anyone thinking, well, obviously, they can be priests and bishops.

History and Apologetics

Father Dwight Longenecker makes a number of dead-on points about the anti-catholic use of historical scandals in the Catholic Church:

One of the things that impressed me in my own journey to the Catholic Church is that the dirty laundry was out there for everyone to see. There was no big cover up about the Borgia popes. There was no secret history about the shameful history of the papacy in the seventh and eighth centuries. There was no massive whitewash of the sins of Catholics. The history was all there.

Two things impressed me about this: first of all, the slanted history, the half truths, the lies and the 'secret history' was all produced not by Catholics, but by anti-Catholic forces. It was the Protestant propagandists who produced all the dark, dirty, nasty stuff about Catholics. Of course they built on some terrible events, exaggerated, told the story one sided and twisted things (usually from a sincerely wounded perspective) and made stuff up. The Catholics didn't for the most part. They behaved like the kid with caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Yup. Fair cop. You got me. Not good. Sorry. Try not to do it again." In the face of this wrong doing it was the Protestants who were all uppity and self righteous about it all. The Catholics were just ashamed.

The second thing that impressed me was that the spotted history of the Catholic Church was actually just what you would expect of a two thousand year history of a religious organization. The history of the Catholic Church read (if you like) like the Old Testament. It was one long soap opera of human sin, repentance, divine punishment, shameful pride, lust, ambition, vanity and folly all mixed up with miracles, divine intervention, saints, holy men and women, and through it all God's amazing providence winning through.

So when I read the history of the Catholic Church the very sinfulness and awfulness of some Catholics' behavior rather confirmed the whole thing as being authentic. What would have been very suspicious indeed is if every Pope was a Leo the Great, every priest a Cure d'Ars, every bishop a Robert Bellarmine, every Catholic a St Francis or a Therese of Lisieux. Now that would definitely have been smelling of rat.

So when I therefore read about 'secret Catholic conspiracies to cover up the truth' (Let's say about 'Pope Joan' or some such) it's laughable, because the Catholic Church just doesn't do that. It's not because Catholics may not wish to do that, but because the Catholic Church isn't the all powerful, megalomaniacal organization that its critics make out. When you read the history of the Catholic Church you get the impression, therefore, that this is real history.

You got saints. You got sinners. You got triumph. You got defeat. You got ups. You got downs. You got crimes. You got heroic sanctity.

It's just what you would expect. It's down to earth. It's simple.

It is an interesting phenomenon that the people who work themselves into the thickest lather over the dastardly Catholic Church, or the threat of priestly pedophiles, are those people with the least to fear. For example, the LDS troll on Pastor Jan's very ecumenical site has really outdone himself this thread with his conspiratorial view of the Catholic church, even to the extent of absurdly arguing that the reason for the pedophile priest scandal of recent years was the fact that Aquinas somehow taught that rape was a far less serious sin than masturbation. [Search for "Gecko."]

For the record, this anti-catholic trope is apparently a bit of conventional wisdom in some circles and is completely bogus. Aquinas's comments were directed toward the technical issue of whether rape or masturbation was "worse" as regards the vice of lust, and since rape sounded more in injustice than lust, as a matter of measuring lust, masturbation worse. This analysis clearly had nothing to do with (a) which was the worst sin with respect to injustice or violence or (b) which was worst in some over-all sense.

But as Father Longenecker points out, it's all out there to read. Nothing has been hidden, redrafted or lost from the corpus of Aquinas' writings. It's there, warts and all, for anyone to read.