What are they saying about masculine spirituality? Book

Mid 3. De Rosa sets out to chart the dark history of the papacy across the estimated 263 incumbents of the papal throne up to and including John Paul II. He attempts to clear those fallacies held true, such as the fact that St Peter never held the title of Bishop of Rome, only being invested with it centuries after he died. Imprisoned as a foreigner espousing a dangerous sect, Peter was finally brought out of confinement to be executed in the persecution of the Christians blamed by Nero for the fire of 64AD. Christianity would not become more central to the faith of Roman citizens until the arrival of Constantine in 312. Laying seige to Rome in his attempt to remove his rival Maxentius and secure sole control of the Empire, and facing superior odds, Constantine had a vision which attached commitment to 'Christos' as presaging victory. Incredibly, Maxentius relinquished his secure advantage within Rome to flee north and Constantine routed his force at Milvian Bridge, where his rival and many of the latter's trops drowned in the Tiber. Yet, Constantine never made Christanity the official religion and was a cold-hearted despot. However, with the Edict of Milan, he did establish freedom of worship for all faiths, something the author decries the Catholic Church as never offering in the centuries since. Enjoying the fruits of this Pax Romana, the Christian faith was not only able to spread across the Empire, but also to gain the trophies of secular power. The early days of the papacy thus experienced corruption, bribery and bloodfeuds, as rival candidates fought to attain the trappings of power. The papacy also had to defend itself against the jealous interests of other powers and so, Pope Stephen III in 753 sought military protection in anointing Pepin, and his son Charlemagne, as 'patricians of the Romans'. In persuading the latter, the Pope presented a document of great antiquity - the 'Donation of Constantine'. This was claimed to be the deed whereby the late emperor, in return for being baptised in the faith, acknowledged the rule of the papal throne across the empire. An obvious fake due to inaccuracies in the text, it wouldnt be proven as such till 1517, but even so Rome continued to proclaim its authenticity for centuries. The truth was that Constantine and not the Bishop of Rome embodied the authority of church and state, as evidenced by the fact that he summoned the very first General Council of the Church in Nicaea in 325, to avoid a schism in the church by proclaiming the indivisibility of God the Father and his Son. Having secured temporal power the early papacy became embroiled in depravity. Pope Benedict V had to flee Rome after dishonouring a young girl before being eventually murdered by a jealous husband and having his corpse paraded through the streets and dumped in a cesspool. While John XII, also in the tenth century, was caught cheating with a married woman by her husband and killed in flagrante delicto with a hammer blow to the back of the head. Restoring strength to the papacy, Gregory VII set out to establish once and for all the suzerainty of the Papal see over temporal sovereigns. Gregory would enlist a whole school of forgers to provide him with documents for any occasion, but by extending the principle of excommunication to emperors and kings in 1078 he sowed rebellion and civil unrest. In excommunicating the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, he fought for his absolutist ideals, and though he would die in exile in 1085, he set the seal for future papal supremacy. Inocent III would put whole nations under papal interdict, such as King John's England between the years 1208-1214, for their challenge to the power of the church, while single-handedly forging the Papal states. However, papal autocracy reached its apogee with Boniface VIII who according to Dante, turned the Vatican into 'a sewer'. From the outset his reign was embroiled in scandal, being suspected of having tricked his predecessor into resigning. In one of the strangest episodes in papal history, faced with months of fruitless discussion to nominate a papal successor in 1292, Boniface had hoped to be elected as a compromise candidate. Yet, his strategy of producing a supposed plea from a respected old hermit, backfired when the latter was offered the papal throne. The hermit accepted, becoming Celestine V, and opting to establish his reign in Naples to avoid the licentiousness of Rome. Incorporated into the newly-appointed Pope's wooden cell at his palace, Boniface had a speaking tube installed through which he pretended to be the voice of the Holy Spirit calling for Celestine to step down. Once his own election was achieved in December 1294, Boniface had his predecessor locked up where he died of starvation and neglect. This ambitious and greedy occupant of Peter's throne would further blacken the papacy's reputation when in 1299 he ordered the levelling of his rivals' citadel of Palestrina on the outskirts of Rome with the deaths of some six thousand people. However, his lasting legacy was the consequences unleashed by his composing of the papal bull, 'Unam Sanctam' in 1302, by which he declared the salvaton of all men depended upon subjecting themselves to the power of the Pope. This was in retaliation to the challenge to papal and ecclesiastical authority posed by Philip the Fair of France, and led to the joining of forces of rival factions with the French crown which ended one year later with the forcible removal of Boniface from his throne and his incarcration and death. Though this prevented his being taken to France for trial, Philip would secure his victory with the electon of a French pope, compliant to his wishes and the eocaton of the papal court to Avignon in 1309. After seven successive Avignon Popes, in 1378 the election of the Pope reurned to the auspies of the Vatican, but with an nruly mob securing the election of an Italian cardinal wo refused to blindly sucumb to French wishes, a schism occured with the election of a French alternative. A hastily convened church council in Pisa in 1409 sought to end the schism by appointing a third Pope, but all three now claimed infalliblity and excommunicated their rivals. Eventually, at the Council of Constance between 1414-1418, the power of the General Council of the Church was declared as having auhority direct from Christ and thus superior to the auhority of the Pope. The schism was at an end, though not the excesses of the papacy. Francesco de la Rovere as Sixtus IV was not only the first pope to licence the brothels of Rome, but also the progenitor of indulgences and the first to sanction the Inquisition in Castile in 1478. With the election of Rodrigo Borgia as Alexander VI in 1492, the papacy ploughed its depths. Rumoured to have had incestuous relations with his daughter, Borgia sired and brought up in public ten illegitimate children. Of these, Cesare would serve as the inspiration for Machiavelli's Prince, and was so devoid of moral compass that he would steal a man's wife, rape her, and throw her in the Tiber. Having murdered his own brother and his sister's lover and husband, Cesare would poison himself and his father, causing the most horrible demise to the latter in 1503. The Reformation revealed the extent to which the papacy refused to countenance any internal dissent, believing itself to have a monopoly on the truth. De Rosa provides a concise history of papal suppresion of any challenge to its theological interpretation or from other religions. In doing so, he subscribes to the view that the tradiional early Christian beief in he sanctity of human life was abandoned in he face of the militaristic competition of Islam. As such, the role-model switched from the ascetic monk to the sword-weilding Christian knight sworn to cast out the infidel, and assured, like his Muslim counterpart, of absolution for all his acts for serving the one true religion. Perhaps the bloodiest chapter was written when Innocent III called for the eradication of the Cathars in his Bull Of Anathema in 1208. The Cathars had flourished for over a century in Languedoc in SE France, and condemned Rome as the Whore of Babylon and the Pope as the Antichrist, yet their beliefs are still unveiled with no evidence left behind aside from the biased judgement of Catholic authorities. Their principal crime being not showing the Pope due deference, the Cathars were routed and wiped out by the Crusaders at Beziers in July 1209 before further massacres throughout the province,turning it into a wasteland over the following seventeen years. In 1232 the Inquisition was born and over the next five centuries tortured and executed all guilty of dissent. The most tyrannical inquisitor would be Torquemada, confessor to Queen Isabella, who from his appointment in 1483 tallied 114,000 victims. Ironically, De Rosa reveals that this executiner in the name of the true church was himself descended from a Jewish grandmother.The author opines that the greatest cover up in history concerns the artistic and theological representation of Christ on the cross, attired in a loincloth to hide his Jewishness, which has allowed centuries of pogroms against the Jewish people as deicides. Centuries before Hitler's Final Solution, the Holy Roman Catholic Church codified the prejudicial treatment and persecution of the Jewish race through the enactments of the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils in 1179 and 1215. These edicts banned all Jews from administration and commerce, and deprived them of ownership of land. Moreover, the Crusades routed their first victims, ahead of arrival in the Holy Land, in the slaughter of Jews within Christendom itself. Then in 1555 Pope Paul IV published a bull which forced them into ghettos and to wear a badge of shame. Another controversial issue raised in the book concerns the papacy's claim to infalibility. As De Rosa explains, within the Early Catholic Church, Popes could be removed from office by church councils accused of heresy. Yet, at what has since become termed as Vatican I, Pope Pius IX in 1870 defined the terms of papal supremacy which still shackles the Roman Catholic faith to this day, and failed its ablity to meet the challenges of twentieth century society on issues such as divorce and abortion. The second half of the book is informative but becomes more of a sermon fom the author, though the points he makes are extremely relevant and persuasive.