Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy

"After Peter, the centuries roll by, full of controversies, any one of which today would involve immediate recourse to Rome for a decision... We have already noted that not a single Father can find any hint of a Petrine office in the great biblical texts that refer to Peter. Papal supremacy and infallibility, so central to the Catholic church today, are simply not mentioned. Not a single creed, nor confession of faith, nor catechism, nor passage in patristic writings contains one syllable about the pope, still less about faith and doctrine being derived from him."

Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy, p. 206.

"The Pope and the Council contained aspects of papal history completely unknown to me. I had been brought up as a Catholic, had gone through the usual six-year seminary course prior to ordination, had graduated from a Catholic university, the Gregorianum in Rome, and had never come across such ideas. This is partly to be explained by the partisan nature of seminary education and the fact that in such establishments history is a Cinderella subject. The misbehaviour of popes is lightly dwelt or even excised, rather in the way that Trotsky was cut out of all Soviet history by Stalin ... My ignorance must also be set down to the preference Catholics have for a history of the papacy that can be read with white gloves on. It is not easy to admit that one's leaders were often barbarians, or that the good popes sometimes did far more harm than good.

Thus, quite late in my career, I felt obliged to examine the history of Catholic ideas and institutions, the later of course including the papacy. It was a long and sometimes painful form of a self-education."

Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy,
pages 455-56.
Publisher: Crown (January 13, 1988)
ISBN-10: 0517570270
ISBN-13: 978-0517570272

(Peter de Rosa is author of many books including Bless Me, Father, Christ and Original Sin, and Jesus Who became Christ. In Vicars of Christ. He dispels myths about the papacy in favor of hard facts, and provides everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, with the true, alarming story of the dark origins of the Church.)

"The subject of papal heretics and papal excommunication is little practiced since 1870. Even the arrogant Innocent III admitted: 'I can be judged by the church for a sin concerning matters of faith.' Innocent IV, affirmed that all creatures were subject to him as Vicar of the Creator, even, as in his own words: "Of course a pope can err in matters of faith." Therefore his naive creatures are to believe not because the Pope believes but because the Church believes. In simpler language even if popes err somehow, the Church will not err. These words appeared in the original text of Innocent IV's Commentary on the Decalogue. They were later erased from later editions. No one knows why, since a number of popes said more or less the same.

The aura and awe surrounding the papacy today is so entrenched that few Catholics question their conscience about the history of papal infallibility, a long dark, mysterious mixture of humans — the normal pious, the obscenely pompous, the truly mad, the frightfully murderous, the devilishly lecherous, the senilely elderly, the lustily youthful, and immature children. These popes were fallible long before they became infallible. Roman pontiffs not only erred but erred in fundamental matters of Christian doctrine.

Most Catholics go through life and never hear in school or church a word of reproach for any pope. Yet a devout Catholic like Dante had no scruple about dumping pontiff after pontiff in the deepest pit of hell."

Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy,
Bantam Press, 1988, p. 30.

Quotes from Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy

"Impeccable Catholic sources, papal documents, letters of reforming saints, all paint the same depressing picture. Monasteries full of women; every friar had his 'Martha', every nun her lover. Bishops, in every sense the fathers of their people, kept harems."

"Young men who spent their youth in rape and adultery were rising in the ranks of the clergy. They were spending their nights with four or five women, then getting up in the morning — in what state, he leaves to the imagination — to celebrate mass."

" ... many monasteries were the haunts of homosexuals, many converts were brothels."

"As to the sex-starved secular clergy, they were so often accused of incest that they were at length forbidden even to have mothers, aunts or sisters living in their house."

"Promiscuity was rife in monasteries and convents. The great Ivo of Chartres (1040-1115) tells of whole convents with inmates who were nuns only in name. They had often been abandoned by their families and were really prostitutes."

"There also crept in the infamous cullagium, a charge for keeping concubines... bishops and archdeacons themselves benefited from this sex-tax; in Rome, it was the pope."

"In the year 1250, Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln wrote to Pope Innocent IV. Of priests he said: 'They are in truth teachers of heresy, inasmuch as the word of action is mightier than the word of speech.' "

"In the year 1414, King Henry V asked the University of Oxford to prepare articles for the reform of the church. Article 39 began: 'Because the carnal and sinful life of priests today scandalizes the entire church and their public fornication goes completely unpunished ...' "

"In the parish of St John Zachary in London, there was a church service of a very remarkable kind. It provided a brothel exclusively for priests and nuns ..."

"St Alban's Abbey, for instance, was nothing but a den of prostitutes serving the local monks. Nuns were regularly raped therein and the entire place, in a phrase worth of Shakespeare, was 'a riot of seed and blood'..."

"The overall report (in England) said that 144 religious houses were equal in viciousness to Sodom; countless convents, served by 'lewd confessors', were full of children; clergy — abbots, monks and friars — were carrying on not merely with whores but with married women..."

"After six centuries of strenuous efforts to impose celibacy, the clergy were a menace to the wives and young women of parishes to which they were sent."

"Across the border lived Henry, Bishop of Liege. The man was a legend beyond his lifetime. Henry was finally deposed by Gregory X at the Council of Lyons in 1274 'for deflowering virgins and other mighty deeds'... He ended murdered by a Flemish knight who was outraged at what the bishop had done to his daughter."

"During Borgia's reign, the Florentine friar Savonarola said the nuns were worse than harlots. As to the clergy, 'one priest spends the night with his concubine, another with a little boy, and in the morning they proceed to the altar to celebrate Mass. What do you think of that? What do you make of such a Mass?' "

"The evil was too deeply rooted; the last opportunities for reform long lost... A proverb passes from mouth to mouth: 'The profession of the priest is the surest road to hell.' "

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly

De Rosa ( Prayers for Pagans and Hypocrites ) is an angry Catholic. In the worst proselytizing tradition, this devil's advocate overstates familiar arguments, bludgeoning the reader with his dossier against the Church. Among De Rosa's tamer charges: Jesus renounced possessions, but his vicars celebrate high mass garbed in cloth of gold; the Church has never lifted strictures against usury, yet the Vatican operates a bank. De Rosa sweeps through Church history to parade popes who begat children, popes who fornicated on a grand scale, popes who married. Then in the second half of this polemic, he addresses Church teaching, conjoining the "immaculate conception" doctrine to decrees governing birth control, abortion, celibacy. The doctrine of papal infallibility is dealt with, as is Church anti-Semitism through the ages leading to the Holocaust silence of Pius XII, the "one man in the world whose witness Hitler feared." And in wrapping up his catalog of "the sins of the papacy," De Rosa virtually dismisses internal reform: "It is not Catholics but other Christians who chiefly can make the papacy what it ought to be."

From Library Journal
In his history of the papacy, former Jesuit De Rosa aims to undermine belief in papal infallibility. Although he claims to be a friend of the Catholic Church, and does at times express admiration for the holiness of many of the Popes, his book is so heavily weighted with information on the corruption of the Papacy that it would be hard for any reader to see any good in the office. The book cannot be faulted historically or stylistically, though most of the information including the most sordidcan be found in the standard Roman Catholic sources. Patrick Grainfeld's The Limits of the Papacy (Crossroad, 1987) offers a more balanced view of the expansion of papal power.
Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, N.J.

Expose of the history of the Papacy from an insiders view., February 24, 1999
By A Customer

This book would make your hair curl. No wonder the Christians got such a poor reputation!

Syllabus of Errors... And Crimes, May 12, 2004
By "bute2" (Paris, France)

This book had me shaking with laughter and trembling with rage--rage at the misdeeds of the papacy, not the book. It brilliantly recounts the endless crimes, hypocrisies, errors, indecencies, murders, debaucheries, illogicalities, idiocies and fanaticisms of the papacy from the "first pope" to the present. It is written in a highly engaging and breezy journalistic style, with more than a dash of humour and wit. For the most part the author lets the deeds (or rather, misdeeds) of the Bishops of Rome speak for themselves, although his own dim view of his subject is abundantly clear throughout. He is himself a former priest (educated at the Gregorian University in Rome) who unfolds the theologial groundlessness of the office of Pope itself, the ethical depravity of a depressingly high percentage of its occupants, the religious zealotry of many Popes, and the laughable absurdity of so many Roman Catholic doctrines such as Papal Infallibility. The overall effect of this is devastating for the Papacy, which emerges from the pages of this book as one fo the most hypocritical, malevolent and unjustifiable institutions in human history--which is saying a great deal. The book is the perfect antidote to the awe in which the office of Pope is held today, and a very welcome reminder of the dark history of a powerful institution built on a mountain of absurdities and atrocities that we all-too- easily forget. De Rosa has done his readers a great service in putting that history into a single volume without mincing his words of pulling his punches. Read it and weep.

Authenticity and sources, July 23, 2000
By C.T. Garrett (Houston, Tx USA)

Peter De Rosa was brought up Catholic, went through the six year seminary course prior to ordination, and graduated from a Catholic university, the Gregorianum in Rome. He dedicated eight pages of bibliography listing authors, titles, and year published. Not to mention the fact that historians such as Edward Gibbon in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" substantiates the demeanor, to say the least, of the Papacy.

De Rosa had done a marvelous job in exposing the "Great Lie", revealing its truths with documented sources some of which are Papal documents themselves which can be found on the Vatican website, if you have a hard time taking his word for it. And if your still not sure that what De Rosa says is true, read Revelation by John the Apostle. Surely John's vision will substantiate all that was done that De Rosa has documented, even if you read the Latin Vulgate version. There's no hiding the truth, Vicars of Christ is De Rosa's testimony of the truth, another witness, another Martin Luther another Wycliffe, another man that had the courage to speak out against the horrid evilness of the extension of the Roman Empire, and its time is short. :)

Too bad this is out-of-print, February 1, 2002
By Michael Freeman (Blanchard, OK)

This is a book that every Christian and every Catholic needs to read. De Rosa is a Catholic himself, though the pope would probably consider him less-than-orthodox. His description of the corruption and wickedness of the "Mother of Harlots" is certainly less than flattering.

De Rosa chronicles the centuries of Roman Catholic "rule" over the "Church." It is fascinating to read the history behind the development of the "Church" as we know it, and behind some of the doctrines of Catholicism. The teaching of Purgatory, for instance, grew out of the need to raise funds. The Pope invented Purgatory so he could sell indulgences in order to allow souls out!

After reading this description of the vast wickedness of this pseudo- church, one must read the seventeenth chapter of Revelation. The Apostle John perfectly described what was to come!

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