Vicars of Christ - Softcover

Peter De Rosa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184223000X ISBN 13: 9781842230008

Publisher: Poolbeg Publications, 2000

Synopsis

At the dawn of the Third Millennium, Peter de Rosa's international bestseller is the dramatic and terrible story of the papal abuse of power in the first two thousand years.

About this title

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."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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 informationincluding 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.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Poolbeg Publications
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 184223000X
• ISBN 13: 9781842230008
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 484