Vicars of Christ: the Dark Side of the Papacy

Argues that the holy fathers, from St. Peter to Pope John Paul II, have included document forgers, men with numerous mistresses and illegitimate children, those who murdered thousands of Christians, and who caused tremendous suffering

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.

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.