United States or Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Gregory VII prevailed on the Spanish churches to accept the Roman for the Mozarabic liturgy. Alexander III attracted to Rome the long-isolated Church in Ireland, and Innocent II reconciled the Milanese at last to the papal supremacy. The foundation for the high claims on the part of the Papacy rested on what are known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.

In the earlier part of the ninth century, there appeared what are called the pseudo-Isidorian decretals, consisting of forged ecclesiastical documents purporting to belong to the early Christian centuries, which afforded a sanction to the highest claims of the chief rulers of the Church. These are universally known to be an invention; but, in that uncritical day, this was not suspected.

Jerome did not translate until about the year 400, is quoted in some of these, this compilation has not unnaturally been styled the False or Forged or Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.

Schaff, in reprobating this "pious fraud" of Chrysostom, as "conduct which every sound Christian conscience must condemn," says of the whole matter: "The Jesuitical maxim, 'the end justifies the means, is much older than Jesuitism, and runs through the whole apocryphal, pseudo-prophetic, pseudo-apostolic, pseudo-Clementine, and pseudo-Isidorian literature of the early centuries.