Welcome to Inquisition Update.
My name's Tom Friess, and I'll be your host for the next hour.
You're listening to FirstAmendmentRadio .com.
Thanks for tuning in.
And so we'll begin on that basis where we left off.
In the book, A Woman Rides the Beast by Dave Hunt.
And this chapter is entitled, Fraud and Fabricated History.
And under the subtitle, Shameless Revision of History, Dave Hunt writes, Such was the
ambition of most of those who were scrambling on to the alleged throne of
Peter, and at times warring with one another to gain it.
Using the name of Christ, and piously making the sign of the cross, they labored
mightily to satisfy their lust for power and pleasure and wealth.
No justification for making themselves the absolute and infallible rulers over the
church, much less the world, could be found in the writings of the early
fathers, and certainly not in Scripture.
Therefore the popes had to find other support.
The means they chose was to rewrite history by manufacturing allegedly
historical documents.
The first of these bold forgeries was called the Donation of Constantine,
which we've already mentioned.
It was followed by pseudo-Isidorian decretals, which were early papal decrees
allegedly compiled by Archbishop Isidor, who lived from 560 A.D.
to 636 A.D., but actually were fabricated in the 9th century.
These frauds became the foundation for much quote-unquote tradition still relied
upon by the Roman Catholic Church today.
Now these are abject forgeries, they're known forgeries, they're admitted
forgeries by Roman Catholic historians, yet they still form the basis for the
temporal and spiritual power of the pope over the whole world.
And I made mention that I hope my listeners will take some time during the
so-called holiday and do a little of their own research into the Donation of
Constantine and the Isidorian decretals to see for themselves what a rickety
foundation it is that holds up the papal chair.
Now continuing where we left off, Catholic historian J.
H.
Ignaz von Dollinger writes that prior, quote, to the time of the Isidorian
decretals, no serious attempt was made anywhere to introduce the Neo-Roman theory
of infallibility.
The popes did not dream of laying claim to such a privilege, unquote.
But prior to the Isidorian decretals, no pope dared to assert to itself the
divine prerogative of infallibility.
There was no support for it.
They had to make support for papal infallibility.
They had to create it, conjure it from thin air, and that's what they did with
these forgeries.
Now he goes on to explain that these fraudulent decretals, quote, gradually but
surely changed the whole constitution and government of the church.
It would be difficult to find in all history a second instance of so successful
and yet so clumsy a forgery.
For three centuries past, and remember he was writing in 1869, for three centuries
past, the fabrication, that is the donation of Constantine, the
pseudo-Isidorian decretal, has been exposed.
Yet the principles it introduced and brought into practice have taken such deep
root in the soil of the church and have so grown into her life that the exposure of
the fraud has produced no results in shaking that dominant system, unquote.
So even though they were exposed and admitted as frauds, they were so deeply
woven into the fabric of the Roman Catholic Church that the Roman Catholic
Church just continued upon those frauds as though they were fact.
And that's the case today.
Now the pseudo-Isidorian decretals involved about a hundred concocted decrees
allegedly promulgated by the earliest popes, along with counterfeit writings of
supposed church authorities and synods.
They literally had to fabricate the early years of the Roman Catholic Church.
It says these fabrications were just what Nicholas I, who lived from 859 to 867,
excuse me, who reigned as pope from 858 to 867 AD, needed to justify his claims that
the popes, quote, held the place of God on earth, unquote, with absolute authority
over kings, including even the right to, quote, command massacres, unquote,
of those who opposed them, all in the name of Christ.
The popes who followed Nicholas were only too happy to emulate his ways,
and each of them used his predecessor's actions to justify his own, thus building
an ever larger case for infallibility, but upon a fraudulent foundation.
Writing in the 19th century, church historian R.W.
Thompson, himself a Catholic, says Dave Hunt, comments, quote, such times as these
were adapted to the practice of any kind of imposture and fraud, which the popes
and the clergy considered necessary to strengthen the authority of the papacy.
The personal interest and ambition of Innocent III led him to preserve all these
forgeries with care, so that the, quote, unquote, pious fraud might become
sanctified by time.
The result, he hoped and sought for, has been accomplished.
These false decretals, which are now universally considered to have been bold
and unblushing forgeries, constitute the cornerstone of that enormous system of
wrong and usurpation, which has since been built up by the papacy, to revive which
Pope Pius IX has now put forth in his encyclical and syllabus of errors,
unquote.
Devout Catholics should be shocked to learn that much of the, quote,
unquote, apostolic tradition they have been told supports Roman Catholicism,
and is to be regarded upon the same level as Scripture itself, was actually a
deliberately manufactured fraud.
The doctrines built upon these forgeries became so interwoven into Roman
Catholicism, that even after the hopes was exposed, the popes were reluctant to make
the necessary corrections.
Pope after infallible pope endorsed the counterfeit.
To make a clean break from centuries of accumulated lies would tear apart the very
fabric of the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope Pius IX relied upon the fraud, though it had already been exposed for
three centuries, to build his case for pressuring the bishops to make papal
infallibility an official dogma at Vatican Council I.
But the testimony of history conclusively refutes both apostolic succession and
papal infallibility.
What a pretension.
What a fraud.
The papacy.
And history has made it such that it is absurd to maintain this fraud any longer.
And it is almost like God is making a mockery of the papacy.
And I believe he is.
And we should take heed.
Now the next chapter, chapter 8, is entitled, Unbroken Line of Papal
Succession?
Is there really an unbroken line of apostolic succession?
Obviously, if you have been paying any attention to this book, there is no
apostolic succession at all in the papacy.
And this chapter begins with a quote from Vatican Council II.
Quote, This is the sole Church of Christ, which in the Creed we profess to be one,
holy, Catholic, and apostolic, which our Savior, after his resurrection,
entrusted to Peter's pastoral care, commissioning him and the other apostles
to extend and rule it.
The Roman pontiff, as the successor of Peter, is the perpetual and visual source
and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the
faithful.
Unquote.
So Vatican Council II establishes the papacy as the vicar of Christ,
the replacement of the Son of God on earth.
She cannot let loose of that papal pretension.
Or she ceases to be antichrist.
She ceases to fulfill the prophecies that God revealed in his Bible that would be
the prerogative of the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, what about this unbroken line of apostolic succession?
The claim that the popes are the successors of the apostle Peter is the
cornerstone of Roman Catholicism, without which that church would lose its
uniqueness and could not function.
We must therefore spend further time to examine this claim carefully.
Is there actually an unbroken line of 262 popes succeeding Peter?
And as of the writing of this book, Pope John Paul II was the pope,
so there have been now 264 popes.
Now, it says for apostolic succession to occur, each pope must choose his own
successor and personally lay hands on him and ordain him.
This was the procedure when Paul and Barnabas were set forth by the church at
Antioch on their first missionary journey.
See Acts chapter 13 verse 3.
Timothy's appointment to the ministry was also by the elders laying hands upon him.
See 1 Timothy chapter 4 verse 14.
As did Paul when he imparted a special spiritual gift to Timothy.
See 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 6.
This biblical procedure, however, has never been followed with regard to
successors of the Bishop of Rome or the popes.
A pope's successor is chosen not by him, but after his death by others.
And it has most often been done in the most ungodly manner, as we shall see.
Furthermore, there is no record that Peter was ever Bishop of Rome, and therefore no
Bishop of Rome could possibly be his successor.
Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons from 178 to 200 AD, provided a list of the first twelve
bishops of Rome.
Linus was the first.
Peter's name does not even appear.
Eusebius of Caesarea, the father of church history as he is called, never mentions
Peter as Bishop of Rome.
He simply says that, quote, Peter came to Rome about the end of his days,
unquote, and was crucified there.
Wonder which Peter that was, and I think for the answer of that we can go to Simon
Peter vs.
Simon the Sorcerer.
You'll find it on my old webpages at inquisitionupdate.org Who was the Peter
that was crucified upside down?
It was not the Apostle Peter.
It was another man, also known as Simon Peter.
It was Simon Magus, the false apostle.
Now, Paul, in writing his epistle to the Romans, greets many people by name,
but he never mentions Peter.
That would be a strange omission if Peter had been living in Rome, and especially if
he were its Bishop, would it not?
How is it that when Paul wrote his letter from Rome, he never mentioned Peter,
if in fact Peter had been the Pope, the first Bishop of Rome?
Simply not tenable.
Rome is embarrassed to be able to explain why the Apostle Paul never mentions Peter
in all of those that he greeted in his letters.
Now, discussing certain missing links in this so-called unbroken line of papal
succession, Dave says, the Vatican puts out an official list of the Popes,
arbitrarily beginning with Peter and continuing to the present.
There have been several such lists, which were apparently considered accurate
at one time, but subsequently had to be revised.
And now they conflict with each other.
Do tell.
The earliest lists come from Liber Pontificalis, in other words, the Book of
the Popes.
Presumably first composed under Pope Hormistus.
Excuse me.
The earliest lists of these Popes comes from a work entitled Liber Pontificalis,
or Book of the Popes.
Presumably first composed under Pope Hormistus of 514 to 523 A.D.
Yet even the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia cast doubt upon its authenticity.
And most scholars today agree that it mixed fact with fiction.
Who the actual bishops of Rome were cannot be known with any certainty at this late
date.
Even the new Catholic Encyclopedia published by the Catholic University of
America acknowledges this fact.
But it must be frankly admitted that bias or deficiencies in the sources make it
impossible to determine in certain cases whether the claimants were Popes or
Anti-Popes.
The simple truth is that the Roman Catholic Church itself, with all of its
archives, cannot verify an accurate and complete list of the Popes.
The alleged so-called unbroken line of succession back to Peter is therefore a
mere fiction.
Anyone who takes the time to seriously attempt a verification of its accuracy
will conclude that the Church has fabricated an official list of Popes in
order to justify the papacy and its pretensions.
Nor was the Bishop of Rome considered to be the Pope of the Universal Church until
about a thousand years after Pentecost.
What about this apostolic succession?
For centuries, the citizens of Rome considered it their right to elect the
Bishop of Rome.
This custom is proof that the Bishop of Rome had jurisdiction only over that
territory.
For if he had jurisdiction over the whole Church, then all of the Church would have
been involved in choosing him.
As it is today, says Dave Hunt, and I would love if Dave Hunt were alive
today, to call him up and ask him how he includes the words, as it is today,
when he knows full, good, and well that the whole Church does not choose the
Popes, the College of Cardinals does.
It just must have been a lapse of his attention when he wrote this portion of
the chapter.
We'll just ignore it as an anomaly and continue.
It says, when at times the right to elect their own Bishop was denied them,
the citizens of Rome revolted and forced their will upon the local civil and
religious authorities.
How could such pressure by mob violence be called apostolic succession by the
direction of the Holy Spirit?
Feuds were carried on between powerful families, the Colonna family, the Orsini
family, the Annibaldi, the Conti, and the Seitani families, et al.,
who fought wars for the papacy for centuries.
For example, Pope Boniface VIII, a Seitani, had to battle the Colonna
family to remain in power.
At the height of his success, he had all the Western Christendom coming to Rome for
the great Jubilee of the year 1300 A.D.
But in 1303, he was seized by emissaries of Philip the Fair of France, and Rome
fell into French possession.
As a consequence, the papacy was moved to France, and from 1309 to 1377,
the popes were French and resided at Avignon in France.
Such political maneuverings could hardly constitute apostolic succession.
Popes were both installed and deposed by imperial armies or Roman mobs.
Some were murdered.
More than one pope was executed by a jealous husband who found him in bed with
his wife.
Hardly apostolic succession.
Money and or violence most often determined who would be so-called Peter's
successor.
No wonder that in the Concordat of Worms, between Pope Callixtus II and the Emperor
Henry V, dated September 23, 1122, the pope was made to swear that the
election of bishops and abbots would take place, quote, without simony and without
any violence, unquote, which all too often decided church affairs.
Look, if there was any such thing as apostolic succession, would it be
necessary to warn the popes not to allow simony or war and violence to have
anything to do with the election of church prelates?
It's a den of thieves, a den of robbers, a den of pretenders, a den of antichrists.
No papal succession, no apostolic succession involved.
They've made a mockery of their own tenets.
They've made a mockery of their own faces.
And God has exposed them for what they are.
We should let history decide what is the truth about the Roman Catholic Church,
and about the popes, and about the bishops, and the priests, and the
cardinals.
An open mockery before the world.
At times there were several rivals, each claiming to have been legally voted
in by a legitimate council.
One of the earliest examples of multiple popes was created by the simultaneous
election by rival factions of Popes Yersinus and Damasus.
The former's followers managed, after much violence, to install him as
pope.
Later, after a bloody three-day battle, Damasus, with the backing of the emperor,
emerged the victor and continued as vicar of Christ for eighteen years, from 366 to
384 A.D.
So, apostolic succession, by an unbroken line from Peter, operated by force?
Really?
Says Dave Hunt.
Ironically, Damasus was the first who in 382 A.D.
used the phrase, quote, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,
unquote, to claim supreme spiritual authority.
Bloody, wealthy, powerful, and exceedingly corrupt, Damasus surrounded himself with
luxuries that would have made an emperor blush.
There's no way to justify any connection between him and Christ, yet he remains one
link in that unbroken chain of succession back to the apostle Peter.
Violence, intrigue, and simony defines the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope Stephen VII, who reigned from 896 to 897, who exhumed Pope Formosus and
condemned the corpse for heresy at a mock trial, was soon thereafter strangled by
zealots who opposed him.
His party promptly elected a Cardinal Sergius to be pope, but he was chased out
of Rome by a rival faction which had elected Romanus as its vicar of Christ.
Of the strange manner in which popes followed one another in this supposed
unbroken line of apostolic succession from Peter, one historian writes, quote,
Over the next twelve months, four more popes scrambled onto the blood-stained
papal throne, maintaining themselves precariously for a few weeks and even days
before being hurled themselves into their graves.
We'll talk more about this so-called apostolic succession, the papacy,
when we get back from the break.
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Now, we're going to continue with this quote, or rather begin at the beginning of
the quote.
This is just one of a multitude of examples how God has used history to mock
this so-called Vicar of Christ.
You see, God does not deal treacherously with His people.
He wants us to know who Antichrist is, just as much as He wants us to know who
Jesus Christ is.
There's no excuse for us to be deceived.
Anyone who is watching unto prayer can recognize Antichrist all throughout
history, and God's intent, God's purposeful exposure of the papacy
throughout history.
Again, the quote says...
Now, does this sound like apostolic succession to you?
Does this sound like divine appointment?
Does this sound like the vicar, the replacement of the Son of God on
earth?
Does God have anything to do with the papacy whatsoever, other than to expose it
as a gigantic fraud that it is?
Continuing with the quote, it says...
...who saw a means of thereby gaining entry into Rome.
The reigning Pope at that time, Leo V in 903 A.D., found his grave.
The slaughters in the city reached a climax, and then Cardinal Sergius emerged
as Pope Sergius III from 904 to 911 A.D., the sole survivor of the claimants,
and now Supreme Pontiff.
Is this how Christ would appoint his successors?
By lining up seven candidates and fighting to the death of the best man when?
Is that Jesus Christ?
Again, I assert that this is just one of a multitude of examples throughout history
where God has made an open mockery of the papacy, showing it for the fraud that it
is, showing it for the anti-Christ that it is.
And we should not be deceived.
Dave continues, he says...
Attempting to establish stability in selecting Popes, in 1059, Nicholas II,
who reigned from 1059 to 1061, defined the role of the cardinals in papal
electoral process.
During the Third Lateran Council in 1179, Alexander III, who reigned from 1159 to
1181, restricted papal elections to the cardinals.
So in order to stop the bloodshed and the intrigue and the simony and the corruption
of the papal elections, they took it out of the hands of the people and dedicated
it to the College of Cardinals.
This was long after the first millennium.
It says, quote, it was hardly an improvement.
As one 19th century historian pointed out, quote, few papal elections, if any,
have been other than simoniacal.
That is, they were bought for money.
The intention of the Sacred College of Cardinals has been, on the whole,
perhaps the most fertile source of corruption in the Church.
Many cardinals went to Rome for the conclave with their bankers.
Unquote.
Yes, when it came time to elect, no, no, no, rather correctly, as the Roman
Catholic Church teaches, in order for the Holy Spirit to select the next Pope,
the cardinals went to the conclave with their bankers in tow.
I wonder if the bankers were led by the Holy Spirit.
They bought and sold their offices to the highest bidder.
Those who could produce the most money, make the most bribes, threaten the most
bloodshed, eventually rose to the papacy.
Again, God making an open mockery of this so-called Vicar of Christ, the Antichrist,
the Pope of Rome.
Much insight into such corruption comes from the diaries of John Bacard,
master of ceremonies at the conclave, that elected Rodrigo Borgia, one of the
most wicked of all Popes, who called himself Pope Alexander VI, who reigned
from 1492 to 1503, Bacard concludes that only five votes were not bought in that
election.
Only five votes were not bought.
The rest were a product of simony.
The bankers buying the office.
Quote, the young Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, who had refused to sell his vote,
thought it prudent to leave Rome immediately.
Unquote.
In other words, we had one particular one of five who would not sell his vote,
thought it best to just get out of Dodge before he got killed, right?
Is that the Holy Spirit selecting the Pope?
Not at all.
In those days, a Cardinal's hat sold for a king's ransom.
So it took a fortune to enter the polluted stream of so-called apostolic succession.
Money flowed in from all over Europe to back favorite candidates.
Borgia bought the papacy with villas, towns, and abbeys, and with four mule
loads of silver to his greatest rival, Cardinal Sforza, to induce him to step
down.
Unquote.
See what it cost to be Pope?
Is this apostolic succession?
That you have to buy the papacy by promising villas, and towns, and abbeys,
and mule loads of silver, so that your greatest opponent will just step aside?
Papal elections are bought and sold.
And that's what they do to Christ, too.
They buy him and sell him.
There's no mistake in this world who Antichrist is.
No one should be deceived.
Here's a quote from Peter DeRosa in a book that we read here previously on
Inquisition Update.
Vickers of Christ, The Dark Side of the Papacy.
Quote, It is instructive to see, by way of Bucard's diaries, how the Holy
Spirit goes about choosing St. Peter's successor.
Unquote.
And that kind of sarcasm is well deserved of the papacy.
Now, sex even got involved as payment to ascend to the papal chair.
It says, Some popes were put in office by their mistresses, fixed by a mother and
daughter pair of prostitutes.
Theodora of Rome, the wife of a powerful Roman senator, was most successful at this
strategy.
She manipulated Roman politics by exploiting the fact that her daughter
Meroza, Meroza, excuse me, was the mistress of Pope Sergius III.
Known as the mistress of Rome, Meroza did not hesitate to murder to
accomplish her ambitions.
Theodora herself was mistress to two ecclesiastics whom she maneuvered in quick
succession, after Sergius' death, into Peter's throne.
Pope Anastasius III, who reigned from 911 to 913, and Pope Lando from 913 to 914.
Falling in love with a priest from Ravina, she maneuvered him also onto the papal
throne.
That prostitutes determined who would be pope could hardly be apostolic succession.
Of this remarkable mother and daughter, Edward Gibbon wrote in his Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, The influences of two prostitutes, Meroza and Theodora,
was founded on their wealth and beauty, their political and amorous intrigues.
The most strenuous of their lovers were rewarded with the Roman mitre.
The bastard son, the grandson, and the great grandson of Meroza,
a rare genealogy, were seated in the chair of St. Peter.
You see how God has made an open mockery, even that popes, the so-called vicars,
replacements of Christ on earth, were put on their papal chair by
prostitutes, by whores.
Who could be deceived if they knew the truth?
Who could be deceived about this cosmic pretension known as the papacy,
after once hearing the truth about how God has exposed it as the fraud that it really
is?
Alberic, another of Meroza's sons, with his armed thugs, literally controlled
Rome.
He made the Roman leader swear to elect his son, Meroza's grandson, Octavian,
not only as his successor to the imperial throne, but upon the death of the pope,
to that supreme religious office as well.
And so it happened that Octavian called himself Pope John XII, while at the same
time retaining the name Octavian as prince.
Thus both the civil and the ecclesiastical thrones were joined in one man.
And that's a state of affairs that exists today.
That was a tradition that has been upheld today.
That's why the pope calls himself the king of kings and the lord of lords.
He is both head and prince of the church, and he is both head and prince of the
civil governments of the world.
He is both king and priest.
Those are offices that belong only to Christ.
Therefore we only have one option to conclude that the papacy is antichrist.
John XII, who reigned from 955 to 963, was obsessed with illicit sex,
even more than he was with power.
Though he had many regular mistresses, they were not enough.
It was no longer safe for any woman to come into St. Peter's.
Bishop Ludeprand of Cremona, papal observer and chronicler of the time,
tells that the pope was so blindly in love with one particular mistress, that he made
her governor of several cities, and even gave to her the golden crosses
and cups of St. Peter himself.
Roman mobs that had supported him and cared nothing about his amorous affairs,
were angered by the loss of properties which Romans had looked upon as part of
their heritage.
Surrounded by mobs who were now eager to remove him, and besieged by the new king
of Italy with his armies from without, Octavian abandoned his position as civil
ruler, but would not give up the even more lucrative and influential papacy.
Though he made no pretext of being a religious man at all, much less a true
Christian.
The papacy still had the power to crown emperors.
So the pope summoned Otto, king of Germany and Europe's most powerful monarch,
to Rome to be crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Otto came in haste with his armies to aid the besieged pontiff.
After his coronation by John XII, Otto attempted to lecture the young pope
about his dissolute life.
John XII pretended to heed the advice, but after Otto and his armies had left,
the pope, unwilling to abandon his sexual exploits, offered the imperial crown to
Berenger, the very enemy whose armies had plundered northern Italy, and because of
whose threats he had appealed to Otto in the first place.
Tempted by the prize that was now dangling in front of him, Berenger nevertheless
declined, knowing that his forces were no match for Otto's army.
The frantic pope then appealed to everyone, from Saracens to Huns,
to rescue him from the man he had just crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,
and with whom he had sworn to revive the ancient partnership between crown and
papacy that had once worked so well between Leo III and Charlemagne.
So there we have the popes relying upon weapons, armies, to sustain their title as
Vicar of Christ.
Is that an example of apostolic succession, or is that just another
example of God's unrelenting exposure of the papacy for what it really is?
Now, we're going to talk about papal musical chairs.
When Otto returned with his army to settle accounts, John XII fled from Rome to
Tivoli with what Vatican treasures he could carry.
So he beat feet out of town, Otto's coming back, the pope gathers up all the gold and
chalices, all the gold and silver he could carry, and beats it out of town.
So much for apostolic succession, right?
Otto opened a synod to decide John's fate.
Bishop Ludprand presided in the emperor's name and recorded the proceedings.
Witnesses were called, and the crimes of the pope established, from fornication
with numerous women who were named, to blinding Benedict, his spiritual
father, to the murder of a Cardinal John, to toasting Satan at St. Peter's altar.
But before Otto could execute justice, Pope John XII was killed by a husband who
found the unrepentant pontiff bedded with his wife.
Justice, right?
And this is called the Vicar of Christ?
Yet, John XII is on the official Roman Catholic list of popes, each known as,
quote, his holiness, Vicar of Christ, unquote.
Not long after Otto's death in Germany, the papacy fell under the control of a
powerful family of warlords in the Albany hills.
The leader of the clan, Gregory of Tusculum, through wealth and the power of
the sword, succeeded in placing two of his three sons and a grandson, one succeeding
the other, on the supposed throne of St. Peter.
The Alberics of Tusculum could eventually boast 40 cardinals, 3 antipopes,
and 13 popes, issuing from that one single family.
It would be a mockery to say that the wealth and power that produced this
remarkable familial network of popes had anything to do with apostolic succession.
Of this period, church historian Von Dolinger, himself a devout Roman Catholic,
writes, quote, The Roman church was enslaved and degraded, while the apostolic
seed became the prey and the plaything of rival factions of nobles, and for a long
time, of ambitious and profligate women.
It was only renovated for a brief interval between 997 A.D.
and 1003 A.D.
in the persons of Gregory V and Sylvester II, by the influence of the Saxon emperor.
Then the papacy sank back into utter confusion and moral impotence.
The Tuscan counts made it hereditary in their family.
Again and again, dissolute boys like John XII, aged 16 when he became pope,
and Benedict IX, at age 11, occupied and disgraced the apostolic throne,
which is now bought and sold like a piece of merchandise.
And at last, three popes fought for the tiara, until the emperor Henry III put an
end to the scandal by elevating a German bishop to the sea of Rome.
Unquote.
That's right.
Three so-called vicars of Christ, all vying for the papacy at the same time,
all calling themselves popes, and all hurling anathemas, damnations,
and calling one another antichrist at the same time.
And as I always like to laugh and say, they were all correct.
They were infallible in that description.
Now chased by mobs from Rome in 1054, Pope Benedict IX, who reigned from 1032 to
1044, and also in 1045, and then for the third time in 1047 to 1048, fled to the
protection of his uncle, Count Gregory, whose army controlled the hill country of
Tusculum.
In his absence, John, Bishop of the Sabine Hills, entered Rome and installed himself
as pope under the name Sylvester III in 1054, excuse me, 1045.
He occupied the throne of Peter a mere three months, until Benedict stormed back
with more swords that Sylvester could summon, and ruled as pope once again.
Yet both of these men are on the official Vatican list of those considered worthy of
the titles, His Holiness and Vicar of Christ.
Tiring of the burdens of his office, and eager to devote himself entirely to
his favorite lover, Benedict sold the papacy for 1,500 pounds of gold to his
godfather, Giovanni Graziano, Archbishop of St. John's Church at the Latin Gate.
Giovanni took over the papacy in May of 1045 under the name Pope Gregory VI.
He reigned for one year.
With fresh resolve, Benedict returned to Rome in 1047 and set himself up as pope
once again.
So did Sylvester III.
Now there were three popes, each ruling over that portion of Rome which his
private army controlled, each claiming to be the Vicar of Christ and possessors of
the keys of heaven by virtue of apostolic succession.
Growing weary of the charade, the disillusioned and angry Roman citizens
appealed to Emperor Henry III.
He marched into Rome with his army and presided over a synod that deposed all
three popes and installed the Emperor's choice.
He called himself Clement II.
He reigned from 1046 to 1047.
One year.
But Benedict was not so easily dispatched.
As soon as the imperial army withdrew, he returned to Rome and managed by force
of arms to rule as pope for another eight months.
Until Henry returned and chased him back to the Alban Hills for the last time.
One would think that the Roman Catholic Church would be ashamed of such fiascos
and blot out the memory of evil popes and their fraudulent and often violent means
of gaining and losing and recovering the papal throne.
Yet in spite of such godless rivalry, in the spite of the fact that their
papacies overlapped at times, all three claiming to be pope at once, each of these
adversarial claimants to Peter's throne is found on the Vatican's official list of
popes today.
And there's much more if you have your own copy of this book.
There's much more about this type of history in the Roman Catholic Church in
appendix D in the back of the book.
Now, we'll just get started in chapter 9, entitled Infallible Heretics?
This is an interesting chapter, and it begins with a quote from Pope
Adrian VI, who reigned in 1523, right after or right during the beginnings
of the Protestant Reformation.
Here's a quote from Pope Adrian.
He said,
That's a quote from one of the so-called infallible popes.
And it is true.
Many of the popes were heretics.
Which is an understatement in itself, because every pope is an antichrist,
and a dynasty of antichrists, that encompasses the entire history of the
Roman Catholic Church, even more so today than ever before.
Now, what about these infallible heretics?
Dave writes,
when they speak on morals and dogma to the entire church.
If they are not infallible, the Roman Catholic Church has lost its unique
leadership and apostolic authority.
I'll just close by saying, the Roman Catholic Church has no authority.
Not from God.
Therefore, it has no authority.
It's the Church of Antichrist.
The woman seated atop the beast of Revelation 17.
We'll continue tomorrow on Inquisition Update.
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Built.
That's crosstheborder.org.
When it comes to prophecy today, much of the Evangelical Christian world
has their eyes on Israel, waiting and watching to see when the Third Temple will
begin to be built.
The plans are drawn, the Jewish people are eager, most Evangelical Christians today
believe that the rapture will happen before the Third Temple is built.
Hi, I'm Michael Eugene.
I was taught that Daniel's 70th week was in the future.
Is that really what the Bible teaches?
Have we searched the scriptures and found this to be true?
Why is it so important for a re-established Israel to build a Third
Temple in Jerusalem?
Is it necessary to build a Temple on the same location already occupied by the Dome
of the Rock?
Is it necessary for sacrifices to take place in the Temple on Temple Mount?
Is there really a rapture followed by seven years of tribulation?
What is the New Testament Temple?
Can we identify history and prophecy?
Who is the first beast in Revelation Chapter 13?
Who are the seven kings in Revelation 17?
I have asked all these questions and I have found Nicholas Arthur's new book,
When the Third Temple is Built, answers all these questions and more using
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The Bible says that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private
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Nicholas shows us in his new book, When the Third Temple is Built,
how the Bible interprets prophecy and not man's private interpretation.
Visit CrossTheBorder.org to get your print, e-pub, or PDF version of Nicholas
Arthur's new book titled, When the Third Temple is Built.
That's CrossTheBorder.org.