The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church
Curran, Robert E.
A fundamentalist's delight THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN CHURCH Malachi Martin G.P. Putnam's Sons, $14.95, 258 pp. Robert Emmett Curratn FRANK SHEED, the American Catholic publishing...
...One can guess that the Babylonian captivity, the papal schism ("Pick a Pope, Any Pope"), and the sack of Rome by Charles V all get more than their share of voyeuristic attention in the slender volume...
...Paul's "huge betrayal and neglect" in failing to check heterodoxy have left the church on the brink of utter collapse...
...John is the new Celestine V who in his innocence opened the floodgates to ecclesiastical democracy and doctrinal anarchy...
...the defenders of birth control and homosexuality and sexual permissiveness for subjecting men and women to utility values...
...Martin is no fool...
...The Whore of Babylon is alive and well in these pages...
...One is willing to grant that Martin is a reliable source for conversations between Pius XII and Cardinal Bea, given the author's relationship with the latter, but one wonders how Martin could have been privy to many other intimate exchanges that he incorporates into these pages (nor does he inspire particular confidence when he confuses Giacamo Antonelli and Leonardo Antonelli and makes them both Secretaries of State...
...Readers of Three Popes and a Cardinal will know better...
...Martin, an early and successful prospector, has indeed given us a new book, but for those who are familiar with his Three Popes and a Cardinal and The Final Conclave, it is the same theme, now packaged in a series of cameos as pop history: Irene, queen in Constantinople, she-devil, magically beautiful...
...Mariozia is here as "The Nymph Who Made Popes" in more ways than one...
...Martin has not changed his mind about Roncalli...
...The imperial pretensions culminated in Gregory VII, who more than any other pope, according to Martin, replaced the notion of a Christian republic with that of a papal monarchy whose dogmatism and clerical domineering "necessarily implied the Reformation and the breakup of Christianity...
...There is no evidence that Sheed's criterion was utilized by those who decided to publish Malachi Martin's latest work...
...Decline and Fall is a fundamentalist's delight...
...In reality at issue was not the principle of temporal power, as Martin suggests, but pragmatic claims to two towns...
...If the conversations in Decline and Fall are not invented, there is at the very least a disturbing sameness about many of them, especially those concerning the temporal power...
...Reform had its moments, to be sure...
...Distortion is the inevitable result, as when the author has Gasfaro Contarini, the Venetian ambassador, pleading with Clement VII to surrender the Papal States...
...Robert Emmett Curratn FRANK SHEED, the American Catholic publishing world's grand old man who died last year, wrote in his autobiography that when he and his wife, Maisie Ward, decided to go into the publishing business, there were many books they wanted to get into print...
...And John XII, the precocious teen-ager who spent his days and nights as pope gambling, hunting, and making love...
...He applauds a Wojtyla who "will condemn a Hans Kiing for subjecting Christian revelation to contemporary anthropology and psychology...
...Celestine V's pathetic reign is rehearsed...
...John Paul I intended to reassert control and begin a process of authentic reform (How he is able to fathom the explicit intentions of a pope who reigned scarcely more than a month escapes this reviewer...
...Their limited means, however, forced them to narrow their choices to books that met an actual need...
...A century later Charles V is cast in the unlikely role of agent of reform against the temporal power, a last desperate attempt to silence Luther and render unnecessary the Reformation...
...That will play well in Little Rock...
...But it is Paul VI who bears the brunt of Martin's contempt...
...One writer, he recalled, sold the same book to four American publishers, getting an advance payment from each...
...And all this within ten . pages...
...The Papal States, immense wealth, corruption, and spiritual authority maintained by force of arms and worldly alliance were all part of the curse of Constantine...
...Paul's failing is that he lacked "the ruthlessness of greatness isolated," the ruthlessness that would have made Humanae Vitae effective papal teaching...
...Despite the seizure of Rome, Charles fails and the decline and fall begin...
...Leo III in crowning Charlemagne in 800, continued the process of rooting the church in the centralized political system of classical Rome...
...The problem with this hardly novel thesis is that it is simply bad history, at least as Martin tells it...
...For all those who are too embarrassed to get their anti-popery kicks from comic -books, this should be the perfect gift...
...He knows who are buying religious books today...
...The church that Martin seeks would seem to be a church that transcends not only political powers but the world itself...
...This original dependence upon temporal power worsened when the collapse of the Roman Empire forced Leo the Great to attempt to make the church the new Empire...
...Irene who has put out her own son's eyes, thrown him in prison, surrounded herself with devoted eunuchs castrated by her orders, seduced the patriarch, and three months ago has written to Charlemagne...
...People and events are flattened out to fit the theme...
...but to John Paul II has fallen the immense burden of attempting to do what no pope for the past sixteen hundred years has been able to do: assert authority on the basis of spiritual power alone...
...Martin's thesis is that the church sowed the seed of its own destruction in 3l5 when Pope Sylvester I allowed Con-stantine to take him under his wing and give Christianity official status...
...The Council of Constance is presented as a golden opportunity to remove the cancer of temporal power from the papacy, but the wily Italians frustrate the intentions of the good Germans and their allies...
...How well it will go with Hollywood is another matter...
...And poor Pope Formosus, who had the distinction of having his corpse dug up by his successor, placed on a papal throne, and tried for capital crimes...
...90) The cameos he has chosen lead one to conclude that he could not decide between Sam Peckinpah and Mel Brooks as possible directors, if Hollywood is indeed his ultimate market for this particular enterprise...
...One tiling is certain...
...The king did not, and that finally dashed any hope of a reconciliation between Rome and Byzantium...
...a Raymond Brown for subjecting the Gospels to the findings of linguistics and archeology...
...And the even more precocious Benedict IX, the twelve-year-old pontiff who was bisexual, sodomized animals, ordered murders, and "dabbled in witch-craft and Satanism...
...The changes which John inaugurated through Vatican II according to Martin have been no less disastrous than those for which he holds Sylvester I accountable...
...Given his thesis, one would expect that Martin would give high marks to John XXIII for his aggiornamento...
...Complexity is nearly a total stranger to these pages...
...In The Church and I Sheed observed that in the 1960s European Catholic writers had discovered the gold to be mined in America...
...if he should wish to many, of course...
...Scenes of intrigue, murder, rapine, and greed abound...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 16
