The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History. Michael Baigent

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ determine who at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice and the Vatican might have had an interest in it.

      The key to understanding Canon Lilley was that he considered himself a “Modernist”; he was the author of a book on the movement that was extremely influential at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Modernists wished to revise the dogmatic assertions of church teachings in the light of the discoveries made by science, archaeology, and critical scholarship. Many theologians were realizing that their confidence in the historical validity of New Testament stories was misplaced. For example, William Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was once asked to write on the life of Jesus. He declined, saying that there was not nearly enough solid evidence to write anything at all about him.

      During the nineteenth century the Vatican was becoming increasingly anachronistic. The Papal States stretching from Rome across to Ancona and up to Bologna and Ferrara still existed, and the pope ruled like a medieval potentate. Torture was regularly practiced by the anonymous minions of the Inquisition in their secret jails. Those convicted in papal courts were sent as oarsmen to the galleys or were exiled, imprisoned, or executed. A well-used gallows stood in the town square of every community. Spies lurked everywhere, and repression was the rule; modernity was being kept at arm’s length—even railways were banned by the pope for fear that travel and communication between people would harm religion. And all this was occurring against a backdrop of a Europe where pressure for social change in the form of liberation movements opposing despotic power and encouraging parliamentary rule had become the norm.

      Despite willful ignorance, the outside world was spilling over the crumbling borders of the papal domains. Change was beginning to seem inevitable. Democratic political philosophy, a growing social awareness, and the mounting criticism of biblical texts and their inconsistencies were causing religious certainties to buckle under the strain. And to the horror of Catholic conservatives, papal political power too was under direct threat. This was a real problem: in 1859, following a war between Austria and France that saw the defeat of the Catholic Hapsburg forces, the great majority of the papal lands joined the newly created kingdom of Italy. The pope, Pius IX, summarily demoted by events, now ruled over only Rome and a fragment of the surrounding countryside. And it grew worse: on 21 September 1870, even this small patrimony was taken away by Italian troops. The pope found himself left with just the walled enclave of Vatican City, where his successors continue to rule today.

      Just before the loss of Rome, the pope, in what seems to have been considerable desperation, had called a General Council of Bishops to shore up his power. Yet by calling this council, the pope was implicitly recognizing the limitations of that power. The question of who held the reins had long been a festering sore at the Vatican. The uncomfortable truth was that the pope derived his legitimacy, not from the apostle Saint Peter, two thousand years earlier as he claimed, but from a much more mundane and worldly source: a Council of Bishops that had met at Constance in the early fifteenth century. At that time there had been three popes—a trinity of pontiffs united only in mutual loathing—all claiming, simultaneously, to have supreme authority over the Church. This ludicrous situation had been resolved by the bishops, who claimed—and were recognized in this claim—to hold legitimate authority. From that point on, the popes held their authority by virtue of the bishops. Accordingly, every pope was bound, when wishing to make a major change, to seek their approval.

      It was Pope Pius IX, though, who wanted to make the most major of changes: he was determined to be declared infallible, thus receiving unprecedented power over all the faithful. But he knew that he would have to use guile to achieve this goal. Hence, the First Vatican Council was convened in late 1869. Its real aims were kept secret by a small group of powerful men that included three cardinals, all of whom were members of the Inquisition. No mention was made of papal infallibility in any of the documents circulated about the objectives and direction of the council. Meanwhile, the bishops gathered and found themselves subjected to strong-arm tactics. There were no secret votes, and the cost of criticism was immediately apparent: the loss of Vatican stipends was the least that a dissenting bishop could expect.

      After two months the issue of papal infallibility was introduced to the council. Most of the bishops present were surprised, shocked, even outraged. Certain church leaders who stood and spoke against the move were “dealt with” by house arrest, while others fled. One leader was physically assaulted by the pope himself. Despite the intimidation, only 49 percent of the bishops cast their vote for papal infallibility. And yet, a majority vote in favor of the move was declared, and on 18 July 1870, the pope was pronounced infallible. Just over two months later Italian troops entered Rome and consigned the freshly “infallible” pope to the limits of Vatican City—a divine response, perhaps, to his lack of humility.

      The desire of the pope and his supporters, of course, was that the doctrine of infallibility would buttress the Vatican against the challenges it was facing—in particular from biblical criticism and the discoveries of archaeology.

      The aim of the Modernists, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. They sought to revise church dogma in light of their scholarly findings. The historical evidence their research produced was helping to unravel the myths the Church had created and perpetuated, especially the myth about Jesus Christ. The Modernists were also greatly opposed to the centralization of the Vatican. The Modernist movement at this time was especially strong in Paris, where the director of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, from 1852 to 1884, was a liberal Irish theologian named John Hogan. Hogan welcomed and openly encouraged Modernist studies at the seminary. Indeed, Canon Lilley saw him as the “greatest single influence” on what became Modernism.² Many of Hogan’s students also attended lectures by the Assyriologist and Hebrew expert, Father Alfred Loisy, who was director of the Institute Catholique in Paris and another prominent Modernist.

      At first the Vatican seemed not to mind. The new pope, Leo XIII (who was elected in 1878 and served until 1903), was sufficiently confident in the strength of Rome’s position to allow scholars access to the Vatican archives. But he had not realized what scholarship would subsequently discover and the church doctrines these findings would call into question. It soon became apparent to him that this scholarship posed a serious threat to the very foundations of the Church. Just before his death in 1903, Pope Leo XIII moved to repair the damage. In 1902 he created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to oversee the work of all theological scholars and to ensure that they did not stray from the teachings of the Church. The Commission had close connections with the Inquisition, having been ruled by the same cardinal.

      The danger, apparent to all, was expressed succinctly by Father Loisy: “Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom, but what came was the Church.”³ Loisy, among other Modernists, believed that the historical scholarship conducted during that time had made many church dogmas impossible to maintain, dogmas such as the founding of the Church by Jesus, his virgin birth, and his divine sonship—in essence, Jesus’s very divinity.⁴

      The leading British Modernist George Tyrell opposed the unrelentingly autocratic authority of the Vatican. “The Church, he thought, had no business being an official Institute of Truth.”⁵ Of course, the Church considered that to be exactly its role.

      The Modernists asked an uncomfortable and impertinent question: what should be done when history or science point to a conclusion that contradicts the Church’s tenets? The response of the Church in the face of these direct challenges was to withdraw further behind its walls of dogma: it resolved all uncertainty by ruling that the Church was always right, under all circumstances, about everything.

      In 1892 Hogan’s successor at Saint Sulpice ordered students to stop attending lectures by the Modernist Alfred Loisy. The next year Loisy was dismissed from his teaching post at the Institute Catholique, and he was eventually excommunicated. In fact, the Vatican suspended or excommunicated СКАЧАТЬ