Apologetics for the Masses #517 - Did the Pope Ever Use the Title, "Lord God the Pope"?

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Topic

A claim of blasphemy against the Catholic Church vis-a-vis a title supposedly once used for the Pope.

Introduction

A little over a year ago I received an email from a subscriber to this newsletter asking me to give a Catholic defense against a Protestant claim that the popes, in the late Middle Ages, were officially referred to as, "Our Lord God the Pope". I have finally gotten around to addressing this Protestant claim in a newsletter (although I did reply to the subscriber's email privately at the time). The specific claim made might be a bit obscure, and most of you have probably never been confronted with it; nevertheless, I think it is a useful exercise to address it here in regards to the specific claim that is made, but also, in general, as an example of Protestant claims that can be particularly difficult to defend against because they are historically based claims as opposed to biblically based claims.

Below is first the email from the subscriber, and then my response to him, and then some additional comments of mine.

Challenge/Response/Strategy

Email from Subscriber
John, I love your ministry. I know you have an inbox full of questions, but I ran into a new one I haven’t seen covered by your newsletters. Why did the popes have the title of “Lord God” in the Middle Ages? I’m talking to someone that claims it is blasphemous and that it identifies the pope as the man of lawlessness as found in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4  [i.e., the anti-Christ]. While I know that I can prove that the pope is not the man of lawlessness on other grounds, I’m having trouble defending the popes use of this title.

An article used as evidence: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30065560 [The article cited here is from an Irish journal called "The Catholic Layman," and was published in July, 1854.]

Thank you John, if you could perhaps make a newsletter rebutting this, that would be fantastic.

Nate

My Reply/Comments
Nate,

The Popes never had the title "Lord God". That is a false claim. You need to ask the person claiming that for some references. Specific references, with the exact quotes and in context. Whatever references they give you are probably either: 1) Completely fabricated; 2) Taken out of context; 3) Works of anti-Catholics, not anything from the Pope or the Magisterium; and/or 4) Probably one or more of the works discussed on the websites below:

Check out these websites and see if they are of any use to you:

1) http://www.geoffhorton.com/PapalClaims.html

2) http://sacrificium-laudis.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-lord-god-popenot-part-1.html

By the way, did you check out the description of The Catholic Layman Journal that was linked to on that page you sent me?

If not, check this out: https://www.jstor.org/journal/cathlayman

It seems that the journal that your friend is citing, is not a Catholic journal at all; rather, it is an anti-Catholic journal from the mid-1800's. Obviously so named so as to fool potential Catholic readers into reading the crap it was putting forth. And, if you read the article that is linked, notice that it states that the "Canon Law of the Church of Rome" used that phrase - "the Lord God Pope" - for some 200 years, but it doesn't give an actual reference or citation...it just makes the claim without any evidence, whatsoever. That would be like me publishing a journal called "The Protestant Layman" and having an article in it that said, "The original founding documents of the Lutheran Church referred to Martin Luther as "acting as God on earth". However, the wording of those original documents was changed a few years later and the original copies of those founding documents were burned." There is no credibilty in such a claim.

So, I'll bet whoever sent you that article thinks that "The Catholic Layman" is a Catholic publication, thus seemingly adding to the credibility of the statement about the fictitious title for the Pope. Ask them if they realize it was written by anti-Catholics. And, I'll bet if you ask them for a reference to an original source that gives the "Canon Law of the Church of Rome" that says such a thing about the Pope, they will be unable to do so.

God bless,

John

My Additional Comments
Okay, a few things to note here. First of all, Nate, as shown by his email, accepted the Protestant claim of the popes being referred to as "Lord God" based solely on the claims of an article a Protestant cited from a journal published in Ireland, in 1854. Don't ever do that. Don't ever accept historical claims about the Catholic Church from a Protestant without any corroborating evidence whatsoever. In this instance, for example, if you read the article that the Protestant provided as "proof" for his claim, you'll see it starts off this way: "This startling, not to say blasphemous, statement ['Our Lord God the Pope'] was found, during a period of two hundred years, in the Canon Law of the Church of Rome. It occurred in the Gloss upon the Extravagant of John XXII." Well, first the article says the reference to the Pope as "Our Lord God the Pope" was found "in the Canon Law of the Church of Rome" for 200 years! Oh my goodness! Heresy! Blasphemy! But, wait a second, not so fast. In the very next sentence, it says that the statement was found in "the Gloss upon the Extravagant of John XXII". The "Extravagant of John XXII" was a collection of papal decrees written by John XXII that was, essentially, incorporated into the Church's canon law. However, a "gloss" is, essentially, a commentary. So, the blasphemous phrase was supposedly found in a "commentary" on a collection of papal decrees written by John XXII. In other words, the claim that the Catholic Church, for a period of 200 years or so, referred to the popes as "Our Lord God the Pope," is based entirely on a phrase that supposedly appeared in a non-authoritative, non-magisterial, commentary on a collection of Pope John XXII's papal letters. Really?!

Furthermore, on that same website where that 1854 article is found, you can find a description of The Catholic Layman which reads as follows: "The Catholic Layman is a short, nineteenth century publication which concerns itself primarily with Irish religion, education, and politics.  It aims to reverse unenlightened prejudices which have resulted from the lack of intellectual improvement of the people of Ireland. This publication strives to reach a mass audience in order to promote independent thinking and discussion, free from the influence of the Catholic Church. The journal commits itself to examining political and theological issues without prejudice or bias."

Did you catch that? The journal aims to examine political and theological issues without prejudice and bias - after essentially calling Irish Catholics stupid idiots and implying that no one should ever be influenced by the Catholic Church. Yep, totally free of prejudice and bias. I guess it's aiming "to reverse unenlightened prejudices" with enlightened prejudices, maybe? So, why would a Catholic ever believe, without any corroborating evidence, anything written in a journal like that? They shouldn't.

And this, in general, is the problem in dealing with the "historical" claims of anti-Catholic Protestants. As I said in my reply above to Nate, the negative historical claims about the Catholic Church are either completely fabricated, or they are quoted out of context, or the "historical" sources cited are the works of anti-Catholics as opposed to original source materials. Or, they will give you a citation from some source that even the internet can't track down so there is no way of verifying it's authenticity. As the Church Lady used to say, "How conveeeenient!"

For instance, how many of you have heard that Constantine was actually the founder of the Catholic Church? That Constantine was a pagan but he saw that he could use Christianity as a tool to further his power as Emperor of Rome so he, in essence, merged Christianity with paganism and came up with a bastardized version of Christianity - the Catholic Church? That is not an uncommon myth circulating among Protestants. But, when asked for historical sources and citations to back up this bogus claim, what are you hit with? You are given books or articles written by anti-Catholic "scholars" as opposed to being given actual original source materials. Where are the documents from 4th century Rome that outline Constantine's plans? They don't exist! Where are the letters from Constantine that give us even a glimpse of his strategy...of his machinations vis-a-vis Christianity? They don't exist! Where are the documents from the "true" Christians of the time speaking of this "false church" Constantine supposedly created and warning others to beware of it? They don't exist! So, then, how do people know that that was what Constantine had in mind vis-a-vis the Church? They have no possible way of knowing. What they did was, they came up with a conclusion that fits their anti-Catholic narrative - the Catholic Church was founded by Constantine, not by Jesus Christ - and then they invented a story that fits the conclusion. No actual historical evidence that any such thing ever happened, but it's a necessary story to give them an excuse to lie about the Catholic Church.

Or, have you ever heard that the Inquisition killed up to 50 or 60 million people? I have, a number of times.  Yet, there is absolutely no evidence...none!...zero!...zip!...nada!...that supports any such claim. It's a pure fabrication. Ask anyone who says such a thing for original source material that would corroborate such numbers - they can't give you any. But that doesn't stop them from continuing to spread the lies. People want to believe the lies about the Catholic Church because if the lies are proven to be lies, then they would have to do the unthinkable - they would have to give serious consideration to the claims of the Catholic Church. And the good Lord knows they can't do that!

So, what I always tell people to do, when faced with an historical argument against the Catholic Church, is to tell whoever is making the argument, that they need to provide you with original source material - not some book or article that makes a claim - but original source material, from Catholic sources, that says what they claim the Catholic Church said or did. Nate's friend gave him an article from an anti-Catholic journal published in Ireland in 1854 that mentions a few sources that might possibly qualify as original source material - if you could actually track them down. What he didn't do, though, is give Nate the actual original source material. And, as I have shown, it usually doesn't take a whole lot of time and research to show that the sources the Protestants cite, that you can find, generally don't say what they claim they say.

I want to share with you a paragraph from that first website I gave to Nate in my email to him that pretty much sums up what I've been saying here:

"Herein lies one of the difficulties of which Catholics experience in defending the fair fame of their Mother Church against the more noisy and ill-informed class of controversialists. A suspicious-looking ‘extract’ is quoted, with suspicious-looking vagueness, from (say) ‘a Catholic writer,’ or ‘a distinguished Catholic theologian.’ You forthwith make a request for name and chapter and verse. This is sometimes met with angry resentment, sometimes by an airy gibe, sometimes by a general statement to the effect that it is in Suarez (or Saurez, as a Wellington enthusiast called him recently), or Aquinas or Bellarmine or De Lugo or Liguori or some other noted Catholic writer--only that and nothing more, and you are left to toil through the 23 massive volumes of one author, or the 17 of another, or the 10 to 20 of the rest. More rarely there is a show of precise reference, but it is commonly found to be inadequate or deceptive--a mockery, a delusion, and a snare--as if one should refer you to ‘the seventeenth verse of the Bible’; or the ‘authority’ is non-existent, like ‘the Tablet of October 9, 1864.’
"In the comparatively rare instances in which detailed references are given, you find that the alleged quotation is conspicuously absent, or that the author's words have been shamefully garbled or mistranslated, or--as in the case of an ‘extract’ recently attributed (in a Dunedin paper) to St. Thomas Aquinas--that not a line of it was ever written by him. If you persecute your opponents on one reference (as, for instance, the Tablet of October 9, 1864), they fly to another (August 6, 1859). You follow the direction indicated by the new sign-post only to find that you have been again chasing a rainbow. And the upshot of the whole thing is this: you find, in practically every instance, that the ‘quotations’ are secondhand or tenth-hand, that they have been carefully and deliberately lopped and chopped and pruned and twisted and contorted till they more or less seriously misrepresent the views of the authors to whom they are attributed, and you not unnaturally conclude that all these inadequate and misleading references are merely so many ruses--the side-jumps of the hunted roebuck--to delay or prevent the discovery and exposure of those discreditable bits of controversial trickery."

Now, one last comment on the phrase "Our Lord God the Pope". In Latin, that phrase is: Dominum Deum nostrum Papam. In the original gloss, or commentary, on the "Extravagant of John XXII," it did not have that phrase in it...anywhere. However, in some editions of the gloss/commentary that were published 200 years or more later than the original, there apparently was a phrase that was similar: Dominum nostrum Papam, which means, "Our Lord the Pope." But, it is using the word "lord" not in the sense of the Lord God, but rather, in the sense of English lords and ladies. The lord of the manor. The lord constable. And so on. However, it is purported by some Protestants, that there were occasionally editions of the gloss/commentary that were printed in the 1500's - 1600's in various cities in Europe, that added the word "Deum" to the phrase so that it did indeed read, "Dominum Deum nostrum Papam" - "Our Lord God the Pope". If it is in fact true that some editions were published in some cities that had that verbiage in it, then it would mean absolutely nothing vis-a-vis the teaching/belief of the Church, for a few reasons. The main reason being that it would have appeared in the commentary on canon law, not in the canon law itself. In other words, it would have absolutely no authority within the Church. Plus, the commentary in question did not contain that language in the original version. Also, the supposed editions with the offensive language were not universally distributed throughout the Church. Furthermore, nowhere else is such language used - if, in fact, it was used at all - in any other documents of the Church. All of which to say that never was the use of such language the official teaching or practice of the Catholic Church.

Well, I hope that wasn't too dry of a discussion. The main point I want to leave you with is this: Getting into a back and forth with Protestants on the subject of Church history - things the Catholic Church supposedly did at one time or another in its history - is generally a colossal waste of time. If you do engage, however, then always, always, always ask for original source material, from the Catholic Church, that backs up the Protestant claims. If they won't, or can't, give it to you, then just tell them you'll be happy to discuss the topic again should they ever produce any actual evidence - which means something other than the writings of anti-Catholic Protestants - to back up their claims.

Closing Comments

Okay, I have a special prayer request: Please pray for a private intention - I can maybe make it public in a few weeks. It involves a large project I'm working on. And, as always, please be assured of my prayers for you and your family! Have a great week!

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