Did Popes Claim to Be God? No.

A just possibly correct Latin text, to the left, a false English translation to the right:



Credere autem Dominum Deum nostrum Papam-conditorem dictae decratelis, et istius, sinc non potuisse statuere, prout statuit, haereticum censeretur.

Quoted in John Treat, The Catholic Faith, or, Doctrines of the Church of Rome contrary to Scripture (1888) : 536.

His translation is:

"but to believe that our Lord God the Pope, the establisher of said decretal, and of this, could not decree as he did decree, should be accounted heretical."

A better translation (if the reference is genuine) is:

But to believe that our Lord God could not so constitute the Pope - author of said decretal and the other one - as he did constitute him, would be accounted heretical.

I am a Latinist.

I can tell you that the translator simply fucked up which accusative should be the subject one in accusative and infinitive clause and which one was only object in the clause and would have been in accusative whatever kind of clause it was.

This is one of the cases where Latin has some ambiguity, and some people are either incompetent at Latin or jumping to the reading which would damn papacy as papolatry./HGL

PS. See also:

Beati mundo corde : The truth about the anti-Catholic charge of “Lord God the Pope”
https://klaravonassisi.wordpress.com/tag/lord-god-the-pope/

I found it after publishing above. I copy the conclusions:

• i) The interpolated (possibly forged?)statement does not appear in the original, but only in copies dated many years (in the case of the Paris edition, over 350 years (1325 till 1685) after the original was written.
• ii) As glosses of their very nature deal with commentaries on canon law, they are unrelated to doctrine or doctrinal pronouncements and are not issued by the pope. Hence this inserted text could not be used (even if present in the original) as proof the pope was teaching falsehood.
• iii) The insertion of a forger of these words at a later date do not in any way affect the truth of the divine institution of the papacy, any more than insertion of words into a copy of the Bible changes the Bible’s authenticity.
• iv) The statement of one Father A. Pereira (see below) is invalid for the same reason mentioned in iii)

In other words, possibly even the quote by John Treat is a fake, possibly the Paris edition inserted sth meaning sth else, like what I translated. If it is a fake, 1685 is a year in which Protestants, Gallicans and Jansenists were already around and eager to smudge the Papal supremacy in the Church for diverse reasons (heresy in Protestants, patriotism of exaggerated and misplaced type in Gallicans, heretic opinion verging on and leading later to schism in Jansenists). So, there is nothing totally improbable in it being a fake./HGL