Horror emanates from the entire Roman theory of the supremacy and infallibility of the bishop of Rome.

Chapter IX: The Origins of the Roman Theory of the Pope's Supremacy and Infallibility The Infallibility of the Popes in the Light of Historical Facts

If the Latin theory of the primacy of the bishop of Rome has no basis either in the Gospel or in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, then where are the foundations of this theory to be found? It is rooted in Rome itself, in Roman psychology, and rests on a number of misinterpreted historical facts.

After the destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of this most ancient Church, Rome, to which thousands of thousands of confessors, "witnesses of the faith," were brought and voluntarily flocked from the East and West, from the North and the South, Rome, which became the universal receptacle of the blood of Christian martyrs, occupies a particularly honorable place among the apostolic Churches that grew up on the blood of witnesses of the Word. "How blessed is this Church," exclaims Tertullian, "to which the Apostles taught all their teaching together with their blood in abundance, where Peter imitates the Lord by his suffering, where Paul is crowned with the Baptist's death, from which the Apostle John, after he was immersed in boiling oil and remained unharmed, is exiled to a deserted island." But this circumstance, although it placed the Church of Rome in the attention of the entire Christian world, giving authority to its voice, did not ascribe to it the exclusive right and exclusive privilege to care for other local Churches, to respond to what was happening in them, to take a direct part in their internal life, to advise and instruct when trials and troubles visited the local Churches. History testifies to us that Ignatius of Antioch also wrote exhortations and instructions to the Churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Tralles, Magnesia, and Philadelphia; Bishop Dionysius of Corinth "extended his zeal for God not only to his flock, but to an abundant measure to the faithful and other Churches," says the historian Eusebius, "exhorting and encouraging them in connection with the various dangers and trials in the faith that they were experiencing"; Irenaeus of Lyons considered himself obliged to intervene in the dispute over the time of the celebration of Pascha, when Pope Victor dared to make an unauthorized attempt to "excommunicate" the entire province of Asia and its neighboring Churches from ecclesiastical communion; In the era of great dogmatic disputes, the local Churches take part, in the person of their representatives, in the dogmatic life of the whole Church in general, thereby fulfilling the apostolic word: "If one member suffers, all the members suffer with him; if one member is glorified, all members rejoice with it." History also testifies to the fact that "the role of universal teaching fell to the lot of the great Fathers – Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, Hilary, Cyril and others, who were lamps placed high on the candlestick and shining to everyone in the house – in the Church." In all this was reflected the conciliar unity of all parts of the Church and the common consciousness of responsibility for the fate of the entire Church. This awareness of the common responsibility for the fate of the entire Church of Christ was the action of the Spirit of God, who lives in the Church as in the Body of Christ and, through chosen vessels, fills the destinies of the Church through conciliarity; this consciousness of common responsibility lived and burned in all the great lights of the Church, the fighters for the purity and integrity of the Faith throughout the entire Body of the Church.

And it would be a gross mistake in the words of Irenaeus of Lyons: "It follows that every Church should turn to this (Roman) Church, because of its primacy, i.e. the faithful who are everywhere, since in it the tradition coming from the Apostles is always faithful, who come from everywhere" – to see the recognition of the Roman Church as the guardian of the purity of the Faith. No, it is not the Roman Church, taken separately from the entire Universal Church, nor the Bishop of Rome and his community that protect the ongoing tradition from the Apostles: the matter of maintaining the purity of the faith is the result of the action of the universal Church – this is what St. Irenaeus of Lyons affirms, for it is not the children of the Roman Church and their bishop, but the "faithful who come from everywhere" who guard the tradition that comes from the Apostles here, in Rome.

The history of the Church vividly bears witness to the salvific interaction of the Orthodox East and the Orthodox West in their organic unity, in the conciliarity of their lives, which is beneficial for the entire Church of Christ. In the person of its great theologians, the Fathers of the Church, the Orthodox East defended the purity of the Faith, it played a leading role (with the exception of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, where the leading role belonged to Pope Leo I) in the theological defense and formulation of the dogmas of the Church of Christ, the East fertilized the thought of the Orthodox West, and the Orthodox West, in the person of its authoritative primates of the ancient Apostolic Roman See, gave courageous and steadfast assistance to the Orthodox East in its struggle against the Heresies and, being independent of the secular authorities, was an invaluable support in the struggle for the observance of church discipline. But the Church of Rome was unable to preserve a clear understanding of its mission, its calling to be an elder brother in the Church of Christ and to "lead in the service of love," as a result of which, with the beginning of the striving of the bishops of Rome for domination over the entire Church, the principles of its participation in the general life of the Church, its participation in the service of the Truth of the Church, began to be gradually distorted. This distortion, as we have seen, took place in two directions: 1) in the assertion of the dominion of the Bishop of Rome over the whole Church and dominion over the world, and 2) in the proclamation of papal infallibility in matters of faith.

The desire for temporal power and participation in the political struggle was not the business of individual popes, but stemmed from the entire papal system. Pope Pius IX declared it religiously obligatory for a Catholic believer to recognize the secular power of the Bishop of Rome. He denounced as a fallacy the view that "the Church has no power to produce violence and has no secular power at all, either direct or indirect." The desire for secular power forced the popes not only to plunge into political intrigues, but also to wage wars, even to lead their own troops (Pope Julius II).

More serious and fatal for Rome and for the whole Church was the striving of the Roman primates of the Church to affirm the infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith, which was culminated in the Vatican Council of 1870. The teaching of the Latins about infallibility flows, said Khomiakov, from cowardice and unbelief. For the Church is an object of faith, inasmuch as it is the Body of Christ and the abode of the Holy Spirit. With the Latins, the place of the invisible Head is taken by the visible "vicar Dei," the "vicar of Christ," and instead of the invisible Spirit of God living in the Body of the Church, they have placed a visible, external oracle of truth in the person of the pope, in order to submit to him. We have before us a pitiful picture of the loss of a mystical understanding of the essence of the Church and the decline of faith in the Church.

In history we do not find the infallibility of the popes in matters of faith. History bears witness to the mutually annihilating contradictions of individual popes, clothed in the solemn toga of universal teaching. Thus, Pope Liberius (354) signed, not as a private person, but as bishop of Rome, the Arian Creed; Pope Zosimus (417-418), in contrast to his immediate predecessor Innocent I, first speaks in favor of Pelagius; Pope Vigilius (537-55) changed his mind three times in the dispute over the three chapters. "He finally submitted to the decision of the Council, declaring to himself that he had hitherto been, unfortunately, an instrument of Satan, working for the overthrow of the Church, and was therefore drawn into discord with his concelebrants, the bishops of the Council, but now the Lord enlightened him"; The example of Pope Honorius I (625-38) in the Monothelite dispute is striking: "At the very beginning of the dispute, Pope Honorius, questioned by three patriarchs, spoke in favor of heresy," and at the Sixth Ecumenical Council (681), the deceased Pope Honorius was condemned among other preachers of this heresy; Pope Leo III, contrary to the demand of Charlemagne, forbade the insertion of the insertion "and from the Son" in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and Pope Benedict VIII adopted the "filioque" in the Creed, and this insertion became a dogma of the Latin Church; Pope Sixtus V, under threat of anathemas, declared the text of the Vulgate corrected by him personally and published under his direct supervision to be binding on the faithful and having the dignity of an original, but this text turned out to be so teeming with errors that the successor of Sixtus V had to withdraw it from use as soon as possible. All this cannot be reconciled with the dogma of infallibility in matters of faith. The tragedy of Roman Catholicism is not in the sins and personal crimes of individual Primates of the Roman Church – there were many personal sins everywhere – but in the fact that the spirit of this world, the spirit of power, the spirit of legal, utilitarian and earthly distortion of the mysteries of God was introduced into the very foundation of the Christian doctrine and spiritual order of the Church. And this spirit led to slavery, the seal of which manifested itself in the desire to transfer the law of the life of the Spirit to the language of external mechanical counting, merit, number, and measure, which was especially reflected in the doctrine of indulgences and in casuistic morality. God's commandment is perceived not as an internal organic norm of a morally free life in Christ, but as an unbearable yoke, as a demand of a harsh lender, which must be lightened. Hence the legitimization of the so-called "mental reservation," i.e., the deliberate misleading of one's neighbor through a deliberately ambiguous mode of expression; hence the teaching about the "superfluous works of the saints", from the treasury of which the pope can cover the shortcomings of the faithful; Hence the excitement instead of spiritual equilibrium and spiritual sobriety, and religious sentimentalism with its characteristic desire to strike the nerves, to touch and amaze the imagination of man.

The Catholic Church is the Roman Church. Roman not because its center is in Rome, not because of its language, not because it once almost coincided with the Roman part of the empire. It is Roman in the spirit and law it has adopted from the Empire, in the Roman idea that underlies it. Therefore, it would be a mistake to assert or assume that the theory of the papacy came out of manipulations, outright forgeries, historical errors, distortions of the New Testament, on silences and other types of distortion of truth and historical reality – all this served only as a foundation in psychology for an ingrained idea. "The history of Catholicism is the history of the development of the Roman Catholic idea as a spiritual force that is born in the recesses of the spirit and subordinates everything to itself – teaching, events, theories, and forms of life."

Chapter X: The Apostasies of Rome in the Celebration of the Sacraments