The Trinity Archive, Vol. I, No. 8, June 1888

The reasoning of the early writers, which finally culminated in the abstruse discussions of the schoolmen, developed some remarkable doctrines. They discovered that all holding offices in the Church, from the priests up, were forbidden to marry, they ordered the shaving of their heads and denounced the wearing of beards as a sin, and they proclaimed, on the authority of certain documents known as the Isodorian Decretals alleged to have been miraculously found in the second century, that the Pope was the successor of St. Peter, and therefore under divine guidance and unable to err or do anything wrong, a doctrine, however, which the career of such a pope as Alexander VI. would be calculated to seriously upset.