I've lately been reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church by Malachi Martin. The Author's thesis is basically that the Roman Catholic church defeated itself by taking on temporal and political power instead of staying within the realm of spiritual power.

It traces the first error of the church to the deal made between the Roman bishop Sylvester and the Roman emporer Constantine when Constantine legalized Christianity and made it the central religion of his empire, after seeing a vision and becoming convinced that he would attain military victory through Christ. It then goes through the ages from Pope to Pope, submitting anecdotes of how the Church's stronghold on military and political power ultimately lead to the loss of most of its power, and the errors made by various Popes when they might have lead the church back to a purely apiritual dominance.

I like the book so far...it has a lot of good information that fits nicely into my study of the origins and history of Christianity. It also illustrates how "made up" ideas can be propagated from generation to generation and gain validity through mere passage of time. In addition, it highlights the historical and continuing corruption in the Roman Catholic Church.

The author's breeze style is very easy to read, but the one major drawback of the book is that there are no references provided, which makes it difficult to directly verify the vailidity of much of the information. I think it would definitely be very good reading for some of my Roman Catholic friends.