Hi, Peter —

As you say, browsing through search engines and following links in search of Church history can indeed leave you wading through materials with a non-Catholic point of view:

• sometimes it's Protestant anti-Catholicism
• sometimes it's liberal opposition to the Church
• but sometimes you can actually find useful historic texts on the more serious
  academic-style sites, even though they may be put together by people with biases.

I can suggest a couple of useful sources for Catholic information on the net.

Catholic Culture has a reliable index of documents on the Early Church Fathers. The sites are reviewed and rated for quality and fidelity. At the bottom of this page you can browse issues by:

• author
• category, or
• title.

In addition, New Advent has the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia on-line, and texts from the Church Fathers.

I hope this helps —

— Andrew

Dear Peter,

Though not as reliable as Andrew's sources, you may want to check out these pages Wikipedia has:

• Catholic Church.
• History of the Catholic Church.

If an anti-Catholic tries to change something or post something erroneous on either of these pages they will be flagged as: [1][failed verification].

From Wikipedia: Material that fails verification may be tagged with {{failed verification}} or removed.

These web pages may also help:

• Origins of the Catholic Church.
• Catholic Answers Search Results.

I hope this helps,

Mike