Essay, Research Paper

Drumhead By the center of the third century the bishops of Rome assumed that their church tradition provided a criterion for other, rather distant churches. During the 4th and early fifth centuries, the Catholic Popes made assorted claims to particular authorization and were seldom challenged. Pope Saint Leo I, the Great ( 440-461 ) , amalgamate apostolic power and successfully intervened in the personal businesss of other Western church territories. Subsequent Catholic Popes considered themselves endowed with powers over the whole church, even over the East. Pope Saint Gregory I, the Great ( 590-604 ) , made the pontificate a major political force. In the late 8th and early 9th centuries, the Frankish house of Charlemagne offered protection to the Catholic Popes and gave them huge districts in cardinal Italy, the footing for the hereafter Papal States. In return, Pope Saint Leo III ( 795-816 ) crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman emperor in 800.In the tenth century the pontificate fell into the custodies of the local aristocracy, and Catholic Popes became mere liturgical figures. Pope Saint Leo IX ( 1049-1054 ) began apostolic reforms and emphasized apostolic authorization as the key to reconstructing church order. Pope Saint Gregory VII ( 1073-1085 ) was the strongest advocator of this plan, which finally was called Gregorian Reform. Overall, the pontificate was strengthened, making a zenith with Pope Innocent III ( 1198-1216 ) , who became the most of import individual, layman or spiritual, in modern-day European society.In the following century apostolic influence declined and was farther damaged in the dirt of the Great Schism. During the Schism, three Catholic Popes at the same time claimed the position of legitimate pope. In the early sixteenth century the Catholic Popes consolidated their political authorization in the Papal States and became effectual territorial princes. At about the same clip, nevertheless, German theologian Martin Luther rejected the pontificate and denounced the Catholic Pope as the Antichrist, triping the Protestant Reformation. Although assorted Protestant reformists differed on many issues, all agreed that the pontificate was an unessential establishment. The Christian Church foremost appeared in history as a family of autonomous communities, scattered all over the imperium, and distributing even beyond its boundary lines. During the class of the fifth, 6th and 7th centuries the Catholic Church developed two distinguishable types of Christianity. The first was shared by all Latin-speaking Christians, who formed the Western Patriarchate of Rome. The 2nd comprised the Syriac, Armenian and Greek-speaking universe, which was divided into four Eastern Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.The East emphasised the divergency of gifts, the West the demand for uniformity and obeisance. It was non ever easy for the two sides to understand each other ; they frequently viewed a new job from wholly different point of views, and sometimes these dissensions ended in an unfastened dissagreement between the two religious orders of Rome and Constantinople. But the split constantly ended in rapprochement, for both sides acknowledged that the Church of Christ must include both Eastern and Western Christians, and that their gifts were complementary.Between the 6th and 10th centuries the Church gave barbaric society establishments, Torahs, and a construct of belonging through written history. A serious split between Rome and Constantinople took topographic point in the 9th century. Its existent beginning ballad in the great political struggle that occurred at the beginning of the century, when in the twelvemonth 800, Charlemagne restored the Western Roman Empire. In the eyes of the East, the Pope had committed a serious breach of religion when he consented to coronate a barbaric similar Charlemagne as Emperor of the West. This was a job because the western Emperor had to acknowledge the new swayer as his brother-sovereign some thing neither party was satisfied with. Therefore two rival political powers had been set up, both claiming to be the lone lawful replacement the Roman Empire, and it was simply a affair of clip before one or other had to be destroyed. The acrimonious struggle between these two rivals, which ended with the autumn of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century, involved the Church besides, and was therefore the root cause of the split between the Christian East and West. This would go forth an chance unfastened for the Crusaders.

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For the West, the events of the Crusades began in an aura of optimism but ended with catastrophe and disunity for the Church. After the decease of Charlemagne, the military authorization that had supported the Papacy began to worsen. The Norman incursions into Italy posed a existent menace to the Church, and the Papacy in 1059 acknowledged its inability to confront any menace from a Norman invasion. At this clip a petition arrived from the Eastern Emperor for aid against invasions by Moslem forces into the Holy Lands. Urban II called together on the faithful to mount a campaign, appealing to the spirit of religion, to recover the Holy Lands from the blasphemous custodies of Islam while pulling attending to the political benefits of such a venture. Barraclough states that & # 8220 ; The Crusades to the Holy Lands were the most dramatic and self-aware act of Western Christian expansionism which represented a merger of three features of mediaeval adult male: piousness, aggressiveness, and greed & # 8221 ; .In a really existent sense, Innocent & # 8217 ; s reign saw the zenith of the apostolic monarchy A narrower hierarchal church had replaced the Church as a community of the faithful, consisting clerical orders in go uping ranks jealously guarding their rights and privileges. Even the reforming Fourth Lateran Council had its plan imposed upon it by Innocent, and in world it was to the pontificate that the people looked to reform the Church. Innocent & # 8217 ; s papacy nowadayss for church historians a dramatic duality & # 8211 ; the institutionalized church get downing to give birth to the servant Church. In footings of theoretical accounts of Church, Innocent III & # 8217 ; s- papacy resembled a Dictatorship: A Church which was so structured that all power and authorization came from one individual ; a Church which was barbarous and violent through the Crusades and the Inquisition ; and most convincingly a Church that stood for no resistance to its beleifs or its authorization. The 12th and 13th centuries were a clip of alteration non merely in the ecclesiastical but besides secular domains. Canon jurisprudence became a power that produced non merely a extremely organized, political and cardinal pontificate, but besides a power that so influenced social jurisprudence, that it gave rise to a new secular order and a civilization that was about wholly ecclesiastical ( Congar, 1969 ) . Durin this century the uprooting of the pontificate from Rome and its re- constitution in Avignon took topographic point for a period for about 70 old ages. However by the terminal of the 14th century the pontificate was in convulsion and confusion, forced into another split which saw three rival Catholic Popes enthroned at the same time in confusion and conflict.Religious life suffered as a effect of the split, for & # 8220 ; Christendom looked upon the dirt helpless and down, and yet impotent to take it. With two subdivisions of Christendom each declaring the other doomed, each cursing and denouncing the other, work forces gravely asked who was saved & # 8221 ; ( Flick, 1930 ) . Doubt and confusion caused many to oppugn the legitimacy and true sanctity of the church as an establishment. In the West, the surpluss that affected the church finally called for extremist reform through that motion which we now identify with the Protestant Reformation.This period of moral diminution was instrumental in taking to a Western Schism within Christendom, in which three Popes and anti-Popes at the same time contested control over the See of Peter. The Catholic Popes refused to hold dialogues to consequence reform, and they failed to convey about reform themselves. & # 8221 ; Thus the pontificate emerged as something between an Italian city state and a European power, without burying at the same clip the claim to be the vice-regent of Christ. The Catholic Pope frequently could non do up his ain head whether he was the replacement of Peter or of Caesar. Such hesitation had much to make with the rise and success & # 8230 ; of the Reformation & # 8221 ; ( Bainton, 1952 ) . By the mid-fifteenth century the Church was in pressing demand of drastic reform which, when effected, would hold permanent impact on the spiritual and secular history of Europe. Bibliography Barraclough, G. The Medieval Papacy, Thames and Hudson London, 1968. Flick, A.C. Decline of the Medieval Church, vol. I London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. , 1930. Congar, Y. Faith and Spiritual Life, Darton, Longman & A ; Todd, London. 1969. Bainton, R.H. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Boston: Beacon Press, 1952.