Many bible scholars depict the beginning of the Roman Catholic Empire as 538 A.D., primarily because the main opposition to the rise of the Papacy was vanquished around that period. This religious iconoclast’s wealth, power, and prestige didn’t occur overnight. It took centuries for the papal monarchy to be firmly entrenched with all of its trappings of power and prestige. There were many changes and struggles, wars, and theological disputes, along with changing political alignments, leading up to the firm establishment of the Roman Pontiff as the supreme authority in Religious and political affairs in the European Realm. There were outrageous abuses like all preceding world Empires, such as Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. However, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, nothing lasts forever.
The first blow to the hegemony of Roman Catholicism occurred with the development of the Great Schism: East-West Schism, event that precipitated the final separation between the Eastern Christian churches (led by the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius) and the Western church (led by Pope Leo IX). The mutual excommunications by the pope and the patriarch in 1054 became a watershed in church history. The excommunications were not lifted until 1965, when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, following their historic meeting in Jerusalem in 1964, presided over simultaneous ceremonies that revoked the excommunication decrees. BRITANNICA: East-West Schism, Christianity, March 22, 2025.
The Western Schism (1378-1417):
From 1305 to 1377, the papal residence was moved from Rome to Avignon in southern France, and soon after its return to Rome in 1378, the great Schism of the West began.
This was a very difficult situation in which two popes appeared on the scene, and some years later, three (due to the different parties of cardinals gathered in conclave at Avignon, Rome, and Pisa). During all this upheaval, the Catholic people remained perplexed as to who was the legitimate pope. The Council of Constance (1415-1418) restored unity to the Church after a difficult trial, with the election of a new pope, Martin V. MEDIUM: Divisions and Conflicts in Catholic Church History, by Obinna Oliseneku.
For many centuries, the Roman Catholic Church was the supreme source of knowledge, divine revelation, geography, and authority until a period of enlightenment known as the Renaissance commenced. This era began challenging many prevailing superstitions that were current in the Middle Ages and promulgated by the Roman Catholic Empire.
There is some debate over when exactly the Renaissance began. However, it is generally believed to have begun in Italy during the 14th century, after the end of the Middle Ages, and it reached its height there between the 1490s and the 1520s, a period referred to as the High Renaissance. Renaissance ideas and ways of thinking also began spreading to the rest of Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. BRITANNICA: When Did The Renaissance Happen, March 19, 2025.
Prominent figures of the European Renaissance include:
the explorers Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Hernán Cortés. They proved that the earth is not flat but round. That you couldn’t fall off the edge of the earth by sailing around the world. Contrary to the teachings of the Church.
Niccolò Machiavelli, the philosopher and statesman known for the political treatise The Prince
Francis Bacon, a statesman and philosopher considered the master of the English tongue
Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who developed the theory that the solar system was centered on the Sun. Contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church which taught that man and the earth were the center of God’s universe.
the poets Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, who laid the foundations for humanism, the mode of thought at the core of the Renaissance
William Shakespeare, considered the greatest English dramatist of all time
Galileo, an astronomer and mathematician who helped disprove much medieval-era thinking in science. Ibid.
All of the above-mentioned historical developments did much to undermine the influence and prestige of the Roman Catholic religious, economic, and political Empire.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
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