Through the various phases of Christianity in the past has been the layered effect. Layer by layer, each group or hierarchical agenda got added, subtracted, fused, misused, slammed, bammed and flimflammed.
Somewhere along the time line, a reformed Judaism of Paul got fused with the floating message of Jesus. After that, Constantine fused, morphed Christianity into a palace decoration and political tool. Through the dark and middle ages, the various centers of Christianity, mostly in or near Turkey faded from economic and also religious importance.
The wave of Islam that overtook the obsolete Roman city view of things in the middle east reduced Christianity to two centers of hierarchical importance, Constantinople and Rome.
Constantinople was the Roman Empire’s primary capital as the city of Rome faded into an unstable backwater destroyed and plagued by vandals and barbarians for a thousand years.
Somewhere along the timeline around 1040, a schism happened between Rome and Constantinople. I have not done much research on it because anything I read will have been written in the west and tell the western version of what caused a break with the eastern church. All I do know is that it was probably about power and money and on both sides to some extent.
Following timelines, one sees the western church shortly thereafter start the Crusades to bypass Constantinople and this inability to militarily hold onto the holy shrines of the so-called holy land.
The motivation was not so much salvation as promised by the pope to all soldiers headed east as it probably was the hope that Rome could reestablish its economic as well as religious importance and prestige in the total of Europe. The crusades were about power and money. The shiny trinkets and relics sold to tourists was a sideshow to the religious political power game being played on a world scale.
One of the crusades managed to sack Constantinople and under the flag of Venice. That sack weakened the walls of Constantinople and the city never got over the sack. The city fell something like two centuries later to the Ottoman Turks, a new rising empire on the make which happened to be Muslim. It was not a Muslim crusade, it was a power grab - and an indirect gift from Rome.
Rome by default was now the center of Christianity. Part of the schism in 1040 had the west or Rome start the celibacy thing out of the blue as official policy. The celibacy thing was never imposed within the eastern Christian church which allows its clergy to marry to this day.
Rome further split into schism in 1517 with Martin Luther. Henry VIII split for political and economic reasons. The princes and kings of northern Europe went the way of Protestantism as much for power as for a cultural difference with the Mediterranean culture of Rome and its church.
The church of Rome countered the Protestant Reformation with a Counter Reformation in the Council of Trent shortly thereafter and set dogma into the cement of the Catechism. All dogma and answers to the laity were in several hundred pages of the Catechism. If it was not found there, you had no reason to ask anything else. Shut up, be a good catholic or join the Prots.
There is one thing in the present child abuse meltdown in the Catholic Church that keeps coming back to me. That is how a priest, any priest who memorizes hundreds of pages of boilerplate religion and serves in the rituals and functions of the church is too valuable a church asset to defrock over the mere sin – crime – of rape and abuse and against defenseless children.
In a way, priests are part of the Too Big To Fail bullshit mismanagement concept that the bullshit American banks are now touting. Was the Vatican a model for this style of management for these banks?
Too valuable to defrock – too big to fail – they all speak of too important – more important than the child or the individual that somewhere on the timeline Jesus thought was the most important part of the original Christian religious equation.
Looking at this private all male – love of penis – cult that rules the Roman Catholic church of Rome in the Vatican, it is a hard nut to crack. Hard nut to crack even in the light of reality and civil authority and common sense and modernity.
The RC church looks as the growing numbers in Latin America and Africa and Asia and knows that in fifty years, the bullshit the enemies of the church are trying to saddle them with will go away. Bullshit to the bishops over the rape of children as not important as compared to the – too valuable an asset / too big to fail – “celibate” priesthood.
The RC church, the entity, whatever it is, will be, endures even if its soul and moral authority evaporates into nothing. The numbers are there. Just God help all the future victims of this infallible corporation and the rest of humanity for the rest of time.
It becomes increasingly evident that the Church of Rome will be replaced in the United States by bona fide legitimately ordained men and women in the Independent Catholic Church Movement – now still splintered but it will come together in the vacuum of the void of moral authority now emanating from Rome.
Men and women priests of several independent Catholic organizations that have survived, broke away after Vatican I under the slavery loving pope Pius IX, will grow.
That these organizations have survived with a purpose from the Holy Spirit to one day replace the corrupt and demon filled buildings and obsessions of the Vatican City political state.
All this is waiting to be fulfilled if Rome continues to do nothing about the corruption and seeming hatred of people, children, women – in the present Too Big To Fail Vatican Power Equation.
