Talk:Catholic Church/Old history section (June 2011)

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Early Christianity
Catholic doctrine teaches that the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ in the 1st century AD and that the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles signaled the beginning of its public ministry.

Conditions in the Roman Empire facilitated the spread of new ideas, and Jesus's apostles gained converts in Jewish communities around the Mediterranean Sea. As preachers such as Paul of Tarsus began converting Gentiles, Christianity grew away from Jewish practices and established itself as a separate religion.

The early Church was more loosely organised and based on evangelism, at times resulting in diverse interpretations of Christian beliefs. In part to ensure a greater consistency in their teachings, by the early 2nd century, Christian communities had adopted a more structured hierarchy, with a central 'bishop' having authority over the clergy in his city. The organisation of dioceses was established mirroring the territories and cities of the Roman Empire. Bishops in politically important cities exerted greater authority over bishops in nearby cities. The churches in Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome held the highest positions, but sees considered "apostolic" retained certain rights of governance and discipline over the other sees "because of their superior origin". By at least the 3rd century, the Roman bishop already functioned as a court of appeals for problems that other bishops could not resolve. Beginning in the 2nd century, bishops often congregated in regional synods to resolve doctrinal and policy issues. Doctrine was further refined by a series of influential theologians and teachers, known collectively as the Church Fathers. Ecumenical councils came to be recognised as infallible and authoritative in resolving theological disputes.

Unlike most religions in the Roman Empire, Christianity required its adherents to renounce all other gods. Christians' refusal to join pagan celebrations meant they were unable to participate in much of public life. This refusal caused non-Christians to fear that the Christians were angering the gods. Christian secrecy about their rituals spawned rumours that Christians were orgiastic, incestuous, atheistic cannibals. Local officials sometimes saw Christians as troublemakers and sporadically persecuted them. A series of more centrally organised persecutions of Christians took place in the late 3rd century, when emperors decreed that the Empire's military, political, and economic crises were caused by angry gods. All residents were ordered to give sacrifices or be punished. Relatively few Christians were executed, others were imprisoned, tortured, put to forced labor, castrated, or sent to brothels; others fled or managed to go undetected, and some renounced their beliefs. Disagreements over what role, if any, these apostates should have in the Catholic Church led to the Donatist and Novatianist schisms.

Late antiquity
Catholic Christianity was legalised in 313 under Constantine's Edict of Milan, and declared the state religion of the Empire in 380. After its legalization, a number of doctrinal disputes led to the calling of ecumenical councils. The doctrinal formulations resulting from these ecumenical councils were pivotal in the history of Christianity.

The first seven Ecumenical Councils, from the First Council of Nicaea (325) to the Second Council of Nicaea (787), sought to reach an orthodox consensus and to establish a unified Christendom. In 325, the First Council of Nicaea convened in response to the rise of Arianism, the belief that Jesus had not existed eternally but was a divine being created by and therefore inferior to God the Father.

In order to briefly express the basic tenets of the Christian belief, the council promulgated a creed that became the basis of what is now known as the Nicene Creed. In addition, it delineated Church territory into geographical and administrative areas called dioceses. The Council of Rome in 382 established the first official Biblical canon when it listed the accepted books of the Old and New Testament.

In the same century, Pope Damasus I commissioned a new translation of the Bible in fine classical Latin. He chose his secretary St Jerome, who delivered the Vulgate– the Church was now "committed to think and worship in Latin." Latin continued to play a role as the liturgical language of the Roman Rite of the Church, and is still to this day used in the official documents of the Church. The Council of Ephesus in 431 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 defined the relationship of Christ's divine and human natures, leading to splits with the Nestorians and Monophysites.

Constantine moved the imperial capital to Constantinople, and the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) elevated the See of Constantinople to a position "second in eminence and power to the bishop of Rome". From c. 350 to c. 500, the bishops, or popes, of Rome steadily increased in authority.

Middle Ages


By the time of the decline of the Roman Empire, many Germanic barbarian tribes had converted to Christianity, but most of them (the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, and Vandals) had adopted it in the form of Arianism, a teaching that had since been declared a heresy by the Catholic Church. When these conquering peoples established kingdoms on what had been territory of the Roman Empire, the Arian controversy became a subject of religious discord between the ruling Germanic Arians and the subjected Catholic Romans. Unlike the other barbarian kings, Clovis I, the Frankish ruler, converted in 497 to orthodox Catholicism rather than Arianism, thereby allying himself with the papacy and the monasteries, strengthening the position of the Franks. Some other Germanic kingdoms eventually followed his lead (the Visigoths in Spain in 589, and the Lombards in Italy gradually during the 7th century). Beginning in the 6th century, European monasteries followed the structure of the Rule of St Benedict, becoming spiritual centres with workshops for the arts and crafts, scriptoria and libraries, and agricultural centres in remote regions. By the end of the century Pope Gregory the Great initiated administrative reforms and the Gregorian missions to evangelise Britain; Early in the 7th century Muslim armies had conquered much of the southern Mediterranean posing a threat to western Christendom.

The Carolingian kings strengthened the relationship between kings and the papacy: in 754 Pippin the Younger was crowned in a lavish ceremony (including anointing) by Pope Stephen II. Pippin then vanquished the Lombards and added more territory to the papal state. When Charlemagne came to the throne he quickly consolidated his power, and by 782 he was considered the strongest of the western kings with the strongest sense of Christian mission. He received a papal coronation in Rome in 800, and he interpreted his role as protector of the church with rights of intervention. After his death, however, the degree to which a ruler had the right to intervene with the papacy was treated in an inconsistent manner.

In Bulgaria, the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet in the 9th century by Saints Cyril and Methodius established a vernacular liturgy. In the 8th century, iconoclasm, the destruction of religious images, initiated a rift with the eastern church. The 9th century conflicts over ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Byzantine-controlled southern Italy, Bulgarian missions, led to further disagreements that created the East–West Schism which is generally considered to have become formalized in 1054 although there is no single date on which the schism started. After the schism, the eastern side came to be called the Orthodox Church, while the West, which remained in communion with the Pope, retained the name Catholic. Efforts to mend the schism at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1439 were unsuccessful.

The Cluniac reform of monasteries sparked widespread monastic growth and renewal. The 11th and 12th century saw internal efforts to reform the church. In 1059 the college of cardinals was created to free papal elections from interference by Emperor and nobility. Lay investiture of bishops, a source of rulers' dominance over the Church, was attacked by reformers and under Pope Gregory VII, erupted into the Investiture Controversy between Pope and Emperor. The matter was eventually settled with the Concordat of Worms in 1122 where it was agreed that bishops would be selected in accordance with Church law. By the early 14th century a centralized Church organisation had been established, a Latin speaking culture was prevalent, the clergy were literate and celibacy was required. In 1095, Byzantine emperor Alexius I appealed to Pope Urban II for help against renewed Muslim invasions, which caused Urban to launch the First Crusade aimed at aiding the Byzantine Empire and returning the Holy Land to Christian control. The crusades saw the formation of various military orders such as the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, and the Teutonic Knights. In 1208, after they were accused of murdering a papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, Pope Innocent III declared the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, a gnostic Christian sect in Languedoc. Up to a million people were killed in a conflict that combined both religious and political struggles. To root out those with Cathar sympathies, Gregory IX instituted the Papal Inquisition in 1231.

Mendicant orders were founded by Francis of Assisi and Dominic de Guzmán, which brought consecrated religious life into urban settings. These orders also played a large role in the development of cathedral schools into universities. Scholastic theologians such as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas studied and taught at such universities, and his Summa Theologica was a key intellectual achievement in its synthesis of Aristotelian thought and Christianity.

The Church was the dominant influence on the development of Western art, overseeing the rise of Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance styles of art and architecture. Renaissance artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Bernini, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, and Titian were among a multitude of artists sponsored by the Church. In music, Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation in order to standardise liturgy throughout the worldwide Church, and an enormous body of religious music has been composed for it through the ages. This led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music and its many derivatives.

Reformation and Counter-Reformation
In the 14th century, the Papacy came under French dominance, with Clement V moving to Avignon in 1305. The Avignon Papacy ended in 1376 when the Pope returned to Rome, but was followed in 1378 by the 38-year-long Western schism with claimants to the papacy in Rome, Avignon and (after 1409) Pisa. The Western Schism resulted in a call for a "collective authority rather than the single primacy of the bishop of Rome" which gained support, but was overturned in 1417 at the Council of Constance with Martin V declared pope, and a decree issued that the Pope received authority "immediately from Christ". In reaction to the lack of authority created by the Great Schism, in England John Wycliffe wrote that the "eternal existing Church" was to be found in the Bible and available to all. His work was brought to Bohemia, where in Prague, Jan Hus embraced Wycliffe's ideas and gained wide support. At the Council of Constance, Hus was charged with heresy and ordered to be executed by burning at the stake. The Council of Constance, the Council of Basel and the Fifth Lateran Council each attempted to reform internal Church abuses, with the "popular and persistently recommended" creation of a council. In 1460, following the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, Pope Pius II forbade further appeal for a general council. Consequently worldly men such as Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) were elected to the papacy, followed by Pope Julius II who presented himself as a secular prince. Early in the 16th century, the publication of In Praise of Folly, written by Erasmus, "included some biting criticisms of the unreformed Church."

In Germany in 1517, Martin Luther sent his Ninety-Five Theses to several bishops. His theses protested against key points of Catholic doctrine as well as the sale of indulgences. In Switzerland, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and others further criticised Catholic teachings. These challenges developed into the European movement called the Protestant Reformation.

In Germany, the reformation led to a nine-year war between the Protestant Schmalkaldic League and the Catholic Emperor Charles V. In 1618 a far graver conflict, the Thirty Years' War, followed. In France, a series of conflicts termed the French Wars of Religion were fought from 1562 to 1598 between the Huguenots and the forces of the French Catholic League, with the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre marking the turning point in the conflict. Survivors regrouped under Henry of Navarre who became Catholic and began the first experiment in religious toleration with his 1598 Edict of Nantes. This Edict, which granted civil and religious toleration to Protestants, was hesitantly accepted by Pope Clement VIII.

The English Reformation during the reign of Henry VIII began as a political dispute. When the pope denied Henry's petition for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he had the Acts of Supremacy passed, making him head of the English Church. Although he tried to maintain traditional Catholicism, Henry initiated the confiscation of monasteries, friaries, convents and shrines throughout his realm. A more thoroughgoing doctrinal and liturgical Reformation was initiated at the end of Henry VIII's reign and continued through the reign of Edward VI under Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Under Mary I, England was briefly reunited with Rome, but Elizabeth I later restored a separate church that outlawed Catholic priests and prevented Catholics from educating their children and taking part in political life until new laws were passed in the late 18th century and 19th century.

The Council of Trent (1545–1563) became the driving force behind the Counter-Reformation. Doctrinally, it reaffirmed central Catholic teachings such as transubstantiation and the requirement for love and hope as well as faith to attain salvation. It also made structural reforms, most importantly by improving the education of the clergy and laity and consolidating the central jurisdiction of the Roman Curia. To popularize Counter-Reformation teachings, the Church encouraged the Baroque style in art, music and architecture, and new religious orders were founded such as the Theatines and the Barnabites in which were established the "evangelistic zeal of the original monastic vocation." The Society of Jesus was formally established in the mid-16th century, and they quickly saw the importance of providing education during the Counter-Reformation, viewing it as a "battleground for hearts and minds". At the same time, the writings of figures such as Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales and Philip Neri spawned new schools of spirituality within the Church.

Toward the latter part of the 17th century, Pope Innocent XI reformed abuses that were occurring in the Church's hierarchy, including simony, nepotism and the lavish papal expenditures that had caused him to inherit a large papal debt. He promoted missionary activity, tried to unite Europe against the Turkish invasion, prevented influential Catholic rulers (including the Holy Roman Emperor) from marrying Protestants but strongly condemned religious persecution.

Early modern period


The Age of Discovery saw the expansion of Western Europe's political and cultural influence worldwide. Because of the prominent role the strongly Catholic nations of Spain and Portugal played in Western Colonialism, Catholicism was spread to the Americas, Asia and Oceania by explorers, conquistadors, and missionaries, as well as by the transformation of societies through the socio-political mechanisms of colonial rule.

Pope Alexander VI had awarded colonial rights over most of the newly discovered lands to Spain and Portugal and the ensuing patronato system allowed state authorities, not the Vatican, to control all clerical appointments in the new colonies. Although the Spanish monarchs tried to curb abuses committed against the Amerindians by explorers and conquistadors, it was Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar, who is particularly known for openly rebuking the Spanish rulers of Hispaniola in 1511 for their cruelty and tyranny in dealing with the natives. King Ferdinand enacted the Laws of Burgos and Valladolid in response. The issue resulted in a crisis of conscience in 16th-century Spain. and, through the writings of Catholic clergy such as Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria, led to debate on the nature of human rights and to the birth of modern international law. Enforcement of these laws was lax, and some historians blame the Church for not doing enough to liberate the Indians; others point to the Church as the only voice raised on behalf of indigenous peoples.

In 1521 the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan made the first Catholic converts in the Philippines. Elsewhere, Portuguese missionaries under the Spanish Jesuit Francis Xavier evangelised in India, China, and Japan. Church growth in Japan came to a halt in 1597 when the Shogunate, in an effort to isolate the country from foreign influences, launched a severe persecution of Christians or Kirishitan's. An underground minority Christian population survived throughout this period of persecution and enforced an isolation that was eventually lifted in the 19th century. In China, despite Jesuit efforts to find compromise, the Chinese Rites controversy led the Kangxi Emperor to outlaw Christian missions in 1721. These events added fuel to growing criticism of the Jesuits, who were seen to symbolize the independent power of the Church, and in 1773 European rulers united to force Pope Clement XIV to dissolve the order. The Jesuits were eventually restored in the 1814 papal bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum. In Las Californias, Franciscan priest Junípero Serra founded a series of missions. In South America, Jesuit missionaries sought to protect native peoples from enslavement by establishing semi-independent settlements called reductions.

From the 17th century onward, the Enlightenment questioned the power and influence of the Catholic Church over Western society. 18th century writers such as Voltaire and the Encyclopedists wrote biting critiques of both religion and the Church. One target of their criticism was the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes by King Louis XIV, which ended a century-long policy of religious toleration of Protestant Huguenots.

The French Revolution of 1789 brought about a shifting of powers from the Church to the State, destruction of churches and the establishment of a Cult of Reason. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte's General Louis Alexandre Berthier invaded Italy, imprisoning Pope Pius VI, who died in captivity. Napoleon later re-established the Catholic Church in France through the Concordat of 1801. The end of the Napoleonic wars brought Catholic revival and the return of the Papal States. In 1833, Frederic Ozanam began the work of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Paris to assist the poor created by the industrial revolution. The society would grow to more than 1 million members in 142 countries by the year 2010.

The spread of the British Empire brought the first Catholics to Australia with the arrival of Irish convicts at Sydney in 1788. By the close of the 19th century, missionaries had taken Catholicism to the neighbouring islands of Oceania.

In Latin America, a succession of anti-clerical regimes came to power beginning in the 1830s. Church properties were confiscated, bishoprics left vacant, religious orders suppressed, the collection of clerical tithes ended, and clerical dress in public prohibited. Pope Gregory XVI challenged the power of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs by appointing his own candidates as colonial bishops. He also condemned slavery and the slave trade in the 1839 papal bull In Supremo Apostolatus, and approved the ordination of native clergy in the face of government racism.

At the end of the 19th century, Catholic missionaries followed colonial governments into Africa and built schools, hospitals, monasteries and churches.

Industrial age
In response to the social challenges of the Industrial Revolution, Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. It set out Catholic social teaching in terms that rejected socialism but advocated the regulation of working conditions, the establishment of a living wage and the right of workers to form trade unions. Although the infallibility of the Church in doctrinal matters had always been a Church dogma, the First Vatican Council, which convened in 1870, affirmed the doctrine of papal infallibility when exercised under specific conditions. This decision gave the pope "enormous moral and spiritual authority over the worldwide" Church. Reaction to the pronouncement resulted in the breakaway of a group of mainly German churches, which subsequently formed the Old Catholic Church. The loss of the papal states to the Italian unification movement created what came to be known as the Roman Question, a territorial dispute between the papacy and the Italian government that was not resolved until the 1929 Lateran Treaty granted sovereignty to the Holy See over Vatican City.

In 1872, John Bosco and Maria Mazzarello founded the Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco in Italy which would grow to be the largest Catholic institute for women in the world, with 14,420 members in 2009.

The 20th century saw the rise of various politically radical and anti-clerical governments. The 1926 Calles Law separating church and state in Mexico led to the Cristero War in which over 3,000 priests were exiled or assassinated, churches desecrated, services mocked, nuns raped and captured priests shot. In the Soviet Union following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, persecution of the Church and Catholics continued well into the 1930s. In addition to the execution and exiling of clerics, monks and laymen, the confiscation of religious implements and closure of churches was common. In the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, the Catholic hierarchy allied itself with Franco's Nationalists against the Popular Front government, citing Republican violence against the Church and "foreign elements which have brought us to ruin". Pope Pius XI referred to these three countries as a "Terrible Triangle" and the failure to protest in Europe and the United States as a Conspiracy of Silence.

After violations of the 1933 Reichskonkordat that had guaranteed the Church in Nazi Germany some protection and rights, Pope Pius XI issued the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which publicly condemned the Nazis' persecution of the Church and their ideology of neopaganism and racial superiority. After the Second World War began in September 1939, the Church condemned the invasion of Poland and subsequent 1940 Nazi invasions. Thousands of Catholic priests, nuns and brothers were imprisoned and murdered throughout the areas occupied by the Nazis including Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein. In the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII directed the Church hierarchy to help protect Jews from the Nazis. While Pius XII has been credited with helping to save hundreds of thousands of Jews by some historians, the Church has also been accused of encouraging centuries of antisemitism and Pius himself of not doing enough to stop Nazi atrocities. Debate over the validity of these criticisms continues to this day.

Postwar Communist governments in Eastern Europe severely restricted religious freedoms. Although some priests and religious collaborated with Communist regimes, many were imprisoned, deported or executed and the Church would be an important player in the fall of communism in Europe. The rise to power of the Communists in China in 1949 led to the expulsion of all foreign missionaries. The new government also created the Patriotic Church whose unilaterally appointed bishops were initially rejected by Rome before many of them were accepted. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s led to the closure of all religious establishments. When Chinese churches eventually reopened they remained under the control of the Patriotic Church. Many Catholic pastors and priests continued to be sent to prison for refusing to renounce allegiance to Rome.

Contemporary
The Second Vatican Council (1962–65), initiated by Pope John XXIII, became one of the major influences on the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. It intended to engage the Church more closely with the present world (aggiornamento), which was described by its advocates as an "opening of the windows". It led to changes in liturgy within the Latin Church, a re-focusing of its mission and a redefinition of ecumenism, but also rethinking its relationship with Judaism in its document Nostra aetate. In the declaration Dignitatis humanae on religious freedom, the council rejected the imposition of a certain religion on people by force and underscored that although all men are bound to seek the truth, "(the) truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power". (DH 1)

Reception of the council has formed the basis of multifaceted internal positions and some strife within the Church since then. Proponents of the Spirit of Vatican II such as Swiss theologian Hans Küng claimed Vatican II had "not gone far enough". On the other hand, Traditionalists represented by figures such as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre strongly criticised the council, arguing that the liturgical changes that it had stated "defiled" the sanctity of the Latin Mass, promoted religious indifferentism towards "false religions" and compromised historical Catholic dogma and tradition. A group positioned in between - including major church figures such as popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI - hold that the council was ultimately positive, but that there were abuses in interpretation.

In the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, the teaching of the Catholic Church about sexuality became an issue of increasing controversy, also internally. In his encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), Pope Paul VI rejected all kinds of contraception (though he favored the regulation of births by means of natural family planning), contradicting those voices in the Church that saw at the time the birth control pill as an ethically justifiable method of contraception. This teaching was continued especially by John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, where he decried contraception and abortion as well as euthanasia as symptoms of a "culture of death" and called for a "culture of life".

In 1978, Pope John Paul II, formerly archbishop of Cracow in then-Communist Poland, became the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years. His 27-year pontificate was one of the longest in history. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last premier of the Soviet Union, credited the Polish pope with hastening the fall of Communism in Europe.

He supported debt relief in the Third World and the campaign against the Iraq War. Disapproving of the influence of Marxism on the Liberation Theology prevalent in Latin America during the 1980s, he said the Church should not work for the poor and oppressed through partisan politics or revolutionary violence. He canonised 483 saints - more than any his predecessors. In 1986, he established World Youth Day, a mass gathering of young Catholics taking place about every three years. He worked for reconciliation with Jews and Muslims, offering forgiveness to persecutors of the Church, and asking forgiveness for the historical errors of the Church, including religious intolerance and injustice toward Jews, women, indigenous peoples, immigrants, the poor and the unborn. In 1992, the Catholic Church issued a new, binding compilation of its teachings, the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Campaigns for human rights and social justice led to the martyrdom of Catholics during this period - notably in Latin America, where Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was gunned down at the altar in 1980, and six Jesuits of the University of Central America were assassinated in 1989.

The Catholic nun Mother Teresa of Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work among India's poor. Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo won the same award in 1996 for "work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor".

In the 1990s and 2000s, the issue of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy became the subject of media coverage, legal action and public debate in the United States, Ireland, Australia and other countries. The Church was criticised for its handling of abuse complaints when it became known that some bishops had shielded accused priests, transferring them to other pastoral assignments where some continued to commit sexual offences. In response to the scandal, the Church has established formal procedures to prevent abuse, encourage reporting of any abuse that occurs and to handle such reports promptly, although groups representing victims have disputed their effectiveness.