when did the Church get bureaucratic? Why did the Popes begin to become interested in worldy things and politics? Isn't true that the instutionalization of the Church and the corruption of clergy during the dark and middle ages is the reason for the reformation? How can one defend the Church as being the sole source of salvation despite its dirty past? Does the Catholic Church teach "do as we say not as we do"?

When Jesus gave the keys to Peter.



Because "separation of church and state" is a very new idea. Historically, the idea was that one job of the state is to enforce the laws of God. You can't separate politics and morality.



No, Luther's pride did that. Others criticised the sins of some clergy members, but reformed the Church from within - that's part of what the Council of Trent was for.



People sin, but God remains faithful to His promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church.



No. The Church is perfect. The human beings within the Church Militant are not.

The dark age and the middle ages are very different things.
Stop learning your history from your fundie church already.
Europe does not survive either the dark ages or the middle ages without the catholic church when pagans and muslims threatend to take over all of Europe if not for the catholic church you would be praying to ALLah an misinterpreting the Quran instead of misinterpreting the Bible.

Of course, there are those, myself included, who do not believe that ANY era in history can properly be described as 'dark'.

I'm really having trouble seeing how this thread has any business being in this forum. I've unlocked it to allow a few responses. But I'm going to keep a close eye on it.

tobit,

That is right.

We would be praying to Allah if it wern't for the Church.
Islam would have given a totally Pegan europe the substance to convert to it. Because if there no Catholic church then there would have been no Christanity, heck forget about the Jesus movement among the Jews!

Islam is missionary, Judaism is not. No Catholic Christanity (which was The Universal Church, not the seperate branch it is today in academia) Messianic belief in Jesus would have likely fallen victum to Greek gnosis. The Jesus movement would INDEED have failed, the Bishop (Pope, but with less power at that time) of Rome took the lead in combating Gnosticism, the West, Roman Bishop and other Latin speakers played crucial parts in battling: Montanism, Mannichiesm, Ariansim, Nestoriaism,Pelagianism Monophysite doctrine, dualist thought,etc...

If you don't understand focus on this:

Thus it took unity to fight the early heresies, the first Gnosticism was the most deadly, it would have made a private cult out of Christanity that pitted the spirit against the Body,with Gnostic Christians as wild party animasl like the polytheistic mythical Greek gods trhat could only obtain the knowledge of liberation of the spirit from the awful corrupt human body through the elite Gnostic teachers!
The later heresies mainly had a problem with who and what Christ was, we developed the Trinity out of those, but Gnosticism is enough to verify

That w/o a united Catholic Church we would all be Muslim (or pegan).
I'm a History student and I can agree with such an assertion.

Cas.

The discussion here could benefit from some focus, and perhaps only Coolmk20x can provide it. However, the between-the-lines tone I read from the questions sounds like "how can we put our faith in the hands of an institution of humans who have proven to be flawed in the past?" Or as I've heard my own father chant on several occasions: "how can someone trust the teachings of a church whose leaders act in reckless ways?"

I guess it boils down to your ability to accept the fact that flawed people can teach infallible truths. You don't even have to look too far down the historical line away from Jesus to find examples of human errors in the Church. St. Peter did some bonehead things in his day. But he never taught heresy ... nor have his successors. Perhaps these questions are answered by a counter-question: "how could such a massive institution of flawed people managed to stay in business for so long EXCEPT through the continued guidance and grace of God?"

Hey COOL......

I have a MUST READ for ya!

Go out and get, "Triumph: The Power and The Glory of the Catholic Church."



This book discusses the Catholic Church throughout it's history.

Right up your alley.

coolmk20x is a Catholic, IIRC.

That doesn't matter much, though. The view of history that is taught is our schools is just as rabidly anti-catholic as you'd find at any fundie church.

I am playing devil's advocate. I am asking these questions because I have been asked them many times and I can never formulate an adequate response. Yesterday in my religious studies class, the professor said something that sparked me to make this thread. He said if it wasn’t for the excessive bureaucratizing of the Church during the Middle Ages, the Protestant reformation would not be. He also attacked Aquinas’ adaptation of Aristotle, which was against what the early Church stood for, a simple faith that would not be monopolized by intellectuals. He attacked the Church for adapting erroneous science of Aristotle and Ptolemy. If they would have interpreted them in a symbolic way rather then a literal way, there would have been no Galileo controversy. Because of Aquinas’ Aristotelian synthesis, thinkers like Luther, Calvin, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, and Freud all came into being. In order worlds, the Church reaped what is sowed. It created the conditions in which would inevitably bring about the modernization of Western Europe. The reason why religion is dead in the west and why science and atheism is treated like dogma and the reasons why doctors are looked upon as priests, is because the Catholic Church made crucial errors in the middle ages of adapting Aristotle and Ptolemy, of creating a rigid bureaucratic hierarchy and giving too much political power to its bishops and popes. Luther and the rest were prone to protest such absolute authority. It was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. The domino effect that started with Luther led to the likes of Freud and Nietzsche. If the Catholic Church had taken different courses of actions in the Middle Ages, modernization of Western Europe would have probably had a much more difficult time becoming the official establishment.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but......your professor's an idiot.

how so? He argues that such thinker were reacting to the establishment of that time; the Catholic hierarchy and its adaptation of Aristotle's and Ptolemy's science and philosophy. He said Galileo would not have been problematic in the Islamic world because they never literally interpreted the classical cosmological view, as did midevil christianity.

1) Galileo wasn't a problem with the Church because of his science...that's an urban legend.

2) The roots of the philosophies that were developed by Descartes, Hume and Kant were present in both Classical Greek Philosophy as well as Islamic philosophy.....both of which operated independently of the Church's influence on Medieval Europe. Your professor's argument is based on a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

So Descartes and the rest weren't rebelling against Aquinas?

Galileo wasn't rebelling against Aristotelian cosmology, which the Church adapted?

Not even close. Descartes and Hume took modern, albeit vastly different, approaches to Pyrrho's (and others') contributions....and Kant actually has more in common with Aquinas that most people give him credit for. Point is, given the historical track record of the development of philosophy in the years before Christ, it only seems proper to assume that it would continue in the same vein.....i.e. from thesis to anti-thesis to synthesis...and the cycle continues. To say that all modern philosophy is a rebellion to Aquinas simply puts all modern philosophers in an intellectual void, isolated both from each other as well as from any external sources (such as any of the eastern or Jewish traditions). Your professor is indulging in some incredibly narrow thinking in order to further his anti-catholic vitriol.

I am not being completely facetious in claiming that bureaucracy is the fifth Mark of the Church. "We believe in one, holy, catholic, apostolic, and bureaucratic Church …"

ANY Church, in fact any human community (and the Church, despite being more than just that, is also that), requires some institutional structure, i.e. bureaucracy. A purely spiritual and invisible Church is impossible here on earth.

Edward Pothier

Your Professor is a heretic!
It may sounf harsh but stand before other making a phrase that I am honest to say.

He probably also believes St. (Sir) Thomas More is one of the architects of socialism.

I don't know if the College/University or Church can do anything about it and I'm sure you need to get by the course with a good grade but hope mine dosent get that bad in the next few weeks as we go into the high middle ages.

Cas.

With this a a backdrop, how then did the Catholic Church recover to become the global (political, social and economic) superpower it represented in 18th century Europe?

This is nothing but pure hubris, and it is hardly the fault of the Church. Religion is not dead, people are dead inside. I have said this in the past and I'll say it again; the problem is people have no interior life, they are not creating anything within themselves and they are certainly not creating human life - they're aborting it!. They are looking for every opportunity they can find to murder any human person that is incapable of carring for themselves. They are necrophylics - lovers of death and they will remain so until they learn to love life, i.e. human life in it's most helpless forms, the unborn, elderly, severely handicaped etc..

God grant you peace
Michael Francis

but not all religions are bureaucratic. Islam, Judaism, and maybe the eastern religions all lack the bureaucratic structure of the Catholic Church, yet they continue to exist perfectly in doctrinal unity. Islam only has political differences, not theological. Judaism is divided in that the reform and conservative branches seperated, but even if we look at orthodox Judaism, which to my knowledge lacks a bureaucratic structure, it maintains doctrinal unity. So is a bureaucratic structure necessary to the doctrinal unity of a religious community?