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The Great Schism of the Church
2005, 2015
July 6, 1054 was rapidly approaching, and the Christian world was about to experience a major event on the road to a schism that continues to our day — the divide between the Western and Eastern Christian churches. The central actors in the looming conflict were Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople,1 and Leo IX, the bishop or pope in Rome.
In the months leading up to July 6, 1054, Cerularius had strongly condemned the Western church for some of its religious practices and beliefs.2 As part of his attack, Cerularius excommunicated the bishops of Constantinople who followed certain rites of the Western church, and he closed down their churches.
In April, Leo sent a legation to Cerularius, headed by Cardinal Humbert, with his own set of demands and accusations against the patriarch. As it turned out, Leo died in the midst of the mission, but the group continued its task. The meetings between Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Cerularius were angry and bitter. Mistrust and a desire to maintain ecclesiastical power ruled the day. No useful dialogue could occur in such a poisoned atmosphere.
Mutual excommunication
Finally, relations between Cerularius and Humbert were strained to the breaking point. The Roman legates marched into
It is believed that the Pope is in a direct line from St Peter who
Before the split of 1054, the Roman Catholic Church or Western church and the Eastern Orthodox Church or Byzantine church were almost one with each other. The two churches held the same ideals and got along with one another the majority of the time. They had previous splits in the past but they were never a permanent situation because they usually found a solution to their issues and differences. The split between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church in 1054 seemed to have no resolution when their theological, political, and cultural differences became too much for them to harmonize upon.
After this was when things started to get harder for Charles V. He was faced with Religious differences as a challenge to political authority. Charles V.
During the late 14th century and the early 15th century there was a great division in the Catholic Church. The Papacy was becoming blurred. The center of the Roman Catholic Church had been moved from Rome to the city of Avignon during the reign of Pope Clement V; and there was now a movement to return the center of power back to Rome. This movement was first truly seen under Pope Gregory XI and his successor Pope Urban VI. Earlier Pope Urban V had moved the center to Rome but it had been proven to be no more than a temporary idea; he had gone back to Avignon to die and there his replacement, Pope Gregory XI was elected . This along with other political problems and circumstances created a split in the loyalty among
For example, the Great Schism is the first major division within Christianity. The Great Schism, otherwise known as the East-West Schism, is when the early Christian Church split into the Western Roman Catholic Church (led by Pope Leo IX) and Eastern Orthodox Church (led by the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius). This occurred in 1054 but previously there had been a lot of tension between the two sides. The Great Schism occurred because of
This was a bad scene when the Catholics were fighting against the Eastern Orthodox leading to the conquer of Byzantine, capital of Constantinople. This lead to the Turkish Muslims to advance towards Europe which resulted in the fall of Eastern Europe.
The Great Papal Schism is also known as the Western Schism that lasted from 1378 – 1417, during which the papacy (the position itself) was in great divide between three popes in the Roman Catholic Church. This political upheaval within the Roman Catholic Church caused distrust of the western civilization towards the church. It began after the Avignon Papacy or the more commonly referred to, “Babylonian captivity of the papacy” which was when the papal court was moved to France and French cardinals who later became popes from 1309-1378 resided in Avignon, France (a total of seven French popes by the papal names Clement V all the way to Gregory XI, who moved the court back to Rome) while being heavily influenced by the French kings; this also resulted to the decline of the papal power and authority (Miller, Study.com).
After the 4th century when Constantinople emerged as a great capital and church center, tensions sometimes arose between its leaders and the bishop of Rome. After the fall of Rome to Germanic invaders in 476, the Roman pope was the only guardian of Christian universalism in the West. He began more explicitly to attribute his dominance to Rome's being the burial place of Saint Peter, whom Jesus had called the "rock" on which the church was to be built. The Eastern Christians respected that tradition and recognized the Roman patriarch to a measure of honorable authority. But they never believed that this authority allowed the papacy to overrule another church or that it made the pope into a universally reliable figure within the larger
Baldric viewed the Christians of the East as holy brethren -- people of Christ just like Catholics. He was disturbed that any Christ followers had to live in pagan territory. Although the conflict of 1054 did not in fact cause a schism between the two groups, there was still underlying tensions that gradually worsened to violent battles, beginning in 1095 with the First Crusade and continuing for centuries.
The issues between Pope Boniface and King Philip IV relate to the case of Thomas Backet and Henry II because both disputes were conflicts between church and state. Henry II thought that by electing Beckett as his Archbishop he would be able to rule over the church and the state. However, Becket did not give Henry that power and he would eventually be assassinated.
In addition to the horrors carried out by the Seljuk horde on Christians and their shrines, the Byzantines were also begging the pope to protect their empire from other Turkish tribes. Urban II's main incentive for answering this plea for help was not entirely contingent on the letter he received from the Holy Roman Emperor, but more so from the notion that the Eastern and Western sects of the church could be unified. Moreover, they might be fused under the Pope, granting him sovereignty over the entire Christian church. This Papal hope has been revealed to historians through, among other sources, the different accounts of his speech at Clermont. For example, Guibert of Nogent recalls the pope declaring: "And you ought, furthermore, to consider with the utmost deliberation, ..., that the Mother of churches should flourish anew to the worship of Christianity, whether perchance, [God] may not wish other regions of the East to be restored to the faith against the approaching time of the Antichrist" (Peters, Guibert of Nogent, 35). Unfortunately, the Holy Roman Emperor feared his throne was in jeopardy due to the large number of crusaders that arrived to drive out the Turks. He demanded that they press on towards the Holy Land, and for reasons that need not be discussed, strong ties with the Papacy were severed soon
The synod of Rome in 1075 saw different bishop be warned and some even deposed for their actions. The accounts written about this synod reveal how the authors, Berthold and Bernold of St. Blasien, saw bishops and clergymen who went against the papal reforms. Pope Gregory used the weapon of deposing and excommunicating clergymen to enforce his papal reforms. These weapons meant that the person deposed or excommunicated must not receive of any sacraments and no one must willing follow this person and their rule. Gregory wanted to encourage that if a member of the church committed a crime of simony then they aren’t an actual bishop or clergymen who could carry out the sacraments. Berthold and Bernold both adopted his viewpoint and opinions in regards to clergymen who act against the papal reform. Berthold would become his biggest supporter, believing Gregory had God-like powers in regards to cleaning the Catholic Church and that he had every right to do it. Berthold explains, “Strove to clear the field of the lord properly with the authentic axes of catholic and apostolic discipline”. The language Berthold uses implies that Gregory is within his right and power to clean the “field of the lord” with the “authentic axe”. Berthold’s description shows that he supported Gregory in his mission to cleanse the church of corrupt
The Roman Catholic Church responded treatment of Luther, Huguenots in France, relationship with the Holy Roman Emperor, the Jesuits and the Council of Trent, treatment of Galileo and other scientists very differently. Luther was called before Emperor Charles V to recant his beliefs. Although some German Princes sided with Luther, it was still declared an outlaw. He protected by a German Prince Frederick the Wise. He translates Erasmus’ Greek Bible into German. Holy Roman Emperor and the RCC were political allies. Prince’s allied with Luther to indirectly challenge the emperor. Huguenots in France worked to reform the rest of France, but the Catholic King Henry III was not about to let that happen. King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, this resulted in driving out hundreds of thousands of his best citizens abroad. The monks at Cluny were challenging the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, there was also the idea of separation of church and state. By 1050, King Henry III appointed the Pope he liked which was Clement II. After his death the archbishops were able to elect the Pope. Henry IV had a serious threat to his stability. He made his bishops swear loyalty to him. When Gregory excommunicated Henry he begged for forgiveness and he got it; after Henry was back to placing bishops, he was excommunicated again. The Germans were eager to see a weakened king siding with the church. The Holy Roman Empire was no way united, still very strong, but they had no control over its
This caused Shirley2 patriarch Germanos I of Constantinople. Greece immediately rebelled and Emperor Leo was forced to lead a fleet against the Greeks instead of against Muslims. Pope Gregory II and a council of bishops claimed the Emperor’s iconoclasm a heresy and they excommunicated him. The emperor sent fleet against Rome but it sank. Emperor Leo, incensed against the Pope, would not send aid to defend Europe (in fact, he had enough threats closer to home that he probably could not, but now he would not). Estranged from the imperial might of Constantinople, Pope Gregory had to call upon Charles Martel, the Frankish king, to fight back the Muslims and hem them in
When Cerularius heard that the Normans were forbidding Greek customs in Southern Italy, he retaliated, in 1052, by closing the Latin churches in Constantinople. He then induced bishop Leo of Ochrid to compose an attack on the Latin use of unleavened bread and other practices. In response to this provocative treatise, Pope Leo sent his chief adviser, Humbert, a tactless and narrow-minded man with a strong sense of papal authority, to Constantinople to deal with the problem directly.