Pope, Bishop of Rome, leader of the worldwide Catholic Church.

(Jody Gray) This is just one of my Blog Posts related to Religion, Origins: where did what exists now, come from? And, why am I your enemy? See, Blog Post: Religion, Cross Reference. http://indextoblogposts.*

*Pope [https://en.wikipedia.] (Latin, papa, a child’s word for “father”) aka pontiff, is the Bishop of Rome, and therefore ex officio the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. The primacy of the Roman bishop is largely derived from his role as the traditional successor to Saint Peter, to whom Jesus is supposed to have given the keys of Heaven and the powers of “binding and loosing”, naming him as the “rock” upon which the church would be built.

  The office of the pope is the Papacy. His ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the Diocese of Rome, is often called “the Holy See” or “Apostolic See” (successor of Peter the Apostle).

  Popes, who originally had no temporal powers, in some periods of history accrued wide powers similar to those of temporal rulers...

Position within the Church. The Catholic Church teaches that Jesus personally appointed Peter as leader of the Church and in its dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium makes a clear distinction between apostles and bishops, presenting the latter as the successors of the former, with the pope as successor of Peter in that he is head of the bishops as Peter was head of the apostles... The writings of the Church Father Irenaeus who wrote around AD 180 reflect a belief that Peter “founded and organised” the Church at Rome. Clement of Rome wrote in a letter to the Corinthians, c. 96, about the persecution of Christians in Rome as the “struggles in our time” and presented to the Corinthians its heroes, “first, and greatest and most just columns”, the “good apostles” Peter and Paul. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote shortly after Clement and in his letter from the city of Smyrna the Romans he said would not command them as Peter and Paul did...

  Protestants contend that the New Testament offers no proof that Jesus established the papacy nor even that he established Peter as the first bishop of Rome. Others, using Peter’s own words, argue that Christ intended himself as the foundation of the church not Peter. Others have argued that the church is indeed built upon Jesus and faith, but also on the disciples as the roots and foundations of the church on the basis of Paul’s teaching in Romans and Ephesians, though not primarily Peter.

  First-century Christian communities would have had a group of presbyter-bishops functioning as leaders of their local churches… In Rome there were many who claimed to be the rightful bishop though again Irenaeus stressed the validity of one line of bishops from the time of St. Peter up to his contemporary Pope Victor I and listed them...

Early Christianity (c. 30-325). In the early Christian era, Rome and a few other cities had claims on the leadership of worldwide Church, James the Just, known as “the brother of the Lord”, served as head of the Jerusalem church, which is still honored as the “Mother Church” in Orthodox tradition. Alexandria had been a center of Jewish learning and became a center of Christian learning. Rome had a large congregation early in the apostolic period whom Paul the Apostle addressed in his Epistle to the Romans, and according to tradition Paul was martyred there.

Nicaea to East-West Schism (325-1054). The Edict of Milan in 313 granted freedom to all religions in the Roman Empire, beginning the Peace of the Church. In 325, the First Council of Nicaea condemned Arianism, declaring trinitarianism dogmatic, and in its sixth canon recognized the special role of the sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch… In 380, the Edict of Thessalonica declared Nicene Christianity to be the state religion of the empire, with the name “Catholic Christians” reserved for those who accepted that faith. While the civil power in the Eastern Roman Empire controlled the church, and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the capital, wielded much power, in the Western Roman Empire, the Bishops of Rome were able to consolidate the influence and power they already possessed. After the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, barbarian tribes were converted to Arian Christianity or Catholicism; Clovis I, king of the Franks, was the first important barbarian ruler to convert to Catholicism rather than Arianism, allying himself with the papacy…

Middle Ages. After the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, the pope served as a source of authority and continuity. Pope Gregory I (c 540-604) administered the church with strict reform… Theologically, he represents the shift from the classical to the medieval outlook; his popular writings are full of dramatic miracles, potent relics, demons, angels, ghosts, and the approaching end of the world.

  Gregory’s successors were largely dominated by the Exarch of Ravenna, the Byzantine emperor’s representative in the Italian Peninsula. These humiliations, the weakening of the Byzantine Empire in the face of the Muslim conquests, and the instability of the emperor to protect the papal states against the Lombards, made Pope Stephen II turn from Emperor Constantine V. He appealed to the Franks to protect his lands. Pepin the Short subdued the Lombards and donated Italian land to the papacy. When Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne (800) as Roman Emperor, he established the precedent that, in Western Europe, no man would be emperor without being crowned by a pope.

  The low point of the papacy was 867-1049. This period includes the Saeculum obscurum, the Crescentii era, and the Tusculan Papacy. The papacy came under the control of  vying political factions. Popes were variously imprisoned, starved, killed, and deposed by force… Pope John XII, held orgies of debauchery in the Lateran Palace. Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor had John accused in an ecclesiastical court, which deposed him and elected a layman as Pope Leo VIII. John mutilated the Imperial representatives in Rome and had himself reinstated as pope. Conflict between the Emperor and the papacy continued, and eventually dukes in league with the emperor were buying bishops and popes almost openly.

  In 1049, Leo IX became pope… He traveled to the major cities of Europe to deal with the church’s moral problems firsthand, notably simony and clerical marriage and concubinage -he restored the prestige of the papacy in Northern Europe.

  From the 7th century it became common for European monarchies and nobility to found churches and perform investiture or deposition of clergy in their states and fiefdoms, their personal interests causing corruption among the clergy. This practice had become common because often the prelates and secular rulers were also participants in public life… centers emerged promoting ecclesiastical reform, the most important being the Abbey of Cluny… Pope Gregory VII in 1073, who adopted a series of measures in the movement known as the Gregorian Reform, in order to fight strongly against simony and the abuse of civil power and try to restore ecclesiastical discipline, including clerical celibacy. The conflict between popes and secular autocratic rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and Henry I of England, known as the Investiture Controversy, was only resolved in 1122, by the Concordat of Worms, in which Pope Callixtus II decreed that clerics were to be invested by clerical leaders, and temporal rulers by lay investiture. Soon after, Pope Alexander III began reforms that would lead to the establishment of canon law.

  Since the beginning of the 7th century, the Caliphate had conquered much of the southern Mediterranean, and represented a threat to Christianity. In 1095, the Byzantine emperor, Alexios I Komnenos, asked for military aid from Pope Urban II in the ongoing Byzantine-Seljuq wars. Urban, at the council of Clermont, called the First Crusade to assist the Byzantine Empire to regain the old Christian territories, especially Jerusalem.

East-West Schism Reformation (1054-1517). With the East-West Schism, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church split definitively in 1054. This fracture was caused more by political events than by slight divergences of creed. Popes had galled the Byzantine emperors by siding with the king of the Franks, crowning a rival Roman emperor, appropriating the Exarchate of Ravenna, and driving into Greek Italy. In the Middle Ages, popes struggled with monarchs over power.

  From 1309 to 1377, the pope resided not in Rome but in Avignon (notorious for greed and corruption). During this period, the pope was effectively an ally of the Kingdom of France, alienating France’s enemies, such as the Kingdom of England.

  The pope was understood to have the power to draw on the Treasury of Merit built up by the saints and by Christ, so that he could grant indulgences, reducing one’s time in purgatory. The concept that a monetary fine or donation accompanied contrition, confession, and prayer eventually gave way to the common assumption that indulgences depended on a simple monetary contribution. The popes condemned misunderstandings and abuses, but were too pressed for income to exercise effective control over indulgences.

  Pope also contended with the cardinals, who sometimes attempted to assert the authority of Catholic Ecumenical Councils over the pope’s. Conciliarism holds that the supreme authority of the church lies with a General Council, not with the pope. Its foundations were laid early in the 13th century, and it culminated in the 15th century. The failure of Conciliarism to gain broad acceptance after the 15th century is taken as a factor in the Protestant Reformation.

  The Eastern Church continued to decline with the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, undercutting Constantinople’s claim to equality with Rome… In the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople.

Reformation to present (1517 to today). Protestant Reformers criticized the papacy as corrupt and characterized the pope as the antichrist. Popes instituted a Catholic Reformation (1560-1648), which addressed the challenges of the Protestant Reformation and instituted internal reforms. Pope Paul III initiated the Council of Trent (1545-1563), whose definitions of doctrine and whose reforms sealed the triumph of the papacy over elements of the church that sought conciliation with Protestants and opposed papal claims.

  In 1870, the First Vatican Council proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility for those rare occasions the pope speaks ex cathedra (“from the chair of Saint Peter”) when issuing a solemn definition of faith or morals. Later the same year, Victor Emmanuel II of Italy seized Rome from the pope’s control and substantially completed the Italian unification.

  In 1929, the Lateran Treaty between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See established Vatican City as an independent city-state, guaranteeing papal independence from secular rule.

  In 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption of Mary as dogma [belief in a real, physical elevation of the Virgin Mary’s sinless soul and incorrupt body into Heaven], the only time that a pope has spoken ex cathedra since papal infallibility was explicitly declared.

  The Petrine Doctrine  (see, Primacy of Peter) is still controversial as an issue of doctrine that continues to divide the eastern and western churches and separate Protestants from Rome.

*Primacy of Peter.

*Primacy of Peter [https://en.wikipedia.] aka Petrine primacy, is the position of preeminence that is attributed to Saint Peter among the Twelve Apostles.

*Treasury of Merit.

*Treasury of Merit. [https://en.wikipedia.] aka treasury of the Church consists, according to Catholic belief, of the merits of Jesus Christ and his faithful, a treasury that because of the communion of saints benefits others too… offered so that the whole of mankind could be set free from sin and attain communion with the Father. In Christ, the Redeemer himself, the satisfactions and merits of his Redemption exist and find their efficacy. This treasury includes as well the prayers and good works of the Blessed Virgin Mary.... (and) of all the saints, all those who have followed in the footsteps of Christ the Lord and by his grace have made their lives holy and carried out the mission the Father entrusted to them. In this way they attained their own salvation and t the same time cooperated in saving their brothers in the unity of the Mystical Body. Remission of penance. The 314 Council of Ancyra witnessed in its canons 2, 5 and 16 to the power of the bishops to grant indulgence, by reducing the period of penance to be performed, to lapsi who showed they were sincerely repentant. The Council of Epaone in 517 shows the rise of the practice of replacing a severe older canonical penance with a new milder penance: its 29th canon reduced the two years of the penance that apostates were to undergo on their return to the Church, but obliged them to fast once every three days during those two years, to come frequently to church and take their place at the penitents’ door, and to leave church with the catechumens before the Eucharistic part commenced…   It became customary to commute penances to less demanding works, such as prayers, alms, fasts and even the payment of fixed sums of money depending on the various kinds of offenses (tariff penances). By the 10th century some penances were not replaced by other penances but were simply reduced in connection with pious donations, pilgrimages and similar meritorious works...

*Church of Antioch.

*Church of Antioch [https://en.wikipedia.] According to Acts 11:19-26, the Christian community at Antioch began when Christians who were scattered from Jerusalem because of persecution fled to Antioch; these followers of Jesus were referred to as Christians. It was from Antioch that St. Paul started on his missionary journeys… The seat of the patriarchate was formerly Antioch, in what is now Turkey. However, in the 15th century, it was moved to Syria in response to the Ottoman invasion.

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