There is a lot of difference between Christianity as spiritual faith and as constructed into a religion where an acquiescent clergy will backwards engineer from the demands of an oligarchy through selected scriptures and homilies into a system of apologetics than can be used to dominate a people. Martin Luther saw that distortion achieved within his lifetime.
In my original post I said, “This new church direction was variously coerced, accepted, imposed, avoided, rationalized, applauded, and managed. The clergy who rationalized, applauded, and managed the new relationship dominated as Rome fell and Europe entered the Dark Ages.” Essentially it was a matter of who won and who lost in a worldly sense. St Patrick’s and other monasteries became the primary keepers of the faith.
I stand by the next statement of my essay. “The Catholic Church’s final rise to European political dominance began with the co-dependent relationship of Pope Stephen and Pepin king of the Franks in 750 A.D. In exchange for defeating Lombard incursions, Pope Stephen proclaimed Pepin’s sons, and their descendants, kings by “divine right”. When Pepin first met Pope Steven, he dismounted and led his horse like a groom. Pepin’s act of submission reflected the Catholic Church’s act of submission to worldly advancement when adopting those Machiavellian strategies allowing political prosperity in the midst of pervasive brutality and treachery. The Papal estates were transformed into the Papal States.
The Papacy became heir to the persistent vision of a Roman Empire, and formed a Teutonic-Latin alliance enabling shared political dominance for the next 600 years. The Catholic Church’s falsifying of divine, spiritual appointments served as the currency to purchase participation in every seat of power in Europe. The clergy abandoned its spiritual identity of professing eternal life in our Lord Jesus Christ, substituted human knowledge and cunning for survival, and then ascended in the temporal world. In response to European chaos, the Catholic Church became a notorious haven for clergy and kings seeking fulfillment of addictions to power and pride equivalent to addictions to drugs or pornography.”
The above is one example of a persistent direction churches take. Because of an article titled McChurch posted to Free Republic, I had an email exchange a few years ago with a Catholic priest. He lamented about Christianity “lite” in his denomination, and I saw the correlation with the Emerging Church, etal plaguing denominations besides Catholicism. Apart from government involvement such an approach enables personal advancement for church leaders coveting acceptance and acclaim within a larger social and academic secular community; a community holding values defined by popular media, academics, and progressive agendas. C. S. Lewis described these traps when he said in The Screwtape Letters, “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels he is ‘finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him”.
A partial bibliography includes:
A History of Christianity by Ray C. Petry
A History of the Papacy by M. Crieghton
The History of the Church by Charles Jacobs
A History of the Expansion of Christianity by Kenneth Scott Lattourette
The Dark Ages 476-918 by Sir Charles Oman
The Middle Ages 395-1500 by Joseph R. Strayer and Dana Munro
Which is to say, the Catholic Church.
The thing to keep in mind, here, is that the diocesan (Church) structure tended to assume responsibility for civil well-being as the secular diocesan (civic) order decayed. The monasteries did as well: they provided for order, stability, and the re-establishment of the rule of law in the aftermath of barbarian invasion and widespread disorder.
To separate "diocesan" and "monastic" can be misleading. True, the monasteries often were founded in separately from any local diocesan structure, but these were all Catholic institutions. They held Catholic and Apostolic convictions, they were Catholic in faith and morals, they maintained the Catholic Scriptures (Bible) and the Catholic liturgical and sacramental life, they were in communion with the Bishop of Rome and the rest of the Church.
Thus, through the vicissitudes of history, the Bride of Christ continued on her pilgrim way. From Pentecost to today.