[kosta50]

What you say is correct. In all fairness, I would like to add, the Pope tried to stop the carnage when it started, but with little success. IN all fairness to the Catholic Church, +John Paul II, in his humility, apologized for that "Crusade."

I was responding to BlackEll's post in which he boasts of "papal armies" and of Swiss guards having more than a ceremonial function. The Church was never meant to be a secular state, which the Papal states became, and having armies was an innovation never envisioned by the Apostles.

The primitive Church was adamantly opposed to any military service for its members, and against all war and violence. In that sense, the Orthodox Church remains unchanged, as in all other aspects.

[redgolum]

But what about the “old” Russia? I have read many accounts of Russian army being viewed as something of a holy calling. And the soldiers in the Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Roman Empire) went from almost religious outcasts to very respected figures.

The Papal States were in many ways an odd thing. They grew out of the remains of the Western Roman Empire, because in the Church was the only functional authority left for most of the people. Even when the Gothic kings ruled what is now Italy, the Church was pretty much left to its own devices. So the became a state within a state, and finally a state by itself.

What is interesting for me is that the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church changed as a result of the events of 1870. They went from a nation state that had at times a very confrontational foreign policy, to what we see now in JPII and BXVI.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

The Church was never meant to be a secular state, which the Papal states became, and having armies was an innovation never envisioned by the Apostles.

I am sure that you are aware the the Emperor in Constantinople as well as his deputy the Exarch in Ravenna completely failed to protect that part of the Empire in the vicinity of Rome, leaving the only spokesman for the Empire and Christian Orthodoxy to be the Pope, the Patriarch of the West. The Emperor effectively put the Christians in that area in the hands of the Pope. (No I am not talking about the fictional Donation of Constantine).