The popes were engaged for several centuries in keeping the secular authority from gaining control of the Church. That would be from the late 10th to the 13th Century the Holy Roman Emperor. Thereafter the national kings. As for the Crusades, this was the pope’s response to the Turkish threat to the Byzantine Empire. In the last quarter of the 11th Century, what is now Turkey was overrun by the Muslim Turks and Constantinople itself was threatened. The Byzantine Emperor asked the pope for help, and he preached the first Crusade. It did take the political pressure off from the Church, which was threatened by the Normans who had taken control of Sicily and who were also ambitious to gain pieces of Greece. The pope was the main organizer of resistence to the Muslims.
Yes, and secular authority tried to gain control over the church in the first three centuries A.D. too, didn’t it? What did the church do? The answer: she was martyred in her thousands. And the more that were killed the more rose up to take their place. Who won that conflict? Constantine decriminalized Christianity in 325 A.D. The state simply gave up in the face of what it could not understand and could not see and therefore could not defeat. But such is the way of God. He is a good and wise king, and a brilliant general, even though we usually do not understand or trust his strategy or tactics.
Do you not see that you make my point for me? The popes tried to win by using secular means in pursuit of secular ends that would benefit - or so they thought - the kingdom of God that is within each of us who believes. The popes left us with a mess bigger by far than the mess Obama is leading us into (and he is most certainly leading us into a mess!).
You said,
“The pope was the main organizer of resistence to the Muslims.”
... and wasn’t that a success? They are still here more than a thousand years later, more bitter and determined than ever, and they have learned to view the cross of Christ as the symbol of the blood-thirsty crusader. Far better it would have been to leave such things to the kings of those days and thus leave the skirts of the bride of Christ unsullied with the crimson stain of the work of the sword, an instrument God gave to the king, not to the church! Read Romans 13! Far better it would have been to leave the cross of Christ stained only with His blood.
Where would Western Civilization be without an institution and unifying center such as the Catholic Church to bring it together in religion, in it’s fight against the various invaders of the past.
It isn’t fair to compare different dark periods of Western history, the Church consists of humans, and humans are imperfect, have an organization for 1700 years and you will have fuel for every argument that you want to make, good or bad.
American slavery needs to be seen in it’s historical context, so do different periods of Church history, a person can’t jump around from century to century of world history and human behavior, and cultural and societal norms and constantly apply our current sensitivities to that era and then say “aha!” the Catholic Church!.
History isn’t over, Islam is here again, and a combination of the Catholic Church and meaty, American Protestant Christianity is needed to defeat it.