In the years of persecution which followed, they got back to their religious roots, saved Europe from the Muslim hordes at Lepanto and the Gates of Vienna in the late 17th century, and produced some of the greatest art and music which the world has ever known.
The magic of competition tends to inspire such great achievements. Monopolies tend to inspire the opposite.
We have a Communist Muslim terrorist in the White House. He is there because for forty years, prominent Catholic bishops have been encouraging Catholics to vote for pro-abortion politicians. E.g., the “Seamless Garment.”
Now, the Communist Muslim terrorist has thrown open the border, engineering a tsunami of diseased “children” (criminals, rapists, drug mules, gangsters) as a distraction, while terrorists stream across the border unchecked.
The Catholic Church in the United States has been a force for evil for decades. The loudest-mouthed bishops are pro-abortion, supported Obamacare, are for open borders and amnesty. Rome sent us these traitors to be our “bishops.”
Whenever the Church has reached this level of corruption in the past, eventually there has been a cleansing.
Schism, however, remains a mortal sin. It is nothing to celebrate.
But even Protestants know that the Catholic Church was One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, don’t they?
The idea that the Church was “running the governments” (outside the papal states) is incorrect. The last time any pope made that pretense was Boniface VIII, who ended up in a French dungeon. The “Babylonian captivity” in Avignon then followed, which ended up in a schism and several pretenders to the papal throne. The schism was finally healed by church councils, but the growing powers of the national kings limited the ability of the pope even to rally Europe against the Turks. The capture of Constantinople and the conquest of the Balkans ended any hope of unifying the Western and Eastern Church. War among the Italian City states, diverted the popes attention to preserving its control of the papal states, and to dressing up Rome with stately new buildings, since the crusader tax was not been spent for its intended purpose. The Germans especially resented this, a tax that drained gold from the German states. The resentment of the abuse of indulgences was, despite what we think we know, was an aggravation of an existing grievance. You may recall that Luther was not much alarmed by the Turkish threat, which he saw more as divine judgement, and the German princes resisted the Emperor’s efforts to end the religious division that Protestantism had caused, in order to present a united front to the Turks. At the same time, the Emperor’s differences with the pope over WHO was the appropriate one to lead Europe against the invader after the fall of Hungary to the Turks, led to the sack of Rome. That the Reformation was not properly addressed until 1530 was not only because of petty politics and certainly not because the pope was embroiled in international politics, but because Europe was divided in the face of an invasion of Europe by the ablest of the Turkish Sultans. Sulieman the Magnificent.