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The Catholic Church as a world power

97 events 1 source c. 420 to c. 2023 updated 23 Jul 2026, 01:01

The Church as a rival power through history: the papacy and the empires, the crusades and inquisitions, the Reformation split, the Counter-Reformation, the loss and defense of temporal power, and the modern global Church.

The Church as a rival power through history: the papacy and the empires, the crusades and inquisitions, the Reformation split, the Counter-Reformation, the loss and defense of temporal power, and the modern global Church.

Figures Adolf HitlerAlexander VI (pope)Augustine of HippoBenedict XVI (pope)Boniface VIII (pope)CharlemagneElizabeth IGalileo GalileiGelasius I (pope)Gregory I (pope)Gregory IX (pope)Gregory VII (pope)

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this parallel The story of Judaism this parallel 1492: expulsion, conversos, and the New World this part of Religion and ideology

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part of this The pillars of modern power parallel this Missions and lodges: two networks of empire parallel this 1492: expulsion, conversos, and the New World parallel this The history of science parallel this Jews, moneylending, and the story of banking parallel this The Sephardic Jews: golden age and exile parallel this South America: from the Inca to independence parallel this The Byzantine Empire: Rome in the east part of this The Holy Roman Empire: neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire parallel this Ireland: from the island of saints to the Republic parallel this The faiths that fought empire: African religion and resistance parallel this The Rotary Club: service, fraternity, and suspicion parallel this Uhuru Kenyatta: dynasty, Jubilee, debt, and the handshake state part of this Religion and ideology

97 newly added in the last 14 days

  1. new

    The deicide charge and Augustine's doctrine of the Jewish witness

    also in Religion and ideology

    Early Church writers accused the Jewish people as a whole of killing Christ, a charge known as deicide that fed centuries of hostility. Augustine of Hippo argued that Jews should not be killed but preserved in a subjected state as living witnesses to the truth of Christian scripture, citing the psalm verse slay them not. His witness doctrine both justified their subjugation and, in principle, restrained outright massacre.

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    Leo the Great turns back Attila legendary

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Leo I met Attila the Hun near Mantua and, by tradition, persuaded him to withdraw from Italy. The episode became a symbol of the bishop of Rome acting where the Western emperors could not.

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    Gelasius I and the doctrine of two powers

    also in Religion and ideology

    In a letter to Emperor Anastasius I, Pope Gelasius I argued that the world is ruled by two powers, the sacred authority of priests and the royal power of kings. The text became a foundation for later claims of Church independence from the state.

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    Gregory the Great and the papal state

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Gregory I governed Rome and its lands as a de facto ruler, organizing defense, food supply and diplomacy as imperial authority faded in Italy. His pontificate expanded the practical and political reach of the papacy.

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    The Donation of Constantine forgery debunked

    also in Religion and ideology

    The Donation of Constantine was a document, later proven to be a forgery, that claimed Emperor Constantine had granted the popes authority over Rome and the Western Empire. It was produced around the eighth century and used for centuries to support papal claims to temporal power.

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    The East-West Schism of 1054

    Papal legates and the Patriarch of Constantinople exchanged excommunications over disputes about papal authority and doctrine. The break split Christianity into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, a division that has never healed.

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    Dictatus Papae asserts papal supremacy

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Gregory VII issued a set of 27 statements claiming that the pope alone could depose emperors, that his judgment could not be overruled, and that the Roman Church had never erred. The document set out an assertive vision of papal power over secular rulers.

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    The Investiture Controversy begins

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV clashed over who could appoint bishops, a dispute known as the Investiture Controversy. Gregory excommunicated Henry, opening a long struggle between papal and imperial authority.

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    Road to Canossa

    also in Religion and ideology

    Emperor Henry IV traveled to Canossa and waited three days in the snow before Pope Gregory VII lifted his excommunication on 28 January. The scene became a lasting image of a monarch submitting to the pope.

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    Crusaders capture Jerusalem

    also in Religion and ideology

    After a long siege, the armies of the First Crusade stormed Jerusalem and killed much of its Muslim and Jewish population. The massacre, carried out in the name of the faith the pope had called them to defend, became a lasting symbol of holy war.

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    Sicut Judaeis protects Jews from forced baptism

    also in Religion and ideology

    Around 1120 Pope Calixtus II issued the bull Sicut Judaeis, which forbade Christians to baptize Jews by force, harm them, seize their property, or disturb their festivals and cemeteries. More than twenty popes reissued it over the following centuries, making it the papacy's standing protective charter for Jews. The same popes still upheld the laws that kept Jews in a subordinate legal position.

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    The Lateran Councils impose the Jewish badge and segregation

    also in Religion and ideology

    The Third Lateran Council of 1179 and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, both summoned by the papacy, tightened restrictions on Jewish life across Western Christendom. The Fourth Lateran under Innocent III required Jews and Muslims to wear distinguishing dress or a badge, barred them from public office, and ordered them to stay indoors during Holy Week. These canons spread the marking and segregation of Jews through Europe.

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    The Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Innocent III called a crusade against the Cathars, a dissenting Christian sect in the south of France. Tens of thousands were killed over twenty years, and the massacre at Beziers, where a papal legate is reported to have said to kill all and let God sort them out, became infamous. The war destroyed Cathar society and extended the Inquisition to root out survivors.

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    The Talmud burned after the Paris disputation

    also in Religion and ideology

    In 1240 a convert's denunciation, taken up by Pope Gregory IX, led to a public trial of the Talmud in Paris. The book was condemned, and in 1242 wagonloads of confiscated Jewish manuscripts, said to number in the thousands, were burned in the city. Later popes ordered further seizures and censorship of Hebrew texts.

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    Ad extirpanda authorizes torture

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Innocent IV issued a bull permitting inquisitors to use torture to extract confessions from suspected heretics. It gave formal Church sanction to a practice that shaped inquisitorial trials for centuries.

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    The friars and the forced conversion sermons

    also in Religion and ideology

    From the thirteenth century Dominican and Franciscan friars led campaigns to convert Jews, staffing the Inquisition and staging public disputations. Pope Nicholas III's bull Vineam Sorec of 1278 ordered friars to preach to Jews, and Jews were increasingly compelled to attend such sermons. Pope Gregory XIII later made attendance at weekly conversion sermons compulsory in Rome in 1584.

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    Unam Sanctam declares papal supremacy

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Unam Sanctam, declaring that submission to the Roman pontiff was necessary for salvation. It was one of the strongest claims of papal authority over secular rulers, made during his conflict with the king of France.

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    The papacy moves to Avignon

    also in Religion and ideology

    For nearly seventy years the popes resided in Avignon under strong French influence rather than in Rome. Critics called it the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and saw it as a sign of the papacy's subjection to a rising monarchy.

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    Vincent Ferrer and the 1391 massacres in Spain

    also in Religion and ideology

    In 1391 a wave of massacres swept Jewish communities across Castile and Aragon, beginning in Seville, killing thousands and forcing many survivors to accept baptism. The Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer, later canonized as a saint, toured the peninsula urging Jews to convert and is widely blamed for inflaming the violence, though he insisted he sought conversion rather than killing. The pogroms created a large population of conversos.

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    The purity of blood statutes

    also in Religion and ideology

    Riots in Toledo in 1449 produced the first limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, statutes, which barred people of Jewish ancestry, even baptized Christians, from offices, guilds and religious orders. The obsession with tainted blood spread through Spanish institutions and much of the Church despite early papal objections. The statutes shaped Spanish life and endured formally into the nineteenth century.

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    Spanish Inquisition established

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Sixtus IV authorized the Catholic Monarchs to appoint inquisitors in Castile. The Spanish Inquisition became a powerful instrument of the crown and Church, targeting converts suspected of secret Judaism or Islam and lasting into the nineteenth century.

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    The autos-da-fe and the toll of the Spanish Inquisition

    also in Religion and ideology

    For over three centuries the Spanish Inquisition tried tens of thousands, staging public autos-da-fe where the condemned were paraded and some burned. Modern historians estimate that it executed roughly three to five thousand people over its whole history, far fewer than the tens of thousands of popular legend, but its use of torture, secret denunciations and mass expulsions spread real and lasting terror.

  37. new

    Torquemada drives the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion

    also in Religion and ideology

    The Dominican friar Tomas de Torquemada, confessor to Queen Isabella, was named Grand Inquisitor in 1483 and shaped the early Spanish Inquisition's pursuit of conversos suspected of secretly keeping Judaism. He is widely credited with pressing Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs, toward the 1492 decree expelling the Jews, arguing that unconverted Jews corrupted the converts. His name became a byword for inquisitorial zeal.

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    The Papal States as a temporal monarchy

    also in Religion and ideology

    By the Renaissance the popes ruled a large state across central Italy, raising taxes, minting coins and waging war like other princes. Popes such as Julius II personally led armies in the field, and the government of these lands consumed much of the papacy's energy until Italian unification.

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    The sale of indulgences

    The Church sold indulgences, documents said to reduce punishment for sin, to raise money for projects such as the rebuilding of Saint Peter's Basilica. The preacher Johann Tetzel's aggressive selling in Germany provoked Martin Luther's protest and helped trigger the Reformation.

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    The Protestant Reformation splits Western Christianity

    Martin Luther's protest against Church practices grew into a movement that broke the religious unity of Western Europe. The Reformation ended the papacy's monopoly over Western Christendom and set off more than a century of conflict.

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    Diet of Worms condemns Luther

    Summoned before the emperor and the imperial diet, Martin Luther refused to recant. The Edict of Worms declared him an outlaw and a heretic, hardening the break between Rome and the reformers.

  46. new

    The Act of Supremacy breaks England from Rome

    Parliament declared King Henry VIII the supreme head of the Church of England, cutting ties with the pope. England's break with Rome removed a major kingdom from Catholic authority.

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    Society of Jesus founded

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Paul III approved the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola. The Jesuits became a disciplined order pledged to the pope, active in education, missions and the Counter-Reformation across the globe.

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    Roman Inquisition established

    also in Religion and ideology

    Pope Paul III set up the Congregation of the Holy Office to defend Catholic doctrine against Protestantism. The Roman Inquisition tried cases across Italy and later judged figures such as Galileo Galilei.

  49. new

    Council of Trent opens the Counter-Reformation

    The council met over eighteen years to define Catholic doctrine against Protestantism and to reform Church discipline. It shaped the Counter-Reformation and set the direction of the Catholic Church for four centuries.

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    Cum nimis absurdum creates the Roman Ghetto

    also in Religion and ideology

    On 14 July 1555 Pope Paul IV issued the bull Cum nimis absurdum, which stripped the Jews of Rome of most rights, forced them to wear a yellow hat or veil, barred them from most trades, and shut them into a single walled quarter that became the Roman Ghetto. The ghetto system it created lasted under papal rule until Italian troops took Rome in 1870. It stood as the papacy's harshest institutional treatment of Jews.

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    Goa Inquisition

    also in Religion and ideology

    The Inquisition was extended to Portuguese India, where it prosecuted converts and non-Christians for religious offenses. It showed the Church's disciplinary reach following European empire into Asia.

  56. new

    French Wars of Religion

    Catholics and Huguenots fight eight civil wars punctuated by massacres, including St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. The Edict of Nantes finally grants Protestants limited toleration.

  57. new

    Regnans in Excelsis excommunicates Elizabeth I

    Pope Pius V declared Queen Elizabeth I a heretic and released her subjects from allegiance. The bull deepened the split with England and made English Catholics suspect as potential traitors.

  58. new

    Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre

    A wave of killings targeting French Protestants began in Paris and spread across France, leaving thousands dead. The massacre was a turning point in the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots.

  59. new

    Edict of Nantes

    King Henry IV granted French Protestants limited toleration and civil rights, ending the Wars of Religion. It was a rare official acceptance of two faiths within a Catholic kingdom.

  60. new

    The Thirty Years War

    A war that began over religion in the Holy Roman Empire drew in most of Europe's powers and devastated German lands. It became as much a struggle for political dominance as a Catholic and Protestant conflict.

  61. new

    The Galileo affair

    also in Religion and ideology

    The Roman Inquisition tried the astronomer Galileo Galilei for teaching that the Earth moves around the Sun, forced him to recant and placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life. The case became a lasting emblem of conflict between Church authority and science, and in 1992 Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the Church had erred.

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    Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

    King Louis XIV revoked the tolerance granted to French Protestants, driving many into exile. The move showed a Catholic monarch enforcing religious uniformity by force.

  64. new

    Suppression of the Jesuits

    Under pressure from Catholic monarchs who feared Jesuit power, Pope Clement XIV dissolved the Society of Jesus. The suppression removed the Church's most influential order for over forty years.

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    Restoration of the Jesuits

    Pope Pius VII restored the Society of Jesus worldwide after the fall of Napoleon. The order returned to its work in education and missions as the Church regrouped in a changed Europe.

  66. new

    Syllabus of Errors

    Pope Pius IX issued a list condemning ideas such as liberalism, separation of church and state, and religious freedom. It set the Church against much of modern liberal politics.

  67. new

    First Vatican Council defines papal infallibility

    The council adopted the constitution Pastor Aeternus, defining that the pope teaches without error when he speaks on matters of faith and morals from his office. The doctrine centralized authority in the papacy just as its temporal power collapsed.

  68. new

    Capture of Rome ends the Papal States

    Italian troops took Rome and completed the unification of Italy, ending more than a thousand years of papal rule over central Italy. The pope declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican and refused to recognize the new Italian state.

  69. new

    Canada's Indian residential schools

    also in Curriculum, programming, and propaganda

    For more than a century the Canadian government funded a system of residential schools, most of them run by the Catholic Church, that removed roughly 150,000 Indigenous children from their families to strip them of their languages and cultures. Many suffered abuse and neglect, and thousands died. A 2015 truth commission called the system a cultural genocide.

  70. new

    Rerum Novarum and Catholic social teaching

    Pope Leo XIII addressed the conditions of workers, defending private property while calling for fair wages and the right to form unions. The encyclical launched modern Catholic social teaching and offered a Church answer to socialism and unchecked capitalism.

  71. new

    The Magdalene laundries in Ireland

    Catholic religious orders in Ireland ran laundries where women and girls, many sent for being unmarried mothers or simply seen as troublesome, were confined and made to work without pay. The last one closed in 1996, and a 2013 state inquiry led the Irish government to issue a formal apology for the abuse and the state's role in it.

  72. new

    Lateran Treaty creates Vatican City

    Italy and the Holy See settled the Roman Question by creating the independent state of Vatican City. The treaty ended nearly sixty years of dispute and restored the pope as a sovereign, though over a tiny territory.

  73. new

    Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany

    The Holy See signed a concordat with Adolf Hitler's government, protecting Church rights in Germany in exchange for Catholic withdrawal from politics. The agreement remains debated for lending the new Nazi regime early legitimacy.

  74. new

    Mit brennender Sorge condemns Nazism

    Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, read from German pulpits, that attacked the racism and idolatry of the Nazi state. It was a rare open Church criticism of the regime.

  75. new

    Pius XII and the Church during the Second World War

    Pope Pius XII led the Church through the war and the Holocaust, avoiding open condemnation of Nazi genocide while the Vatican sheltered some refugees. His silence remains one of the most debated questions in modern Church history.

  76. new

    The Church under communism

    Communist governments across Eastern Europe suppressed the Church, jailing clergy such as Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary and restricting worship. The Church became a center of resistance to state atheism.

  77. new

    Second Vatican Council modernizes the Church

    The council reformed Catholic worship and teaching, allowed Mass in local languages, and opened dialogue with other faiths and the modern world. It was the most far reaching change in the Church in centuries.

  78. new

    The debate over Pius XII and the Holocaust contested

    After the war, and especially after a 1963 play attacked the pope's wartime record, historians divided sharply over Pius XII. Critics argue he failed to openly condemn the genocide of Europe's Jews, while defenders point to Vatican-directed efforts to shelter Jews in Rome and elsewhere. The Vatican opened his archives in 2020, and scholars continue to disagree.

  79. new

    Nostra Aetate repudiates the deicide charge

    On 28 October 1965 the Second Vatican Council promulgated Nostra Aetate, which rejected the idea that the Jewish people as a whole were collectively guilty of the death of Christ and condemned antisemitism and hatred against Jews. It marked a decisive break with the deicide accusation the Church had carried for centuries. The reversal came only two decades after the Holocaust.

  80. new

    John Paul II elected pope

    The Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla became the first non-Italian pope in over 450 years. His election brought a figure from behind the Iron Curtain to the head of the global Church.

  81. new

    John Paul II's first visit to Poland

    The pope returned to communist Poland and drew vast crowds, encouraging Poles to resist fear. The visit is widely seen as a spark for the Solidarity movement and the wider challenge to Soviet control.

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    Banco Ambrosiano and the death of Roberto Calvi

    Roberto Calvi, head of Italy's Banco Ambrosiano and known as God's Banker for his Vatican ties, was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London. The bank collapsed amid massive fraud, and the Vatican Bank was its main shareholder. The Holy See denied wrongdoing but paid creditors about 240 million dollars in 1984, and the affair exposed the murky finances of the Vatican.

  84. new

    John Paul II visits the Synagogue of Rome

    On 13 April 1986 Pope John Paul II entered the Great Synagogue of Rome, the first recorded visit by a pope to a synagogue since the early Church. He called the Jews the elder brothers of Christians and again condemned antisemitism. The visit built on Nostra Aetate and signaled a lasting shift toward reconciliation.

  85. new

    The Vatican and the fall of communism

    As communist governments fell across Eastern Europe, the Church under John Paul II was credited with helping inspire the change. The collapse restored Church freedom in much of the former Soviet bloc.

  86. new

    John Paul II's apology at the Western Wall

    In March 2000 Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and prayed at the Western Wall, leaving a written prayer that asked God's forgiveness for Christian wrongs against the Jews. It followed the Vatican's 1998 document We Remember, which expressed repentance for Catholics who failed to resist the Nazi genocide. Critics found the apology guarded, noting that it distinguished the sins of Church members from the Church itself.

  87. new

    The abuse crisis becomes public

    Reporting by the Boston Globe revealed that Church leaders had covered up decades of child sexual abuse by clergy. The exposure set off investigations worldwide and a lasting reckoning over Church accountability.

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    The John Jay Report on abuse in the US Church

    Commissioned by the US bishops, a study by the John Jay College documented accusations against more than four thousand priests and over ten thousand reported victims between 1950 and 2002. It was the first large-scale accounting of the scale of clerical sexual abuse in the American Church.

  89. new

    Ireland's Ryan and Murphy Reports

    Two official Irish inquiries reported in 2009. The Ryan Report described widespread physical and sexual abuse in Church-run industrial schools, while the Murphy Report found that the Dublin archdiocese had concealed abuse to protect the institution's reputation. Together they broke the moral authority of the Church in Ireland.

  90. new

    Australia's royal commission on child abuse

    A national royal commission examined how institutions responded to child sexual abuse and found that the Catholic Church accounted for the largest share of cases. It reported that about seven percent of priests in Australia had been accused, and its findings drove new laws on reporting abuse.

  91. new

    Benedict XVI resigns the papacy

    Pope Benedict XVI announced he would step down, the first pope to resign in nearly six hundred years. His decision cited failing strength amid the pressures of the office.

  92. new

    Pope Francis elected

    The Argentine cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Jesuit and first Latin American pope, taking the name Francis. His election marked a shift toward the Church's growing membership in the global South.

  93. new

    Mother-and-baby homes and the Tuam scandal

    A local historian's research revealed that a Catholic-run home for unmarried mothers in Tuam had buried hundreds of infants, some in a disused sewage structure. A 2021 Irish commission found that about nine thousand children died in such homes across the country, and the government and Church apologized for decades of neglect and secrecy.

  94. new

    Pope Francis and the abuse reckoning

    After a crisis in Chile and revelations about the former US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was expelled from the priesthood in 2019, Pope Francis convened a global summit of bishops on protecting minors. The Church issued new rules requiring the reporting of abuse and cover-ups, though critics said the measures fell short of true accountability.

  95. new

    The Pennsylvania grand jury report

    A grand jury found that about three hundred priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses had abused more than a thousand children over seventy years, and that bishops had systematically hidden the crimes. The report renewed pressure on the Church and prompted investigations in other US states.

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    The global Catholic Church of 1.3 billion

    The Catholic Church counts roughly 1.3 billion baptized members, about a sixth of the world's people, with its fastest growth in Africa and Asia. It remains one of the largest and oldest continuous institutions on Earth.

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