Church Becomes More Political
But Church unity did not last. In the eleventh century, the mounting tension between the Western and Eastern factions of the Church caused it to split into two. Although the Popes had and still resided in Rome, more power was accumulating in Constantinople. Since the 600'sAD, Muslim armies had conquered lands that were formerly Christian including the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Minor, surrounding the eastern factions of the Church. The western factions and eastern factions were growing apart, now physically separated by Muslim lands inbetween, resulting in more difficult communication and different sets of challenges. Tensions between the two came to a head when the Western Church run by Pope Leo IX excommunicated the Eastern Church in what is called the Schism of 1054. The Western Church adopted the name “Roman Catholic” with Latin as its official language, while the Eastern Church was named the “Orthodox Church” with Greek as its language. Today the Roman Catholic Church claims over one billion members in all the continents and is its own country within Italy, called the Vatican. The Eastern Orthodox Church has about 200 million members primarily in Russia.
All during the struggles for political power between the emperors, as the alliances with the Church proved useful to win popular support, the Church itself became increasingly political, acting beyond its spiritual jurisdiction. Quite notable were the Crusades. In 1095AD, the Church actively entered the military field by calling a holy war. Pope Urban urged nobles in Europe to mount an armed crusade to capture Jerusalem back from Muslim Turks. This First Crusade was followed by others into the Middle East as well as Spain, Finland, and northern Russia. For hundreds of years that followed, the Popes intermixed their spiritual world with the secular, bargaining for the political influence of the Church. Popes taxed their own clergy, amassing material wealth with which to pay the rulers for favors. Election of Popes became political processes. For example, in the late 1390s, there were two simultaneous Popes vying for authenticity each elected from a competing group of Cardinals, one in France and the other in Rome. The blur of spiritual with secular reached new heights of hypocrisy when the Popes began raising money by selling indulgences. The Church could grant to a buyer merits of "good works" that could be offered, presumably to God, to reduce the time spent in purgatory before going to heaven. There is no reference to an indulgence system in the Bible.
