Maggie's Farm

The Anglican Church considers itself catholic -- not Roman Catholic, but catholic as much as RCs and Orthodox; a form of orthodox anglicanism will continue in the Anglican Church in North America and its allies in the global south, no matter where Canterbury and the liberal Episcopal church wander.

The tragedy of the western church wasn't the monty python view on history described above, but is more complex. it began when the roman church inherited a great deal of administrative authority and cultural influence after the collapse of the western empire in the 5th century -- things that the invaders envied, aped and eventually adopted.

Trinitarian Christianity -- Roman, Anglican, Lutheran, virtually all protestant groups -- survived in the west because the Frankish warlord Clovis whose dynasty unified western Europe from the late 5th century onward was a late catholic convert (the one catholic amongst pagans and arian christian germans). The church validated the transformation from migrating tribal warlords to kings and benefited in return from their patronage, in some ways that eventually went sour.

So Rome became a political player, one of many. By the time of the Reformation, the winds of change -- political and economic, rising concepts of nationalism -- were tearing apart the increasing less-unified west, especially the Holy Roman Empire. Rome and its political allies fought protestant warlords in a series of religious wars lasting a century where there were only losers.

what roman catholics and protestants fail to get is that the blame for disunion falls equally on everyone. the conscripts and hired thugs of the Catholic League and Protestant Union who depopulated Europe during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries were tools of kingmakers and opportunists.

the collapse of the western empire was complex, not unclear. western roman imperial authority in gaul ended by 486 what remained was, to various degrees, an administrative, trade and fiscal structure controlled by a (mostly) catholic gallo-roman aristocracy that included church hierarchy, all trying to accommodate and be accommodated by germanic invaders who were either arian christian or pagan.

the warlord who founded merovingian dynasty converted to roman catholicism rather than arianism or orthodoxy-- without the least amount of compulsion or vatican "CIA" or "KBG" cold war style politics. european history fuses all these factors and factions and what europe might have looked like otherwise is speculative fiction.

that the roman church was deeply involved in politics I think was wrong, but I also think was inevitable in the 5th century and a thousand years later. just as it was for the protestant state churches after the reformation.

if we are christian, we need to move away from the bullwinkle and rocky caricatures of history and each other.