Rise Of Papacy Analysis

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Roman Governance and the Church of Rome: An Analysis of the Positive and Negative Effects of the Centralization of Power in the Papacy in the Sixth to the Ninth Centuries

This historical study will define the positive and negative effects on the rise of the papacy throughout the sixth to the ninth centuries. The fall of the Roman Empire left a massive administrative void that was filled with the administrators that served under the Church to replace this imperial form of governance from Rome. In appositive trend, the combined influence of the Church and Roman methods of governing throughout the tribal kingdoms helped to build stronger monarchies (The Franks, Visigoths, Germans, etc.) that were administrated by the Roman Catholic clergy throughout
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Without this type of experienced and knowledgeable administrative role found under the guidance of the Pope, it is evident that these smaller kingdoms would continue to be fractious and quarreling tribal monarchies, as they were before the 6th century. In this manner, the rise of the papacy brought Roman administrative skills to govern these small kingdoms as they began to develop into more unified and developed monarchies into the 7th, 8th, and 9th …show more content…
The positive impact of this policy allowed the papacy to provide a broad-based collation of monarchies that would serve the interests of the Roman Catholic Empire. In many cases, the power of the papacy helped to bring more regional stability for Christian kingdoms, which sought to reduce internal wars between rival kings. However, the negative aspect of a centralized papacy only encourage new questions about the authority of the pope to install administrators or monarchs in the 11th and 12th centuries: Beneath the question of investiture: would the papal monarchy achieve theocratic power, like that of the Byzantine Empire, over all western Christians, or would governance remain divided between sacred power )popes) and secular power (kings) (Stefoff, 2008, p.70). This type of question would be the most important aspect of papal power, which would go unchallenged until the kings, such as King Henry VIII, would challenge papal supremacy in England in the 16th century (Bernard, p.26). In this manner, the continual power struggle between regional kingdoms and burgeoning nation states, such as England, define the impact of the Lutheran protestant revolution that had slowly degraded the power of the Church of Rome to dictate jurisprudence. These aspects of papal authority show the negative aspects of a papal authority as a

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