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East-West Schism Research Paper

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The Great Schism of 1054, also called the East-West Schism, divided the church into the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The split did not just occur randomly; it was a series of long tensions that had been brewing for years. When the tensions reached the climax in 1054, Pope Leo IX sent delegates to the ecumenical patriarch, Michael Cerulias, and excommunicated him and his associates. In return, Michael excommunicated the Pope and his delegates too. The split was done and there would be no coming back. The Schism of 1054 resulted from an amalgam of issues and conflicts between the Catholic and East Orthodox Church for six centuries; the result was a wide split between the two churches.
Two preliminary schisms set the …show more content…

These causes in a general scope included political debates, theological arguments, social problems, and economic issues. The first cause was political. It occurred when the Muslims began invading the Mediterranean world. Many people began to convert to the Islamic religion. This scared the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox churches. Thus, began a fight, between the two, to gain as many followers as possible to enlarge their following. This caused great conflict between the members of both churches. Each church gained their own spheres of influence. Catholicism taking up much of Western Europe and the western and northern areas of the Mediterranean. The Eastern Church took up Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. This caused a further divide and made the people completely split apart into almost two huge countries. In 800, The Catholic Church crowned Charlemagne as king of the “Holy Roman Empire”. This split the country into the West, which constituted of the Catholic Church and its followers, and the East, which constituted of the Eastern Orthodox Church and its members. The Eastern Church refused this title and challenged saying the Catholic Church saying that they could not take a vast area of land and suddenly name it an empire. The Catholics refused to change their position and this infuriated the Eastern Orthodox Church and caused the relations between the two to

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