The Significance of the Pope

The Pope is the head of the Church: he represents the ultimate religious authority. However, as a Bishop of Rome, the Pope is also in command of certain secular affairs, including some military aspects. Certainly, the Pope is a link between the earthly and the divine realms. Problems arise when the imperfect world the Pope physically lives in interferes with his heavenly objectives. Taking Pope Gregory I as an example, I am going to look at his letters to analyze how he reconciled his political and spiritual goals, whether he valued one category over the other, and how he justified it.

The second theme elaborates the transition of power from God to the monarchs. This transition occurs through an intermediate institution that transfers divine power through religious mechanisms onto a political leadership. Divine power form God is transferred onto the Papacy that is given supreme authority and dominion over all men. St Peter is the first pope whose kingdom is centered in Rome form where he rules over all men: Gentiles, Jews, Christians and any other religious groups. The Papal lineage is established as the supreme power structure and all Popes that descend from St Peter are treated with the same respect and proclaimed as lord and king. One such pope is responsible for donating the lands of the Americas onto the King and

Pope: The Pope is the bishop of Rome and the leader of the Western Church of Christianity. Pope comes from the word “papa” meaning father.

The papacy – the office held by the pope as head of the Catholic Church - gained great power from the sixth through eighth centuries, and there are several reasons for this surge in influence. Starting around 590, Pope Gregory I sought to convert Teutonic invaders to Christianity. Islam was also in play, as it had taken over most of Asia and Africa. According to Earl Cairns, by trying to win Teutonic tribes to Christianity, the medieval church “…further centralized its organization under papal supremacy and developed the sacramental-hierarchical system characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church.”

For over a period of seven hundred plus years, from Gregory the Great’s papacy to Boniface VIII’s papacy, the world experienced many influential popes, whose accomplishments changed the course of history. Many of these popes become known for both their positive accomplishments, which brought prosperity to their people, and for their failures, which in many cases led to their own death. Throughout the given time period, Pope Nicholas II, Pope Gregory VII, Pope Innocent III, and Pope Gregory IX, were all influential popes whose accomplishments are what they are most remembered for. First, Pope Nicholas II decreed that the College of Cardinals would obtain authority to choose the pope. The College of Cardinals was made up of a group of Roman Church officials who were in charge of electing the pope, which was put in place to prevent kings from selecting popes.

If we travel back to the year 1500, the Church (what we now call the Roman Catholic Church) was very powerful both politically and spiritually in Western Europe. For some time the Church was seen as an institution weighed down by internal power struggles. Popes and Cardinals often lived more like kings than spiritual leaders. Popes claimed political as well as spiritual power. They commanded armies, made political alliances and enemies, and, sometimes, even waged war.

The Catholic Church is the oldest major religion in the Western world. Littered with peace, love, and humility, along with violence, turmoil, and controversy this institution has seen, heard, led, and had influence over the majority of everything and everybody that there was in the last two millennia. This has included ordinary people, Kings, Queens, Generals, Nobleman, Royalty, and everything in between, and has endured since the beginning of the modern era, Anno Domini. They great spiritual and monetary machine created a powerful reign over the entire world’s Catholics, and remains so to this day. For the purpose of background for my visit to a Catholic Church, being Presbyterian, I did historical research before I visited. I

Pope St. Gregory VII had his vision on how the Church was supposed to be structured and what needed to change. He firmly planted his beliefs because he could see that the Church did not live up to its standards. He became a leader when the Church needed him the most. He did not conform to the current state of the Church and encountered incessant obstacles with a relentless determination overcome them. As pope, St. Gregory VII valiantly confronted the challenges, social issues, and corruption of the Church to cleanse its noticeable defects.

The catholic church played a massive part in the people's lives in medieval europe. The Pope was the head of the church and was entirely in control of the clerey. He also had a huge influence on the king as the king would run everything by the pope. He was seen as God’s representative on Earth.

In the void left by the collapse of the Roman Empire, the bishop of Rome grew even more in both power and prestige beginning in the sixth century and continuing to the reformation in the ninth century. It is the aim of this paper to explain how and why the papacy in Rome became the center of power of the medieval world, the factors contributing to this dominance over Western Europe, and the positive and negative ramifications of the position becoming so powerful. Through this paper you will discover how papacy was able to fill the vacuum of power left by the fall of an empire.

successor to Peter, the first bishop of Rome. Although one can debate those details, one

I chose the article concerning the upcoming visitation of Pope Francis by the title of “A Sacred and Praiseworthy Purpose”. This article speaks about the reason for Pope Francis visit, which is to deliver a mass at the National Cathedral where he is expected to finalize sainthood for the eighteenth century Franciscan Missionary Junipero Serra, whom was nicknamed “the Evangelizer of the West” by Pope Francis (Newcomb, 2015). Pope Alexander VI’s edicts gave credence to the missionary’s worthiness of sainthood as being deemed worthy by carrying out the churches spiritual conquests through the authority of the Saint Peter and victoriate of Jesus Christ (Newcomb, 2015). Newcomb goes on to discuss how the churches detail how the Holy See is in denial

A pope is elected to lead a generation. This means that their whole lives they are serving christ. This means to be elected you must either be elected after the pope has resigned, such as Pope Benedict XVI was the first ever to resign since Pope Gregory XII. The more traditional way to be elected is when the current Pope dies. The first step in becoming the Pope, is cardinals. The primary role of the cardinals is to elect a new pope when the existing pope retires or dies. When a new pope must be elected, cardinals from around the globe gather in the Vatican City to elect “The Bishop of Rome” or commonly known as the “Pope”. So when the cardinals gather they must elect a new Pope. This tradition is believed to date back all the way to the 14th

Yes, to an extent, I do believe that the Vatican could have done more especially in terms of “Pope Pius XII’s” direct involvement . From reading the scholarly work by Conway (1989) and Zuccotti (2005), it is seen that there has been a lot of criticism as to the Pope’s effort to save Jewish people who were being murdered by the “Nazi’s” prior to and during the holocaust . By looking at Zuccotti’s work, it can be understood that whilst the Church and the Vatican’s members did provide shelter to the Jews that were being attacked, it is seen that there was no instruction from the Pope himself at that time to help the Jews and thus these members were in essence behaving in a way that they believed would be approved by the Pope, as part of the

The Papacy is the office of the Pope. The word pope comes from the Latin form of the word “Papa” which means father. The office of the Pope or rather the papacy is responsible for a wide variety of things. Specifically the Papacy’s main responsibility is the spiritual well being of the members of the Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church rose to power in the 6th century and lasted throughout the 9th century. There were several different circumstantial and also coincidental factors that contributed to the high regard of the church by the 6th century. The beginning was the church’s unsolicited popularity. This could be linked to its relationship with the early apostles. The Roman Church was the first in the empire