The capability to negotiate with invaders as well as call Christians to arms would also be seen in later centuries when Popes rallied armies to defend Christendom during the crusades, as Pope Urban II did in 1095 from Clermont when he preached for the first crusade4. Possibly the most influential ability of the papacy was its ability to control education starting in the third century. Most of the people within the Pope’s sphere of influence were illiterate, including monarchs and the nobility. Thus the papacy was able to exercise a great amount of power through its exclusive control of education. Monastic orders copied the scriptures as well as all literature available in Western Europe. Meaning that it had to first pass through the Church, …show more content…
“The arguments for eternal security are guaranteed by the person and work of God”.9 The Bible clearly says “All that the Father giveth me (Christ) shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out”10. The Popes were also able to use the power of the interdict, which let him impose a ban on all public worship and the sacraments for an entire nation. The interdict was a form of national excommunication. Other doctrines that were held by the Church, backed by the popes, such as infant baptism, indulgences, purgatory, and transubstantiation (the belief that the bread and wine of the sacrament were supernaturally transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ) could not be supported by the Bible and were to become causes that would eventually lead to the Protestant …show more content…
Ironically it is the educational reforms of Pope Gregory VII that created the scholarly environment that would make the reformation movement possible. There were many abuses by feudalistic governance in the middle Ages, unbiblical practices by the Catholic Church, and rampant corruption by both ecclesial and secular authorities. The establishing, of the nearly supreme, power of the popes over the Catholic Church and as the great influencer of Western Europe permitted the Christianity to become the primary 9. Towns, 2002.