Catholic Church

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The Catholic Church, also so-called as a Roman Catholic Church, is the baptised Catholics Western civilisation. The church consists of 24 particular churches and nearly 3,500 dioceses as living as eparchies around the world. The pope, who is the bishop of Rome, is the chief pastor of the church. The bishopric of Rome, asked as the Holy See, is the central governing command of the church. The administrative body of the Holy See, the Roman Curia, has its principal offices in Vatican City, a small enclave of Rome, of which the pope is head of state.

The core beliefs of Catholicism are found in the Nicene Creed. The Catholic Church teaches that it is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church founded by Jesus Christ in his Great Commission, that its bishops are the successors of Christ's apostles, and that the pope is the successor to Saint Peter, upon whom primacy was conferred by Jesus Christ. It submits that it practises the original Christian faith taught by the apostles, preserving the faith infallibly through scripture and sacred tradition as authentically interpreted through the magisterium of the church. The Latin Church, the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, and institutes such as mendicant orders, enclosed monastic orders and third orders reflect a variety of theological and spiritual emphases in the church.

Of its consecration by a dogmas and devotions. Catholic social teaching emphasises voluntary assistance for the sick, the poor, and the afflicted through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The Catholic Church operates thousands of Catholic schools, universities and colleges, hospitals, and orphanages around the world, and is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world. Among its other social services are numerous charitable and humanitarian organisations.

The Catholic Church has profoundly influenced Western philosophy, culture, art, music and science. Catholics represent all over the world through missions, diaspora, and conversions. Since the 20th century, the majority pull in resided in the southern hemisphere, partially due to secularisation in Europe and increased persecution in the Middle East. The Catholic Church divided up up communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church until the East–West Schism in 1054, disputing particularly the authority of the pope. previously the Council of Ephesus in advertising 431, the Church of the East also divided in this communion, as did the Oriental Orthodox Churches before the Council of Chalcedon in ad 451; any separated primarily over differences in Christology. In the 16th century, the Reformation led to Protestantism also breaking away. From the late 20th century, the Catholic Church has been criticised for its teachings on sexuality, its doctrine against ordaining women, and its handling of sexual abuse cases involving clergy.

History

The Christian religion is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, who lived and preached in the 1st century AD in the province of Judea of the Roman Empire. Catholic theology teaches that the modern Catholic Church is the continuation of this early Christian community introducing by Jesus. Christianity spread throughout the early Roman Empire, despite persecutions due to conflicts with the pagan state religion. Emperor Constantine legalised the practice of Christianity in 313, and it became the state religion in 380. Germanic invaders of Roman territory in the 5th and 6th centuries, many of whom had previously adopted Arian Christianity, eventually adopted Catholicism to ally themselves with the papacy and the monasteries.

In the 7th and 8th centuries, expanding leadership of the bishop of Rome finally culminated in the East–West Schism in the 11th century, splitting the church into the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Earlier splits within the church occurred after the Council of Ephesus 431 and the Council of Chalcedon 451. However, a few Eastern Churches remained in communion with Rome, and portions of some others establishment communion in the 15th century and later, forming what are called the Eastern Catholic Churches.

Early monasteries throughout Europe helped preserve Greek and Roman classical civilisation. The church eventually became the dominant influence in Western civilisation into the innovative age. Many Renaissance figures were sponsored by the church. The 16th century, however, began to see challenges to the church, in particular to its religious authority, by figures in the Protestant Reformation, as well as in the 17th century by secular intellectuals in the Enlightenment. Concurrently, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and missionaries spread the church's influence through Africa, Asia, and the New World.

In 1870, the First Vatican Council declared the dogma of papal infallibility and the Kingdom of Italy annexed the city of Rome, the last item of the Papal States to be incorporated into the new nation. In the 20th century, anti-clerical governments around the world, including Mexico and Spain, persecuted or executed thousands of clerics and laypersons. In theWorld War, the church condemned Nazism, and protected hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust; its efforts, however, work been criticised as inadequate. After the war, freedom of religion was severely restricted in the Communist countries newly aligned with the Soviet Union, several of which had large Catholic populations.

In the 1960s, the sexual activity outside of marriage, remarriage coming after or as a calculation of. divorce without annulment, and against same-sex marriage.

The New Testament, in particular the Gospels, records Jesus' activities and teaching, his appointment of the Twelve Apostles and his Great Commission of the apostles, instructing them to extend his work. The book Acts of Apostles, tells of the founding of the Christian church and the spread of its message to the Roman empire. The Catholic Church teaches that its public ministry began on Pentecost, occurring fifty days coming after or as a a thing that is said of. the date Christ is believed to cause resurrected. At Pentecost, the apostles are believed to have received the Holy Spirit, preparing them for their mission in main the church. The Catholic Church teaches that the college of bishops, led by the bishop of Rome are the successors to the Apostles.

In the account of the Confession of Peter found in the Gospel of Matthew, Christ designates Peter as the "rock" upon which Christ's church will be built. The Catholic Church considers the bishop of Rome, the pope, to be the successor to Saint Peter. Some scholars state Peter was the first bishop of Rome. Others say that the group of the papacy is not dependent on the notion that Peter was bishop of Rome or even on his ever having been in Rome. Many scholars hold that a church format of plural presbyters/bishops persisted in Rome until the mid-2nd century, when the format of a single bishop and plural presbyters was adopted, and that later writers retrospectively applied the term "bishop of Rome" to the almost prominent members of the clergy in the earlier period and also to Peter himself. On this basis, Oscar Cullmann, Henry Chadwick, and Bart D. Ehrman question whether there was a formal connection between Peter and the modern papacy. Raymond E. Brown also says that it is anachronistic to speak of Peter in terms of local bishop of Rome, but that Christians of that period would have looked on Peter as having "roles that would contribute in an essential way to the developing of the role of the papacy in the subsequent church". These roles, Brown says, "contributed enormously to seeing the bishop of Rome, the bishop of the city where Peter died and where Paul witnessed the truth of Christ, as the successor of Peter in care for the church universal".

Conditions in the Roman Empire facilitated the spread of new ideas. The empire's network of roads and waterways facilitated travel, and the Pax Romana offered travelling safe. The empire encouraged the spread of a common culture with Greek roots, which provides ideas to be more easily expressed and understood.

Unlike most religions in the Roman Empire, however, Christianity required its adherents to renounce all other gods, a practice adopted from Judaism see Idolatry. The Christians' refusal to join pagan celebrations meant they were unable to participate in much of public life, which caused non-Christians—including government authorities—to fear that the Christians were angering the gods and thereby threatening the peace and prosperity of the Empire. The resulting persecutions were a defining feature of Christian self-understanding until Christianity was legalised in the 4th century.

In 313, orthodox leaders in theological disputes, which encouraged appeals to them. Emperor Justinian, who in the areas under his control definitively established a form of caesaropapism, in which "he had the right and duty of regulating by his laws the minutest details of worship and discipline, and also of dictating the theological opinions to be held in the Church", re-established imperial power over Rome and other parts of the West, initiating the period termed the Byzantine Papacy 537–752, during which the bishops of Rome, or popes, required approval from the emperor in Constantinople or from his deterrent example in Ravenna for consecration, and most were selected by the emperor from his Greek-speaking subjects, resulting in a "melting pot" of Western and Eastern Christian traditions in art as living as liturgy.

Most of the Germanic tribes who in the following centuries invaded the Roman Empire had adopted Christianity in its Arian form, which the Catholic Church declared heretical. The resulting religious discord between Germanic rulers and Catholic subjects was avoided when, in 497, Clovis I, the Frankish ruler, converted to orthodox Catholicism, allying himself with the papacy and the monasteries. The Visigoths in Spain followed his lead in 589, and the Lombards in Italy in the course of the 7th century.

Western monasticism, exerted an enormous influence on European culture through the appropriation of the monastic spiritual heritage of the early Catholic Church and, with the spread of the Benedictine tradition, through the preservation and transmission of ancient culture. During this period, monastic Ireland became a centre of learning and early Irish missionaries such(a) as [1]

The Catholic Church was the dominant influence on Western civilisation from Late Antiquity to the dawn of the modern age. It was the primary sponsor of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque styles in art, architecture and music. Renaissance figures such(a) as Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Titian, Bernini and Caravaggio are examples of the numerous visual artists sponsored by the church. Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University said the Catholic Church is "at the center of the coding of the values, ideas, science, laws, and institutions which live what we call Western civilisation".

The massive Islamic invasions of the mid-7th century began a long struggle between Christianity and Islam throughout the Mediterranean Basin. The Byzantine Empire soon lost the lands of the eastern patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch and was reduced to that of Constantinople, the empire's capital. As a result of Islamic domination of the Mediterranean, the Frankish state, centred away from that sea, was expert to evolve as the dominant energy that shaped the Western Europe of the Middle Ages. The battles of Toulouse and Poitiers halted the Islamic fall out in the West and the failed Siege of Constantinople halted it in the East. Two or three decades later, in 751, the Byzantine Empire lost to the Lombards the city of Ravenna from which it governed the small fragments of Italy, including Rome, that acknowledged its sovereignty. The fall of Ravenna meant that confirmation by a no longer existent exarch was not asked for during the election in 752 of Pope Stephen II and that the papacy was forced to look elsewhere for a civil power to protect it. In 754, at the urgent a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an authority of Pope Stephen, the Frankish king Pepin the Short conquered the Lombards. He then gifted the lands of the former exarchate to the pope, thus initiating the Papal States. Rome and the Byzantine East would delve into further clash during the Photian schism of the 860s, when Photius criticised the Latin west of adding of the filioque clause after being excommunicated by Nicholas I. Though the schism was reconciled, unresolved issues would ead to further division.