30. Притязания Римских пап на преобладание в Церкви. Заблуждения, допущенные в Западной Церкви

The claims of the Popes to predominance in the Church can be seen from the first centuries of Christianity. The reason for these claims could have been the charm of Rome, which was the capital of the Roman Empire. With the emergence of New Rome on the banks of the Bosphorus, the former lost somewhat of its significance as a capital, but in the absence of an emperor in this city, which is still called eternal, the pope became the leading person. The popes, for their part, instead of reducing the secular, tried to give Rome ecclesiastical significance, as a city that received Christian enlightenment from the supreme apostles Peter and Paul. In particular, to strengthen the ecclesiastical significance of Rome, the popes used the sacred memory of the first of these apostles for Christians. The Lord Jesus Christ supposedly installed the Apostle Peter as the head of the apostles and the prince of the Church, and this leadership after the death of the apostle passed to the pope, who is therefore the head of all bishops, the vicar of Christ on earth and the prince in the Church. Having adopted the idea of ​​Petrov's primacy, the popes took advantage of all the opportunities presented to them to elevate their importance and show their greatness in the Church, especially when any difficulty arose in the Eastern Churches, and the saints, by virtue of fraternal communication, turned to them for advice and help. We see cases of such conversions in the history of Athanasius the Great, John Chrysostom and other saints, and popes interpreted the usual, especially in the East, expressions of love and respect for the foremost hierarch of the West in the sense of the relationship of subordinates to their superior. The turmoil that occurred in the East due to persecution from the iconoclasts gave the popes especially many reasons both to defend Orthodoxy and to declare the rights and power allegedly belonging to them over the entire Church. The rise of the popes in the West was also facilitated by the struggle that they had to wage against the Arian heresy, rejected in the East and adopted by the new peoples who filled Western Europe and North Africa. This struggle rallied all the adherents and defenders of Orthodoxy in the West around the popes, the leaders of this struggle. But what particularly contributed to the strengthening of papal power in Western Europe was the extraordinary spread of their patriarchy. It did not happen suddenly, but gradually. Initially, this patriarchate suffered some restrictions and restrictions: it was at a time when the Western Empire fell, and the emperors of Constantinople, spreading their power in the West, subordinated the possessions they acquired there to the authority of their Patriarchate of Constantinople. At this time, the popes lost, among other things, power over the Thessalonian Exarchate. At the same time, the emperors of Constantinople tried in every possible way to raise the importance of their closest patriarch, giving him, for example, the title of Ecumenical, which Pope Gregory I the Great so sharply rebelled against. The Roman popes endured various hardships and difficulties within their own region, where the conquests of the Constantinople emperors did not extend. New peoples (Vandals, Svens, Alans, Visigoths, Ostrogoths), who flooded the western and southern countries of Europe, and penetrated into North Africa, adhered to the Arian false teaching. At the end of the 5th century (488), the Ostrogoths invaded Italy itself, and their king Theodoric, who recognized himself as the head of the Western Empire, was also an Arian, as were his successors. Favorable circumstances for the popes began with the baptism of Clovis, king of the Franks (496). The subsequent conversion of the entire Frankish people to Christianity (504) immediately and significantly expanded the area of ​​the Roman Patriarch. Having become under the spiritual leadership of the popes, the Frankish kings, under the pretext of zeal for the faith, undertook a series of wars against the Arians - the Visigoths and other peoples in the west of Europe, and the area of ​​the pope expanded more and more until it covered all the countries of Western Europe. In the middle of the 8th century, the popes acquired a significant area into their possession as secular rulers. It happened like this. Pope Zacharias allowed the Franks to swear allegiance to the rightful king Childeric and for this service received the Exarchate of Ravenna from the Frankish commander Pepin the Short, who later ascended the French throne. It formerly formed one of the parts of the Greek empire and was ruled by exarchs appointed from Constantinople, then it was conquered by the Longobards and, finally, Pepin was taken from the Longobards and presented to the pope. At the beginning of the 9th century, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne. Karl approved of the pope and increased Pepin's gift. From that time on, it became customary for every Western emperor to receive purple and a crown in Rome from the hands of the pope, and the Roman high priests began to proudly think of themselves not only as rulers vested with supreme power in the Church, but also as dispensers of imperial and royal power. To justify the power-hungry papal aspirations at this time, the so-called false Isidorean decretals were drawn up in the West, in which, through a series of fictitious decrees, supposedly dating back to the Roman Bishop Clement, who lived in the 1st century, it was proven that the highest church power in the entire Christian world always belonged to the pope. At the same time, a also fictitious legend was compiled about the so-called gift of Emperor Constantine, who, by moving the capital to the shores of the Bosphorus, allegedly left Rome in the eternal possession of the Pope. Over the course of centuries, with the constant desire of the popes for dominance, errors arose in the Western Church, which the popes, out of pride, did not want to acknowledge and correct. Thus, contrary to the rule of the First Ecumenical Council, celibacy was introduced everywhere for priests. Contrary to ancient church custom, it was allowed to eat dairy foods and eggs during fasting. On Saturday, which the Church has always distinguished from fasting in memory of the original celebration, fasting was established. The most important deviation of the Western Church was the addition to the Creed, in the eighth member, of the extra word “Filioque” and the adoption of the doctrine expressed in this addition about the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. The lust for power of the Roman popes and the apostasy from Orthodoxy, allowed in the West, were the reasons for the separation of the Western Church from the union with the Orthodox Ecumenical Church. You might be interested in: