The question of Church governance and its relation to the secular authority was the number one hot-button political issue during the European Middle Ages, over which many intellectual, political, as well as military battles were fought. It’s a vast and fascinating topic that spans several centuries of complicated history, with changing fortunes on all sides; to get a basic taste of it, this article on the Investiture Controversy is decent.
These controversies exploded again during the Reformation and the subsequent religious upheavals and wars that engulfed Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they haven’t died down completely to the present day. But as a simplification (perhaps excessive), one could say that the present tightly disciplined form of Catholic Church governance developed during the Counter-Reformation period.
(It should also be noted that some local Catholic churches, most notably the Eastern ones, have much more autonomy for peculiar reasons of local history. Formally, this is known as the sui juris status.)
The question of Church governance and its relation to the secular authority was the number one hot-button political issue during the European Middle Ages, over which many intellectual, political, as well as military battles were fought. It’s a vast and fascinating topic that spans several centuries of complicated history, with changing fortunes on all sides; to get a basic taste of it, this article on the Investiture Controversy is decent.
These controversies exploded again during the Reformation and the subsequent religious upheavals and wars that engulfed Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they haven’t died down completely to the present day. But as a simplification (perhaps excessive), one could say that the present tightly disciplined form of Catholic Church governance developed during the Counter-Reformation period.
(It should also be noted that some local Catholic churches, most notably the Eastern ones, have much more autonomy for peculiar reasons of local history. Formally, this is known as the sui juris status.)