UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on April 17, 2014 by Betty Clermont
The Gospels tell us that the religious leaders were the only people Jesus reprimanded and chastised. They were hypocrites and didn’t set a good example. In turn, they paid Judas 30 pieces of silver to help them arrest Jesus. Their court handed Jesus over to the civil government to have him tortured and executed.
Early Christians were mostly a persecuted minority until Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. By law, no other religion would be tolerated. So Christian leaders supported the state. Constantine used Christianity, in part, to unify his empire. Church leaders used the Roman Empire as their organizational model even though Jesus had told his followers, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
From then on, the Roman Catholic Church was allied with European emperors and monarchs. In return for the legitimacy bestowed on them by prelates and popes, the civil governments made the religious leaders wealthy and powerful. The emperors and monarchs also enslaved their populace, executed the innocent, conquered indigenous populations and waged war in the mutual interests of church and state.
When Pope Pius IX lost his last feudal territories in the unification of Italy in 1870, other aristocrats who had also lost their hereditary lands advised him how to use money instead of land to produce income and wealth. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the last Catholic monarchy – was defeated in the First World War, Vatican officials sought alliances with new states.
Popes opposed democracy as a dangerous influence on their own absolute sovereignty. Socialism was unacceptable to the new capitalists. Communism, which prohibited both religion and private property, became the Vatican’s chief enemy. But fascism was both totalitarian and capitalist.
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