How did the Pope, the Holy See, Vatican City, and the main parts of the Catholic religion end up in Italy? It’s not like there was anything in that area connected to Jesus - was there ever a thought to have the Catholics move their “headquarters” to what’s now Israel?
The Pope is the Bishop of Rome. The main workings of the Church were there because that was the heart of the Roman Empire. As for moving it, if it ain’t broke…
It was a holdover from the Roman Empire. Jesus may have lived in Israel, but Catholicism really took off only after it came to Rome. The Vatican itself is the rump of the “Papal States” where the pope had temporal power until Italy started forming around it in the mid 1800s.
A real fast runthrough, simplifying and omitting nuance with abandon:
The oversight (episkopé) of church affairs in each city was concentrated in the leading elder, who was hence called the episkopos, whence ‘bishop’. The episkopoi of major cities were termed ‘Metropolitans’, and those of the five greatest cities, which had been founded by Apostles (or in one case the chief assistant to the chief apostle, who was himself author of a Gospel) were the Patriarchs. Of these five, the leader was the one in the capital city, seat of the Empire: Rome. He became arbiter of theological disputes among the others. On these foundations – tradition rather than proven fact but solidly attested by inference in contemporary documents – the Papacy began to grow.
The Western Empire was overthrown in the late 5th century by the Gepids, they rapidly by the Ostrogoths, they by the Byzantine armies, and they in turn by the Lombards, all within a century. When the Lombard power started to decline, the Popes, bolstered in part by Charlemagne and by a fraudulent bequest supposedly from Emperor Constantine the Great, asserted and maintained temporal power over Latium and Emilia-Romagna across the ‘calf’ of the Italian boot. They held this territory, often in conflict or joint sovereignty with the Holy Roman Empire, right down until the 1860s.
When troops of the Kingdom of Italy entered Rome, overthrowing the Pope’s secular landholdings, the Popes retreated into the Vatican and used their not-inconsiderable moral influence against the Italian government (1870-1929). Mussolini negotiated a compromise with Pius XI where the Popes held Vatican City and extraterritorial rights here and there (Castel Gandolfo being the major example) as secular rulers and backed off on their condemnation of Italy. That’s where things have stood since.
Regarding Vatican City, the Papcy used to control a large section of central Italy (including Rome) under the Papal States. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire ~500, the Eastern Empire made an abortive attempt to recover it, but basically controlled only that central-Italian portion under an exarch reporting directly to the emperor in Byzantium.
This position eventually devolved to the Pope once the Byzantines abandoned the project; naturally this left the Pope without much of an army to defend his claim, but via religious influence and the setup of the Holy Roman Emperor the Holy See maintained temporal power in the region through a combination of assigned garrions from the emperor and local feudal lords in the region. That’s not to say this claim remained unchallenged–Rome was famously sacked in the 1520’s by Emperor Charles V–but the situation remained more or less as is until the 1800’s.
By 1800, Napoleon wiped out the Holy Roman Empire and crowned himself in that role, so the Papacy had to rely on France for the garrison. Moreover, the push toward Italian unification picked off individual states until only Rome remained in 1870. The Franco-Prussian war forced the French to recall their garrison in Rome, the city itself was captured but Pope Pius IX–who happened to be in St. Peters at the time–refused to peacefully capitulate. The Italians ceremonially breached the Leonine walls surrounding the Vatican near the gate of Porto Pia on 9/20, a date now celebrated as unification day in Italy. Still, Pius IX refused to leave and styled himself the “Prisoner of the Vatican”, an appelation carried on by his successors, all of whome refused to leave the Vatican grounds as a show of defiance against the Italian government’s rightful rule over the rest of Rome. The situation was only resolved with the Lateran treaty in 1926, which created the modern city-state.
The Holy See’s almost-exclusive association with St. Peter’s and the Vatican is a relatively recent phenomenon. Of course St. Peter’s was always an important religious site, but the seat of the Bishop of Rome is actual designated at the St. John Lateran Basilica (this and other famous basilicas in Rome and the surrounding area are treated like foreign embassies under the Lateran treaty; the Vatican, for example, employs their own security forces to protect these sites). Relics of the older arrangement are also found in the Curia, where several now purely-ceremonial offices (such as the Cardinal Deacons and Cardinal Bishops) reflect offices in the Papacy’s temporal administration of the city.
ETA: I really should have read Polycarp’s excellent response before posting.
Thanks for helping this Jew understand.
The papacy actually moved to Avignon, France for nearly seventy years in the 14th century.
Actually, Kaiser Franz abdicated the throne and dissolved the Reich in 1806 in order to prevent the brutish little thug seizing the HRE and thus ruling with the moral authority of being Kaiser.
Bonaparte continued as self-appointed ‘Emperor of the French’; and Francis continued as Kaiser of Austria — later Austro-Hungary.
The Bishop of Rome was originally more important that the other bishops for the same reason that the mayor of New York City is considered more important than the mayor of Schenectady. It didn’t have to turn out quite that way, however. Besides being the head of the Church in what was recently the most powerful and populous city in Europe and the world, the Roman bishop also happened to be on the winning side of several theological disputes. It also didn’t hurt that he had little competition in the area for big-shot-church-guy. In the Eastern part of the Empire, there were four major cities of significant power and prestige, and the bishops of those cities developed roughly equal importance. When the Western half of the empire fell to the German tribes, the four cities in the East remained in the Roman (now Byzantine) Empire and went on to become, while Rome was isolated as the only real power center in Europe. Carthage was the second largest city in the West, and was also very important in early Catholicism, but unlike Rome, the Carthaginian church failed to establish its authority in the theological debates of the day, and was itself a source of controversies. That it was shortly conquered by Muslim armies did not further advance the relative scope of the Carthaginian bishops.
So in the West, Rome became the only real seat of power within the church, and with the collapse of the Empire there, the church became the only real source of civic power in Rome. In the East, the churches of the four main cities continued to develop as independent and roughly equal centers of power in the church, which was itself subordinate to the Byzantine state. The churches associated with Rome became the Roman Catholic Church, and the churches in the Byzantine Empire became the Orthodox Church. If you ask a Christian in Eastern Europe or the Middle East where the headquarters of the catholic (universal) church is, they won’t point to Rome, but to Antioch or one of the other Patriarchal churches (which now include Moscow and Athens for the heads of the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches).
Just a little more to add to the excellent summaries above. In the very earliest days of Christianity the center of power was Jerusalem with the infant Church being guided by the Apostles under James the Just, the brother of Jesus. The complete destruction of that city by the Romans after the Jewish Revolt of AD 70 changed everything and the power naturally gravitated towards other cities such as Antioch, Alexandria and chiefly Rome. In the coming centuries the Bishop of Rome would assert his dominance more and more, although not without stiff resistance from other regions of the Empire, and in fact some of those regions would never concede the supremacy of Rome and to this day have their own Heads of the Church eg the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Coptic Pope.
Italian cuisine > Israeli cuisine
I’ve always head that Italians are Jews with better cooking.
Them’s fightin’ words.
…and cars.
Church history states that Peter went to Rome to carry on the teachings of the Early Church, and Paul stayed in Palestine and the surrounding countries. The Epistles of the New Testament were letters Paul wrote in his ministry of the Early Church.
Peter was later crucified in Rome, and legend has it he was affixed to the cross upside down, because he considered himself to be unworthy to be crucified in the same manner as Christ. He was believed to be buried in what became Vatican City.
In 1968, an underground cemetery in the Vatican was excavated and one body in particular was noteworthy. The manner of death, the age of the remains, and the physical characteristics of a Palestinian Jew of that time gave the Church reason to declare the remains were of Simon Peter.
~VOW
Peter and Paul got executed in Rome on the same day, according to tradition. Paul traveled around more than Peter (he was younger and didn’t have dependants), but he didn’t stay in the East.
Most of the Epistles (those known by names of places as well as Hebrews) are attributed to Paul, although there actually seem to be several hands. But others are attributed to other ministers, such as Peter or Judas Thaddeus.
Peter was crucified upside-down, Paul was beheaded.
Those Romans were fun guys!
~VOW
Thereby creating one of the coolest AOC’s in all of wine: chateauneuf du pape.
The Catholic church no longer attributes the Letter to the Hebrews to Paul. The author of that epistle is considered to be unknown.
The author was always considered uncertain, which is why Hebrews always got listed last in the Pauline epistles, which are otherwise arranged in descending order of size.