Does anyone think the Catholic Church is an extremely powerful organization?

Question

Ever think about what if it decided to abuse its power? I mean, it could do a LOT of things if you think about it.

Answer 1

You mean like invent a fictional book and pretend it is the word of God.


Oops they already did that.

Love and blessings Don

Answer 2

It is and it isn't. It isn't centrally governed, it is really a federation of thousands of individual groups, mostly dioceses but also other structures such as the orders and communities. So the power is great, but highly distributed. The Catholic principal of subsidiarity requires that decisions occur at the lowest level possible so most power is located locally and little is even regional. It is true, that since the Catholic Church constitutes between 1/6 and 1/5 of the world population it could do a lot, but the distributed nature of the power structure makes centralized action impossible. One of the difficulties of the sex scandal was that many of the solutions required some form of centralized rule making and that simply isn't permitted. Each group is independent and they cannot surrender their authority voluntarily to the larger group, they must each continue to act independently. Even canon law is not universal but rather there are bodies of canon law that run in parallel, much like each state in the United States has its own laws. The word Catholic means all embracing, the only way to embrace all is to accept a high degree of internal diversity. The only way to allow high levels of diversity is to not impose central control. So the hierarchy is more like a set of personalized connections between groups than magistrates or govenors.

Answer 3

hahaha.. of course I've thought about that. I wrote a whole entire freakin' 12 page paper on it. It definitely has a huge amount of power and it definitely has abused it before. Think about the crusades, the heretics, the witches, the inquisition, the excommunication. All of that was abused powers. However, it is not as bad today even if it does have a lot of power.

Answer 4

The Catholic Church is at one of its lowest points in history. It's income is a shadow of what it used to be during (i.e. Middle Ages.) It has no political power at any major country. A great percentage of its adepts are either not active, free thinkers and critics, or mere low-level cultist. It's growth compared with other main religions is miserable (and it loses many believers everyday against other denominations.)

This has been healthy for it. It is in one of its purest periods too.

Answer 5

Power in what way?

The power to spread the word of God?
Political power?

What?

The Vatican has very little political power on its own - a VERY small country with no army (not even a reserve force).

Any power that it has is strictly from a salvation view.

Answer 6

Everybody knows it is an extremely powerful organization, and if you read any history book, you will know that it did abuse its power. No "what if" about it.

Answer 7

I am going to state the obvious...The Catholic Church has never not abused its powers. Wars have been fought in the name of a god who considers killing to be quite the wrong. Makes you wonder...

Answer 8

Well, it did in the past. Remember the inquisitions carried out by that righteous sect called the Jesuites, which was the popes army to carry out the torturing and killing of innocent Christians that disagreed with him?

Answer 9

So do Evangelical Xtians in America.

Answer 10

especially in hitlers time

where hitlers government made a concordat with catholics

his picture and the cross was to be saluted

anyone not followng this is to be executed even other members of other religions(jews jehovahs witnesses,blacks,gays etc)

same in dark ages.popes kill anyone having access to bible

powerful in a violent way

you might ask yourself......is that the way god operate?