Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for December 29, 2002

Ok, actually, there were some individuals who did act like this ‘Bishop’, but not because the Church allowed it. It was because there was a lot of what was called ‘simony’ going one, selling offices for money. Again, this was fought against by the True Church. When the head is in Rome, and you’re operating in England, thousands of miles away, and letters take months to get anywhere, maybe years, looking in and controlling such abuses would be impossible.

Such Bishops were installed by the rulers of the countries, and installed because they would listen to the king, not the pope. They were controlled and obeyed the king of the country or area, not the Church. But Wiley is making it sound as if its the Church to blame. Typical.

The Catholic Church was the unifying force among Catholic countries; ergo, the Church was the power! And that’s what the big fight was all about — Muslims and Jews were trying to sabotage the Christian politico-infrastructure and the Church was fighting back. The country leaders’ entire sense of solidarity depended solely on the Church and the Church issued orders and strategies, especially between Spain and Italy, for the sake of maintaining political status quo — the Catholic Church is the only game in town! The royalty deferred to the Church. Of course, Church representatives had to defer to the laws and customs of the country in which they lived, but that was just local news. In the big picture, the Church was the Big Brother of the day, at least from around 1478 (?) to around 1500. The Church decided everything from political structure to even what a citizen was allowed to think — the ideologies and their interpretations. That was (and still is, perhaps on a less visible, more covert, scale) a lot of control, from the individual to the social to even the royalty.

The Catholic Church is far from true…