Reply #5: Not in any meaninful way. [View All]

[Davis_X_Machina]

There are survivals in language and other things -- a 'diocese' was once a sub-unit of the empire, for example, and the 'pontiff' title was that of a Roman pagan priest. Traditional priest's vestments can be traced back to what imperial bureaucrats wore in the fourth century, and a 'basilica' was originally a courthouse-cum-government center. Much of the paraphernalia of traditional, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism represents fossilized 4th or 5th century practice.

But the Roman empire was a polity, a state, a government, with all the appurtenances of a government. And the Church hasn't had that, except in an area smaller than the Mall of America, for a hundred years. Even before that, it was limited to central Italy, and then the Papal States were a joke, compared to other European powers, even third-rate ones.

Three hundred years before that the Reformation took half of Europe out of the Church's orbit. The Church's attempts to remove Protestant monarchs were mostly failures, and in the case of England, backfired with spectacular results -- Puritanism. Even before then, outside Italy, the Church's temporal power was limited. France's kings appointed French bishops, the Holy Roman Emperors warred routinely against the Popes, sometimes literally.