Politics and religion don’t mix. Or rather, they do often mix, but with bad result.
The same kind of thing happened in the west, BTW.
This is the best explanation of why the Catholic church is not primarily responsible for the Spanish Inquisition. The church had become an adjunct of the state, and the state had a policy about uniformity of religious practice.In his role, Torquemada was acting on behalf of the king.
Of course, the Roman Inquisition was another matter.
Anyway, it is important to realize that the early church had a different sort of organizational arrangement, based upon dioceses gathered into local synods. The bishops were named locally and the synod called local councils. The Catholic Encyclopedia is full of references to these local councils, they were very important in the development of the western church. They don’t, as a general rule, happen anymore.
Synods were organized around a ‘Metropolitan’, the first mentioned in the canons of the ecumenical councils were of Rome (for central Italy), Alexandria (for Egypt and Libya) and Antioch (for Asia). Others were not named specifically, but when a conflict arose over the governance of the very ancient church at Cyprus, the Fathers in Council declared that church to also be self governed. It was a general process of reorganization that went far beyond what was mentioned in the Ecumenical Councils as examples, because we know Palestine was governed by Caesarea Maritima on the coast (with Jerusalem as a suffragan See), this is well attested. (Later an Ecumenical Council elevated the Jerusalem church over Caesarea.) We also know Milan was the Metropolitan See for northern Italy (which explains why or how they developed the different liturgical tradition from very early on, called the ‘Ambrosian’).
There was a very interesting thread in the Traditionalist section about the
Mozarabic church (from early Spain) which demonstrates how independent it was. This pattern existed throughout the church, east and west.
The trouble was, and can be today, that kings and nobility want to control the churches in their regions, the bigger the kingdom, the more synods that would be affected. This was a huge problem in the western church as well as the eastern, with for example the Italian nobility which contested over the Papacy for perhaps two centuries, the naming of Popes by the Byzantine empire for a stretch, then the naming of Popes by Frankish empire for a stretch. The same problem happened in France and Spain and it is also remembered as the investiture controversy in the Holy Roman (German) empire.
Here in China the Catholic church is under this kind of strain even today. Considering the very similar history of the church elsewhere in the past, I don’t blame them for these problems, it was imposed upon them from outside and they have to deal with it.
In any case, the Orthodox church is still organized along local synodal lines. In countries where the government respects the church, there is no problem with it. In countries where the government does not respect the church, no form of organization does particularly well.
The Catholic (or Western) church is now very centrally governed. This can be traced mostly to the Gregorian reformation of the church. It helped eventually liberate the church from a lot of the stresses of local governmental control, but introduced a host of it’s own problems.
For one thing, it made the Papacy a big juicy target, as witnessed by the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the Papacy at Avignon and also with powerful historical figures like Charles V and Napoleon locking Popes up. This high degree of centralization also allowed for types of larceny and church corruption on a much grander scale than had been possible before.
