Because that WAS the pattern in Europe for about 500 years. It remained the pattern in most of Protestant Europe, just as it had been in Catholic Europe.
The Church leaders are not, and never have been, infallible in all things. Popes are sinners, just as we are. Most of the Popes of that era came from the upper classes themselves, and it was from those upper classes that virtually ALL leaders, religious or lay, came from.
Keep in mind that Clerics were CLERKS, meaning that they could read and write. Many lay nobles were actually trained by the church, and unlike what you claim they did NOT have to be educated about the church. The church operated every University in Europe in those days, and that is where all lawyers and other leaders got their education. Even the Kings and Princes were often trained by the clergy.
The common folk had essentially no opportunity for education (with very few exceptions). So, if you were going to have a Bishop, where would you look for one? Among the country friars, who could barely read the Latin for the Mass, or among the educated and literate people?
It is so easy to look back and condemn, without actually understanding how society worked in those eras. There was no such thing as “free education”, the vast majority of people were ignorant and could neither read at all nor do any match above counting. And taxes rarely affected the poor, because essentially they owned nothing that could be taxed. Instead, it was the landowners (who were the rich) that actually got taxed.
Don’t believe movies like “Robin Hood”. The people that “Robin Hood” is based on didn’t give a darn about the peasants, they were fighting for the rights of the minor nobles.
The “Magna Carta”, that great document of democracy, had absolutely nothing to do with the common people at all. In fact, they were not mentioned in it. Every right mentioned in that document concerned only the Nobles, and limited the ways in which the King could tax them, could demand service from them, etc.
They didn’t care at all about the common people. They essentially had one right, the right to die. Other than that, the person who owned the land they lived on, essentially owned them and everything that they had.
The rights of the common man VERY slowly developed, and it was not until around the 16th century that they even began to have rights at all. Keep in mind that in England as late as the 1840’s, a person could be sentenced to permanent exile, or even death, for stealing a loaf of bread.
It is so easy to assume that everyone had rights all along. They didn’t, and the governments (including the government of the church) reflected to society that it existed in.
