5/4/15
The East-West Schism
With the new law under Emperor Constantine that the Christians may no longer be prosecuted for their beliefs, Catholic Churches began to crop up around Rome and slowly began to spread all over Europe. Christianity later developed into two slightly different religions, those being the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The reason, that medieval Christianity split though was due to the result of the "East-West Schism". When Byzantine split with Roman Catholicism on 800, the people of the Byzantine Empire were hurt and over time their relationship with Roman Catholicism deteriorated and split. The east and the west developed into the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church respectively. Over the centuries, these two religions separated over reasons such as geography, ignorance of language, difference of theologies, politics, and many more unnamed reasons.
There are multiple reasons why Christianity separated into these two churches around Europe, however this list cannot be limited to the beliefs of these two groups, the reasons are much more fundamental and enormous than that. A major factor is the language barrier that the western church (Roman Catholic Church) spoke and wrote in Latin, and the eastern church (Greek Orthodox Church), in Greek. In Roman Catholicism, the pope has a universal jurisdiction over all of the church, while the pope in the Greek Orthodox Church is recognized as an equal to the people. There are several reasons on why these groups stay separate, such as their liturgy, married clergy, and bread and the Eucharist.
