Almost everything about catholic faith revolves around events that (allegedly) happened in the Middle East. Most of the holiest sites seem to be there in relation to the bible’s depiction of events. So wouldn’t it make sense that the pope/vatican would place its power center as near as possible from the holiest sites? How did it come to be Rome? Was this a decision based on the current political climate at the time or was there a reason based on faith/rethoric of the church?
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This largely has to do with who was in charge when Christianity emerged and who spread Christianity throughout the world. The answer to both is the Roman Empire. Rome was not just the most powerful force in the world at the time. It was basically the most powerful force the world had ever seen up to that point. While the Romans were extremely hostile (ie wanton murdering) towards the first Christians, after Constantine converted in the 3rd century Christianity became essentially the state religion of the biggest empire in the world. And while it’s important to be close to your place of birth, it’s far more important to be close to the boss. The boss of Rome was in Rome, so that’s where the papacy set up shop.
For complicated and controversial reasons, early Christianity took hold and spread much better among Greco-Roman gentiles than among Jews. Christian power centers naturally corresponded with the power centers of the Roman Empire, namely Rome and Constantinople. There is no faith-based reason for the significance of these cities.
After the western Roman Empire fell, Rome and Constantinople lost touch with each other culturally and their religious practices diverged. This eventually led to the great schism between the Catholic (Roman/Latin) church and the Orthodox (Greek) church in 1054. That is why Catholicism is centered on Rome alone.
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among other reasons, it could be also because this area is (and almost always was) unstable. Jerusalem has been handed over from one to another a number of times, and it’s always been a place of contention. today, it still is governed by a tri-lateral body (Jewish-Christian-Muslim) and they have hard time agreeing on almost anything – including such trivial things as to who is to change a lightbulb that’s gone bad.
Not to disagree with all of this, but the Catholic perspective is also that the keys of the kingdom were given to Peter and his successors, and “wherever Peter is, there is the church.” Since Peter went to Rome, the disciples appealed to the seat of Rome as the seat of authority. St. Peter’s Basilica is built over the tomb of Saint Peter.
For a while in the Dark Ages the Pope and cardinals were in southern France. They agreed with you and wanted to enable pilgrims to visit the holy sites.
They tried to take back the holy land for several hundred years in the Crusades (1090-1290AD). But we’re never able to fully control that region in the history of Christianity.
Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople (*which was in Turkey, the Middle East/West Asia*).
I like the term “*West Asia*” better than “*The Middle East*”.
Because Rome was a thing and once the emperor converted, the center of gravity for the early church was built near the center of political power. Before that it had been a loosely aligned group of the movement which DID have its hub in the eastern Mediteranean.
Eventually the empire split and Constantinople became a thing, but eventually the power center there came to a point where they had irreconcilable differences with the Roman leadership and that’s how we came to have the Orthodox church (as compared to the Roman Catholic Church).
Even as the empire came apart piece by piece, the pope in Rome retained a huge amount of social and religious power, and that only increased once the schism happened.
The center of the Catholic world, politically and administratively, continues to be Rome. It’s a continuation of the coalescense of power that happened way back in the 4th century.
edit: the WESTERN part of the empire came apart and the Pope retained a lot of power, which is a related tangent, but the EASTERN empire (with Constantinople) managed to hang on in good form for nearly a thousand years more, finally crumbling in the 14th-15th centuries, with Constantinople itself only falling in the 1450s. And they, having been the western end of the Silk Road, had been a big part of keeping spices and goods moving between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The Ottomans who took over reduced the trade flows enough that Europe started looking for sea routes to replace the overland routes…and that’s why Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Yes, the fall of the last claimants to the Roman Empire is what set up the age of European colonial land grabs and the modern world. History echos loudly today, even if we (or at least Americans) didn’t really learn much about it in grade school for whatever stupid reason. I loathe whoever approved the curriculum for my history lessons, they can go screw themselves.
Several reasons (it’s all politics):
1. Modern christianity descends not from the christians in Judea (who were more conservative jews), but from christianity as preached “to the gentiles” by Paul & Peter. Paul&Peter first gravitated towards Antioch (further north) and then to Ephesus (Greece) and then to Rome.
2. Once a part of the roman empire everything gravitated towards Rome, the political center at the time.
3. The bishop of Rome has since almost day 1 claimed primacy, but once christianity became a legal religion in rome authority of the roman empire had moved mainly to Constantinopel and authority was split between the Patriarchs of Rome, Constantinopel (modern day Istanbul), Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch (because this was the political order supported by the Roman emperor of Constantinopel). Each of these ruled a “metropolis” (mother city) and every lesser bishop was subordinate to one of these mother cities. For most of this time the Patriarchs of Constantinopel and Alexandria were by far the most influential, as these cities were the greatest cities of the empire at this time.
4. Rome didn’t become preeminent until much later, when the Patriarch of Rome and Charlemagne (who united the first super-empire in western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman empire) threw their lots together in a deal that was basically “I back you as the head honcho of Christianity, and in return you back my claim as Holy Roman Emperor”.
5. This eventually led to the Great Schism between Western christianity and Eastern Ortodox which can basically be summed up as “I, the Pope of Rome, have total authority over christianity” and Eastern ortodox going “No you don’t”. They claim all sorts of religious reasons for the split, but basically it boiled down to politics. Just like the Nestorian schism (where the syrian, coptic etc churches all split off) boils down to a conflict between Nestorius (Patriarch of Constantinopel) and Kyrillos (Patriarch of Alexandria. The pope in Rome had the backing of Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor at the time, and the rest were kind of vaguely backed by the Eastern roman emperor (Eastern Rome had problems as the time though. This is just a few decades before The Crusades).
There are several factors:
* The Catholic Church is centered around the Bishop of Rome, the successor to St. Peter. Catholic doctrine holds that Peter was granted particular authorities over the other apostles by Jesus, which is mirrored by the authority the Pope has over the other clergy.
* The Islamic conquests of the 7th century caused the entirety of the Levant and North Africa, previously strong Christian institutional strongholds, to fall fully under Islamic control. While the various institutions (such as the Patriarch of Jerusalem) still remained, they were greatly diminished in power.
* In the 11th century, a theological schism formed between the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople over various doctrinal and political disputes that had been forming over the prior decades and centuries. The ecclesiastical divisions roughly lined up with the Latin-speaking and Greek-speaking areas of the former Roman empire.
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