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 is actually two questions. One of them is “why Rome?” And the other is “why not the Middle East?”
Why not in the Middle East is easy. The Catholic Church is the Western branch of Christendom. They are defined by being in the west. If you want the branch of Christendom that exists in the Middle East, you want the Othodox Church. These two groups used to be one, but because of political and cultural and geographic differences, they split up.
So why Rome? Well, the current political climate, but that’s because “political climate” is connected to everything else. Rome had ties to Israel, was stable and affluent, and had religious and theological reasons for its significance.
Israel was a “client kingdom” of Rome. Rome had conquered it and left a puppet monarch in charge. Israel’s religion was uniquely incompatible with the Roman pantheon because Israel came into being as a nation that violently refuted ALL other religions. And religion permeated every part of cultural and political life at that point. Israel was destabilized by Rome because too many factions within Israel refused to submit to Roman rule, and collapsed shortly after the writing of most of the texts in the New Testament. The urgency and pronouncements of coming doom that you see in the Gospels, the Book of Revelation, and other texts in the New Testament come from living in a time when the whole system was on the verge of coming down.
The traditional form of Judaism collapsed along with the destruction of their holy sites. There was a loss of community, language, and culture as the people of Israel dispersed. So the actual origins of the Christian tradition were in a location where you weren’t going to end up with a stable, powerful center for your new religion.
However, the first and second generations of Christian evangelist/missionaries successfully sold their religion to lots of people at the center of the conquering empire. At the beginning, most of those people were not important/powerful/influential. But the religion grew, to a point at which the Roman emperor Constantine recognized Christianity as something that could be a problem for him or a tool for him. He chose to make Christianity work for him, and made it the state religion.
That’s the political side. The religious side is that the most influential person in Christianity, Paul, made it to Rome to evangelize and was, tradition has it, executed there. Even more theologically important, Peter, one of the most heavily featured disciples in the Gospels, is also traditionally held to have made it as far as Rome before being executed. The Catholic Church stakes *all* of its religious authority on a connection to Peter.
With the two most important Christian figures after Jesus pressing into enemy territory and dying there, placing your seat of power in that location is a theological statement about your good religion triumphing over an evil empire. It echoes and reinforces the Christian teaching that Jesus was executed under Roman rule and rose to life again.
But remember that the Catholic Church is only half of the original extent of Christendom. The various branches of the Orthodox church also have their own holy sites, likewise based upon important religious figures and the political situation of the past. Rome is a holy site for them, sure, but their own locations are also holy. The Catholic Church is centralized and unified under one seat of power, but the pope of Rome is only one of many popes who all recognize each other’s authority.
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