{"id":5418,"date":"2023-03-22T13:09:49","date_gmt":"2023-03-22T18:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/?p=5418"},"modified":"2023-03-22T13:11:58","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T18:11:58","slug":"holy-roman-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/?p=5418","title":{"rendered":"HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>That is another oxymoron, of the highest order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When &#8216;Christianity&#8217; became the official religion of the Roman Empire a few hundred years after Jesus&#8217; ascension, it was not good for the church.<br>That turned into power for the Catholic Church, and power always generates a craving for more power.<br>And so, the Catholic Church found no limits to extending their power and control over the people&#8212;spiritually, financially, politically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the Reformation freed many Christians to rediscover a true relationship with God and reading the Bible themselves, the Catholic Church doubled down on their authority over the members.<br>It remains an amazing mystery how they can maintain so much control over so many people.<br>The massive power of the Catholic Church continues to this day&#8212;not much different from days of The Holy Roman Empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.&#8221;<br>&#8220;An observation that a person&#8217;s sense of morality lessens as his or her power increases. The statement was made by Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We see before our eyes today increasing corruption from such power&#8212;in the church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That is another oxymoron, of the highest order. When &#8216;Christianity&#8217; became the official religion of the Roman Empire a few hundred years after Jesus&#8217; ascension, it was not good for the church.That turned into power for the Catholic Church, and power always generates a craving for more power.And so, the Catholic Church found no limits [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2,4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-educational","category-faith_based","category-financial","category-political-cultural"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5418"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5418"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5421,"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5418\/revisions\/5421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awordforthought.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}