The increasing emphasis on the papacy is driven by the nature of the office and, let us not pull punches, television and our reliance on it. If you want to put THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AS WESTERNERS UNDERSTAND IT on TV, the Pope is right there. Add in the peculiar charism of JP2, bam.
Thus, all of those specious "news" pieces about some group of heretical Catholics that come every time the Pope visits never feature some couple aborting and contracepting their way through life saying, "The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith can't tell me what to do."
"We're gathered here, as womenpriests, in defiance of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments," aside from the humor value, is never something we get to hear.
The Pope as St. Peter's successor is metonym for the Church and it's a lot easier to focus on a metonym than the whole thing when one's attention span is about four seconds, tops.
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This is largely right, but (a few quibbles about knowledge aside) it overlooks the fact that most technological development went into various new branches of warfighting, which turned most warfare into siege warfare, which ... actually made war worse.
If you mean about 476-1453, what stands out is how large parts of Europe started to rebound, then had a plague and oh dang; or were more advanced than we thought, then a plague; or how the Muslim world wasn't actually better (and had plagues); but holy goodness did war suck.
And if you *really* want to blame someone for making the whole thing worse, to Christendom and to the Umma, it's the bloody-damned Mongols who did it. Seriously, they were the worst.
I'm still tickled at the crazy lady who somehow missed the part of Texas History where we learned how Sam Houston overwhelmed a numerically superior force by waiting until the latter had decided to take a nap without posting sentries who could stay awake.
But: Wanna add a bit.
The crazy woman echoes a bit of nonsense that was all the rage when I was in college, which means it will leak out into the wild and become normalized in newsrooms if it hasn't already, to-wit: Beating up sleeping combatants is a war crime, especially if midday naps are cultural.
Put aside that no law of war, ever, has declared that attacking a sleeping enemy is a war crime. Put aside that the Spanish, from whom the cultural nap imperative arises, fielded amazingly competent land armies who -- unlike the successor Mexican army -- posted sentries.
Everything else notwithstanding, there were no Geneva Conventions at the time; there is no law of war preventing an army from attacking a sleeping opponent; and the Mexican Army of Operations played the Degüello before storming the Alamo and putting every man to the sword.
As I've said, I learned this in Texas History in a public school in 1988-1989. I know this because I knew where "REMEMBER THE ALAMO" came from, but until then, I'd never known that they also cried "REMEMBER GILEAD" (another Mexican war crime) as they attacked.
One last: The Mexican army was an uneven affair at the time, but the Spanish army from whom they were descended also believed in siestas BUT ALSO believed in posting sentries. Operational Security by the Mexican Army of Operations was garbage, which surprised the Texan scouts.