satellite of love

“Medieval Europe looked to the pope in Rome. Anyone who was anyone spoke the language his church had preserved, Latin. It was an extraordinarily united world. Historically minded western Europeans tend to take the unity of medieval Europe for granted but it is unique in human history for a region to be so dominated by a single form of monotheistic religion and its accompanying culture for a thousand years. Only Saudi Arabia comes close to it, and for a far shorter period. The dominance of the church of the Bishop of Rome was a freak in human experience, albeit a freak with profound consequences today. Its break-up in the 16th-century Reformation was a return to the normality of religious history, not some unexpected or even undesirable accident.” In his review of a book on the history of the papacy, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch muses on how current views of the pope still look back to the alien circumstances of the Middle Ages