Charlemagne Quotes
Bishops and priests should live according to the canons and should teach others to do likewise
Charlemagne, 742-814, French King Charles, First Christian King & Holy Roman Emperor, Capitulary Issued in the Year 802 [The Church maintained until modern times, that only the church could proscribe and enforce the behavior of Priests and Bishops--not the temporal power, the monarch or other ruler. In this quoted document, Charlemagne, the temporal ruler, had entered into the region that had previously been claimed by the church. Churches and governments have been struggling ever since regarding who could proscribe and enforce behavior upon religious leaders of the community. In modern times, even though the governments had clearly won this prerogative under the law, some religious leaders have tried to maintain their canonical independence often to the detriment of the church. The best examples of this were the Roman Catholic bishops of Ireland, Canada, and the United States, not reporting sexual abuse crimes of priests to the civil authorities (and covering them up), for many years. When the truth became known, the church suffered heavily.
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The letter had been written earlier, but this and 51 other letters written when she was in Turkey were published in 1763. At the time, Turkey, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, was an Islamic state operating under Islamic law, as were all countries within the Ottoman Empire. Today, Turkey is a secular state and the clergy and the legal profession are separate.
This was before the state had officially sanctioned and accepted the church. Most of the institutions were pagan and the kings had subjects of both religions with Christianity not yet dominant. Yet among Christians, the Church had government temporal power, even before the church was allied with the state.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. This quotation, in the 17th century outraged almost every cleric. This is one of the strongest and unequivocal statements about the desirability of separation of church and state. Interestingly, as early as this statement was, Spinoza believed that harm extended to both religion and government.
For those who doubt that there was intended a rigid separation between church and state, they have but to contemplate this passage. However, at about the same time, the State of South Carolina moved in its constitution in an opposite direction. See {612573}. When the framers of the Constitution met in 1787 in Philadelphia the separation of church and state issue was not really resolved and awaited the Bill of Rights where the separatists won out.
This concept of separation of church and state divided the society into two domains and had the Emperor rule and the church, the other.
Some politicians then and later were not as religious as the leading clerics would prefer. The quotation shows that priests commonly married at that time even though the church had forbidden it.
Gregory the Great. “Emoluments” included the income from all lands and other church property, gifts and tithes, and income of any sort. This formula characterized the division of resources for the better part of Christian history. By today’s standard, the proportion for these Bishops (there were those who chose poverty) and his household seems astoundingly high—his income and sustenance was the equal of all the priests in the bishopric. It illustrates the affluence of the bishops who were major forces in their territories. One of the rationales for such an affluent bishop (the assets were not all personal but he had control of them) was that he should be at least the equal of any in the area including kings and nobles for he was to have as much influence as they. It is difficult today to look at modern bishops and realize how their role, power, relative wealth, and influence has changed. Bishops had their own armies, judiciary, accountants, attorneys and were a government unto themselves.
i.e., a clergyman representing a congregation The theory of this particular expulsion applied not to clergy in general, but to clergy who represented a Congregation. In the absence of strict separation of church and state, clergy representing congregations had representative and legal roles in other aspects of the government and therefore represented a problem of separation of powers within the government. The same logic, for example prohibited Sheriffs and Tax Officials from the House of Commons as well as Judges sitting in the Lords. With strict separation of church and state however, the separation of powers argument does not hold, and hence there is no such current prohibition. However, at the end of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic and some other religious institutions had reached the conclusion that clerics serving as elected representatives to various civil legislative bodies potentially had an inherent conflict of interest and divided loyalty and banned the practice from the religious end although the civil laws did not preclude it.
The Pope separates the church from the civil law to a degree that is a rarity amongst religions. Even Catholic Pope John Paul II who prohibited priests from holding political office always saw Papal and clerical influence on civil law making and interpretation as a fundamentally important role.
Charlemagne (English: /ˈʃɑːrləmeɪn, ˌʃɑːrləˈmeɪn/; French: [ʃaʁləmaɲ]) or Charles the Great; from the Latin Carolus Magnus, numbered Charles I, was the King of the Franks from 768, the King of the Lombards from 774, and the Emperor of the Romans from 800. During the Early Middle Ages, he united the majority of western and central Europe. He was the first recognised emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire around three centuries earlier. The expanded Frankish state that Charlemagne founded is called the Carolingian Empire. He was later canonised by Antipope Paschal III.
