The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury
2025 is showing itself to be a complicated year for the Christian religion. A few months ago the very public exit of Justin Welby from the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, for all the reasons the exit was for, was preceded by weeks and months of air time and print space from the now so many different people and viewpoints holding some level of office within the CofE (Church of England). Without even a tiny diversion into the fascinating history of the 1400s and 1500s in Italy and northern Europe, and of course England, as to why and how Protestantism and the Church of England arose, this blog will just put all Protestant beliefs, including the Kirk in Scotland and the roughly 45,000 different denominations and sub groups and tiny groups under ‘Protestant’ meaning it arose from the 1400s, which is only about 500 years.
In this same year, and very recently, a loved and respected Pope died, and the air time and print time and TV time was one huge global outpouring of grief, ceremony, gathering, traditional processes to be followed, plus the information that many young people are attending Catholic churches. Yet the Catholic church has a fairly terrible history of abuses, scandals, financial issues, (and looking back in history, were responsible for severing the relationship of the human to Helios, the governing power of Earth, before of course themselves being treated as the evil ones by the Protestants). Even for those who are within the Catholic church and hold to the beliefs and to the Christian god in the afterlife, the less than positive aspects of the Catholic church are public knowledge. Yet events as in recent weeks, and the smooth transition to a new Pope, have been as a united group of people, under one event and one person. And further, because the new Pope is an American, the Catholic church has seamlessly joined global politics with the offer of a possible Vatican hosting of peace talks thereby leapfrogging into the centre of the present day world crisis.
So, the question is, why do these two underlying structures of western civilization show in public to be so diametrically opposite in 2025?
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