AHC: Minimal or nonexistant Catholic church power

Crying · Mar 27, 2017

With a POD sometime after 400 AD, minimize or erase the power/influence of the Catholic Church over Europe.

Bonus points if you can do so while still keeping Europe mostly christian.

Timaeus · Mar 28, 2017

Have Arian Christianity dominate. There, Catholic Church neutered in favor of the Arian Church.

DanMcCollum · Mar 28, 2017

Timaeus said:
Have Arian Christianity dominate. There, Catholic Church neutered in favor of the Arian Church.

Which is what I was just going to say, and what I've managed to pull off in my Amalingian timeline. Well, Catholicism isn't entirely neutered, but the Pope hasn't been able to set himself up as superior to the other Patriarchs

Tripledot · Mar 28, 2017

Have a particularly strong Holy Roman Emperor centralize the state, capture, and preferably rule from Rome. Given a few centuries, the Pope becomes as powerless as the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Avrorrange · Mar 28, 2017

Protestants take over europe.

Kerney · Mar 28, 2017

Crying said:
With a POD sometime after 400 AD, minimize or erase the power/influence of the Catholic Church over Europe.

Bonus points if you can do so while still keeping Europe mostly christian.

Wank the Irish missionary efforts, making them the primary transmitters of Christianity. Follow it up with a schism over the date of Easter or the generally less authoritarian nature of the early Irish church, making them the primary form of Christianity from Frisia to Russia. Then screw the Franks.

Fabius Maximus · Mar 28, 2017

AD 400 is probably too late. Once the Western Empire falls to barbarians, which by this date was probably inevitable sooner or later, there's going to be a big power vacuum in Europe into which the Church is going to be sucked by virtue of being the only wide-raging organisation full of educated and literate people. Probably you'd have to somehow give the Western Empire a new lease of life, so that the Imperial bureaucracy continues to rule over Europe and the power vacuum never gets formed.

Byzantion · Mar 28, 2017

Crying said:
With a POD sometime after 400 AD, minimize or erase the power/influence of the Catholic Church over Europe.

Bonus points if you can do so while still keeping Europe mostly christian.

Maybe regional churches like Celtic churches develope so independedly , that the papal authority and rome as a center doesn´t matter anymore. Maybe many fragmented " national" churches with owen liturgy . Also Byzantine Rome or later arab conquest of the eternal city ?