Marginal Catholic Church

Make the Roman Catholic Church the same as OTL, just a couple orders of magnitude smaller, so there are maybe 10 million Catholics instead of a billion. Have the same canon of Scripture (so PoD would probably have to be after 100 AD). Bonus for making the RCC so small for the entire AD time span.
 
Make the Roman Catholic Church the same as OTL, just a couple orders of magnitude smaller, so there are maybe 10 million Catholics instead of a billion. Have the same canon of Scripture (so PoD would probably have to be after 100 AD). Bonus for making the RCC so small for the entire AD time span.

Have the Aquilean patriarch break with Rome and claim as a Pope which the Germans will back which will cause Central Europe to be Ambrosian while the Avignon Papacy claim as pope and the Schism between Rome and Avignon remains.
 
Maybe a more, agrressive proselytization campaign by Cyril and Methodius, resulting in a more, bigger popularity of Byzantine Christianity?
 
Dealing with religion in alternate history is always dicey. And when it gets treated around here at all, it's usually on strictly materialist terms - i.e., religious entity as purely man-made phenomenon.

As a Catholic, I do believe that the church is 1.2 billion and change *for a reason.* But having said that...

1. On purely materialist terms, I think your best bet by far is a very early POD.
Probably with the Gnostic crisis of the 2nd century. The potential there would be that Christianity devolves into competing mystical cults. I think that was very unlikely just on the terms of who the Gnostic leaders were, and how compelling their theology actually was. But this was clearly a point when the Church was at its most vulnerable, still trying to flesh out its own ecclesiology, liturgy, and soteriology.

2. After that, it has a great deal of momentum going, and only a powerful external threat with an equivalent level of metaphysical confidence will suffice. And that can only point to Islam. Best bet there would be Christian defeats at both Tours (732) and the Siege of Constantinople (718).
 
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10 million is an eay number ot reach, it is the number of Catholics in Britain and Eire in 2011.
So just have a scism in the Roman Catholic church (presumably early on) that meant that each country has it's own church (Church of Britain, Church of France etc.)
 

Skokie

Banned
Have the Moors conquer Western and Central Europe? The Catholics can exist as refugees in Byzantium.
 
The Protestants elect one of their own as the Holy Roman Emperor and he invades Italy to forcibly reform the church, perhaps? The Protestant Emperor puts a reformist on the papal throne and the Catholic Church ends up looking rather Protestant (and conveniently denuded of most of its assets).

Catholics elsewhere (I'm thinking Spain and perhaps France as well) oppose this and elect their own pope.

Even then, that's more than 10 million Catholics. Maybe France goes state-church or *Protestant later, leaving only Iberia Catholic?
 
More successful Reformation? You could have France, Bohemia and Hungary go Protestant rather easily.

Speaking as something of Reformation-buff--the trick with Bohemia and Hungary isn't to have them 'go Protestant'--they already had--it's to keep them there.

France, on the other hand, is much more difficult--there's a determined popular resistance to Protestantism there. Having the Edict of Nantes holding is probably the best you can do--and that requires the Huguenots to stop acting like insurgents at the drop of a hat...
 
Dealing with religion in alternate history is always dicey. And when it gets treated around here at all, it's usually on strictly materialist terms - i.e., religious entity as purely man-made phenomenon.

As a Catholic, I do believe that the church is 1.2 billion and change *for a reason.* But having said that...

As a Catholic, Horay for Catholicism on the forum:D

As an ameteur historian, probably early, I'd say don't have Constantine endorse Christianity, so that Catholicism remains one of several mystery cults that alltogether are 20% of the empire at most. If the empire dies more or less on shedual, then the church is probably confined to a minority religion in the meditteranean, so think Judaism. Still probably more than 10 million, but for a religion to have only 10 million after 2,000 years without dying completely is damn near impossible, as even Zoroastrianism is more than that today.
 
...as even Zoroastrianism is more than that today.

...about 200K, actually. Samaritans are about 700 people left. Mandeans are not very numerous.

Of the more recent developments (1000 years or so), Yezidis are a little over 1 million, though they never went to that kind of rise-and-decline, and Karaites are about 50K strong.

In fact ca. 10 million would be almost directly comparable to Judaism or the Copts. Armenian and Assyrian Christians are even less numerous than that.

So it's not too low a number.
 
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