Arguably the worst period in the history of the Roman Catholic church was the period of the Three Popes (1410-1417, closely followed by the period of the Two Popes, 1378-1410). When the point of a pope is to hold the unity of the universal church together (after 1054, at least the unity of the universal church in the West), to have two popes is unfortunate and to have three is a disaster. Whether divided in two or in three, a divided universal church has no claim to be universal!
But the Roman church came through this crisis, not least because it re-asserted its unity around a single pope by choosing to fall in behind one and only one pope from 1417. The way was paved for the development of doctrine both as a system (building on Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274) and as a way of life (following the notable example of Francis, 1182-1226) in a coherent, elegant catechetical edifice. Fast forward through the debacle of papal ambition for an edifice of a different kind - sparking the Reformation (ameliorated from a Roman perspective by the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation) - and you get to Louise Mensch's sympathetic endorsement of the edifice and its sharp edge re her own situation as a divorced and remarried woman (mentioned in my previous post).
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