What was the Great Schism?
” Answer: The Great Schism is the title given to the rift that formed in the Church in the eleventh century A.D. This separation led to the “Roman Catholic” Church, hereby known as the Western Church, and the “Greek Catholic” or “Greek Orthodox Church,” hereby known as the Eastern Church. In order to best understand what happened, we need to examine history and the context in which that history occurred. The Church from the fourth century onwards had 5 patriarchs or heads, and each one governed a jurisdictional area or patriarchate. The patriarchates were located in the west in Rome, which spoke Latin, and in the east in Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Byzantium, which all spoke Greek. Wanting to create a new Christian empire, and due to the degree of paganism in Rome, the Emperor Constantine decided to move the capital of the Empire to Byzantium (which was later renamed Constantinople after him). Around this time, and shortly after this move, the barbaric “Germanic” tribes began i
