The word church comes from the Greek ekklêsia (in Latin, ecclesia), who means “assembled” and comes from the verb ekkaleô, “I convene”. This term indicates, on the one hand, the religious community rested by Jesus-Christ on the other hand, the place where the faithful ones are assembled (but the Protestants say temple rather).

Since many centuries, the Christian communities are multiple: Churches catholic, orthodoxe, Protestant (or reformed), and the history of the Church (catholic) is, itself, heteroclite: in nearly two thousand years, it covered with the extremely contrasted periods, it concerns multiple people, extremely different and often opposed, and it even has, at one time now completed, makes the bet build a civilization.

The Gospels are completed by the sending of the disciples of Jesus, who says to them: “Go by the whole world, proclaim the Good news with all creation”. This order incontestably gave a “universal” dimension to the mission whose close relations of Jesus felt invested after Pentecost.

The first Christian Jews initially revolve around the group of the apostles, who felt invited to testify to the resurrection of Jesus, to introduce by the baptism all them converted into the community of the believers and to guide this incipient Church.

This one had to overcome several crises. If the Good news were addressed all to the men, those did they have, into practice to receive it and put it, to subject themselves to the regulations of the Jewish law, which modelled the life of chosen people? The community was divided into a “Hebrew” party, which answered by the affirmative, and a party “hellenist”. The attitude of Paul, who devoted himself primarily to the pagan ones, reinforced this last party; the fall of Jerusalem, which ruined the Jewish people of Palestine, put an end to this conflict, which had lasted more than twenty years. This community also had to overcome its disappointment in its waiting of the arrival differed from “last times”. The famous word is known: “One awaited Jesus and it is the Church which came.” It was thus necessary to compose with the future, i.e. to organize the communities: the companions of the first apostles got busy there, as the epistles pastoral of Paul attest it. It was necessary to fix in writing the preaching of the pilot first of Jesus; as from the Sixties constituted texts whose whole formed New Testament.

During two centuries, the Church knew a risked life, which did not oppose its expansion. Each community was directed by a bishop, surrounded by his presbytres and its deacons. Its life was characterized by the Eucharistic celebration, the reception of the catechumens, their initiation with the Christian faith, and by the fraternal assistance of its members. The radiation of this religion was such as it penetrated, in the one century space, all the Roman Empire, and the bishop of Rome, the pope, increased his powers quickly.

The Christians were the object, of time to other, of persecutions, since they refused to sacrifice to the worship of the emperor. After Néron, Dèce (249-251) and Dioclétien (284-305) continued to lead a policy of oppression to their regard. But one was the day before a radical change: the “conversion” of Constantin into 313.

The Church enters one new era. Recognized officially, it even became, under Théodose, at the end of the IV ^E century, religion of State. The ecclesiastical organization was modelled on the imperial administration. Its religious quarrels did not compromise any more from now on the only communion of the Churches, but the cohesion of the empire. Also the heresies which had course up to that point (arianism, for example) were treated in councils convened by the emperor.

From the O C century, the empire itself divided between its oriental party and her Western part; this cut affected the Church. The traditions, the cultures Greek and Latin, the intellectual vitality of the East and the progressive deterioration of the Occident contributed to give several faces to the Church. As well in the theological writings as in the liturgy or the ecclesiastical discipline, these differences marked a drift which led, a few centuries later, with an irreversible rupture. Constantinople had to fight against the cruel invasions, but she managed to contain or absorb their multiple pressures. The Occident, on the other hand, was carried. In 410, Rome was invaded and, twenty years later, the Barbarians settled in North Africa. In this collapse, the Latin Church had from now on to count on itself and either on the power weakening of the empire. The invaders composed with the ecclesiastical persons in charge, and the latter gradually undertook the conversion of the new people. It was the time of the remote missions into Germanic or Plank, beyond the borders of the old Roman Empire.

To the VIII ^E century, whereas Spain was under the domination berbéro-Arabic, the Carolingian power was established. Italy being threatened by the Lombardic ones, the pope appealed to defend it either in Constantinople, weakened, but in Charles Martel, who, in return for this step which implied recognition of its very new power, gave to the bishop of Rome some territories: Papal States. From now on, the Carolingian dynasty, by its conquests, its beginnings of organization and centralization, nourishes the ambition to restore the empire.

By crowning Charlemagne (800), the pope answered this wish and marked thus how much the Occident moved away from Constantinople. But this empire was transitory and was dislocated in multiple suzerainties. Rome lost a political support then; moreover, the Church was parcelled out: its bishops were dependant on the new suzerains or the latter escaped to them. The loads were sold; moreover, the clergy was uncultivated. Rome itself was the theater of dark intrigues.

From 1059 the “Gregorian reform” intervened, which was prolonged during several decades. It was not only a question of restoring the authority and the independence of papacy, but of reforming the Church. That implied a restoration of the episcopal authority, assisted of a new clergy. From where birth of communities of priests devoted to the prayer and the ministry: “regular canons”. That supposed a financial independence, i.e. it was necessary to tear off with the owners, who they were monks or laic, the parishes which were on their seigniories. Then, the centralization of the power, the organization of the curia, the establishment of a right connected with the church could bear their fruits and form a power which resisted the aimings of the princes; with XI ^E century, “quarrel of Nominations” (papacy not wanting more that the princes and the emperor can name the bishops), marked by the tender of the emperor Henri IV in Canossa (1077), was regulated with the legal settlement of Worms (1122).

In parallel, the too powerful abbeys, like Cluny, had to reform itself; new orders were created, in particular the Cistercian ones and the Carthusian monks. This movement gave rise to “a new” Christendom, whose apogee was at the XIII ^E century with Innocent III. Rome, which had been able to mobilize in the crusades energies of an Occident expanding, had two new orders then: the Franciscan ones and the Dominican ones, to undertake an intense theological activity in the recent universities, to send missionaries in the East and in the Islamic world, to make reign, even brutally, the orthodoxy, threatened by the hearths of the heresy.

As of the end of the XIII ^E century, incipient nationalisms reflect in question this guardian authority; the conflict which opposed Boniface VIII to Philippe the Beautiful one announced the disappearance of this theocracy. The balance of the spiritual and political forces of Christendom was compromised. Marsile de Padoue or Guillaume d' Occam developed a political philosophy which affirmed the sovereign authority of the States and denounced the monarchical structure of the Church. They announce to the theory “conciliarist”, according to whom the pope must subject himself to the authority of the councils.

The great schism of Occident ruined the prestige of the papacy, which continued, after the return to the unit, to make weigh on the populations of heavy financial expenses. The One hundred Year old war, the Black Death, the setting out of night light of the universities, the insurrection hussite in Bohemia (1419), radical theories of Wyclif in England, the final disappearance (1453) of the Byzantine Empire, as many disasters which developed a distressed climate, dominated by the apprehension of the death and the sanction of the “last judgment” and which called “the reform of the head and the members of the Church” that the many councils did not manage to impose. On another side, a new spirituality appeared. Individualist, it took his distances with regard to a declining clergy and was often exerted apart from the visible Church and of his sacraments.

At the beginning of the XVI ^E century, Europe was crossed by multiple reforming currents: the Protestant Reform proposed the rediscovery of Christian people taking part in his entirety in the universal priesthood of Christ, and an exclusive attachment with the Bible. So the Reform rejected the supervision of a clergy which, by introducing the distinction between the laic ones and itself, assumed functions and powers on subjected people. According to the reformers, all baptized had from now on the right of the free examination of the Writings, without being subordinates with clerical orthodoxy. It is true that this formidable fight, which undermined Christendom, was used as springboard with the political competitions. At the time of the opening of the council of Thirty (1545), Northern Europe escaped in its greater part from the Roman authority. Admittedly, the colonial expansion of Spain and Portugal opened with the catholic missions the New World and the Far East.

Before propagating its ideas, the Roman Church was to be redefined. It was a question for it of again leading million men to the hello by the faith as a Jesus-Christ and the sacraments of its Church. The Counter-Reformation was harnessed with this project. If she were undeniable successes, she, however, was gradually paralyzed by the supervision of the catholic princes, by a defensive attitude with regard to the Protestants, whose role continued in Europe, by a mistrust in front of any innovation (of which the most famous example is the judgment of Galileo in 1633).

The birth of modern sciences, the rise of skepticism, individualism, the “Lights” shook the Christian universe in its depths. The building which linked, not without clashes and difficulties, the Church at the company collapsed definitively at the end of the XVIII ^E century. The torch which Christianity for the control of humanity held passed in other hands.

In a few years, the Roman Catholic Church saw its structures crumbling, and the French revolution caused at it a deep trauma which explains, to a certain extent, its preserving attitude and reactionary throughout the XIX ^E century. All that could be claimed of 1789, in particular freedom and the republican heritage, was the object of the sharpest loathing. The support given to the “restorations” of the Former regime, the support of the preserving movements, the coalition, in the middle of the century, with the middle-class and the abandonment of those which the middle-class exploited characterize this conservatism of the Church.

It is true that the XIX ^E century is one period, for the Roman Church, of intense missionary activity, supported by the colonial expansion. But this association even was not without ambiguity nor danger. In the same way, in Europe, the initiatives of education and assistance are renewed, but that is done with the ulterior motive of a restoration of the functions previously assumed, and the reconquest of these tasks of substitution becomes, in the new context of the Sovereign states, the occasion of power struggles, competitions, constant polemics.

In addition, charity works have as an aim to generally relieve misery and not to fight the causes of the system which generates it. The few attempts to bring the Gospel closer to “socialism” are transitory, and their initiators reduced to silence. The liberal-democrats of the end of the XIX ^E century, in France and Europe, are minority in a preserving Church which refuses the modern society. Magpie IX, restored in its authority by the French troops, resisted all the forces of progress.

The judgment of the “modern errors” in the Syllabus (1864), the mobilization of the catholic opinion around the “Roman question” (Rome was not to be the capital of unified Italy), the crispations of an authority which felt mined led to a council: The Vatican I, which ratified these tendencies, symbolized by the dogma of “pontifical infallibility”.

Leon XIII (1878) remained intransigent on this “Roman question”, whereas he admitted that the republic was, in other places, a reality impossible to circumvent. He pushed even the French catholics to adopt the republican mode (1890). He also published a famous encyclical: Rerum novarum (1891). But these openings, extremely careful, were ordered by a political realism and not by an adhesion, as for the bottom, with the situations and new mentalities. Thus the rallying is explained by the fear of a separation of the Church and the State; Rerum novarum is an attempt to recover some audience near a proletariat whose Church is unaware of however the condition as well as the causes of its control. The pontificate of Magpie X accentuated the reflexes of stiffness and defense. The “modernistic crisis”, which was solved authoritatively, rejected any attempt at application of new methods, arrivals of Germany, to approach the Bible. The judgment of the Furrow, democratic movement of tendency, the reinforcement of centralization and later the creation of the Index, the coding of a new canonical right maintained the Church in its cutting off.

After the First World War its attitude changed somewhat: it tried to dissociate its missionaries activities of the colonial imperialisms. It invited its members, to leave the insulation in which Christianity was locked up, “to engage” in a world which had become to him foreign, and it was the paddle of the movements of catholic action. The university institutions of catholic obedience did not manage to have taken on the large modern currents of the thought and the culture. On the political plan, the concern of the Church of being made recognize by States which had been concealed with its supervision brought it to conclude from the legal settlements with totalitarian modes and it nourishes a violent anticommunism that its adversaries themselves (which one thinks of Hitler) used. Until the death of Pie XII the authoritarianism of Rome was considerable.

The council the Vatican II seems to have marked a new stage, whose consequences overflow the framework of the only Roman Church. The greatest contribution of this council is to have modified the way in which the catholics define their membership in the Church: they are not any more one minor people, led by an omnipotent ecclesiastical hierarchy, but they train people of baptized in whom each one has to fulfill a function, if various that are the functions. He recommends, finally, an opening, differed so a long time, with the modern thought and operates, especially, a bringing together with the other Christian confessions. It is there the one half-century result of obscure and quiet work carried out by often repressed pioneers. Also this council rather crowns it former efforts which it does not give a program for the future, since this one is inhabited per so many new questions, not controlled.

In this direction, it allows the Christians, orthodoxe, Protestant and catholic, to seek their unit, not by disavowing their past, but by combining their energies to answer the decisive stakes of the planetary situation present, which they are cultural or political. Perhaps contributes it, ultimately, not to overcome all resistances, which are numerous still, but to prepare this Church, which throughout its history sought, of reform in reform, to find its vocation first, to spread the good news of the resurrection of Christ.

According to the council the Vatican II (constitution Lumen gentium), the Church is initially a mystery, i.e. at the same time the sign and the channel of the intimate union with God, thanks to Christ, and of the unit of all mankind. The spiritual Community, the Catholic church is also a company organized in this world, Messianic people.

To get for her Church the instruments of her growth, Christ wanted that the primacy of the Roman pontiff constitutes for the successors of the apostles, namely the bishops, a principle and a base of unit of faith and communion. As a vicar of the Christ and Pasteur of all the Church, the pope enjoys a power plenary, supreme, immediate and universal, that it can always exert in perfect freedom. The pope and the bishops form a college, the episcopal Body, which succeeds the apostolic college.

Each Episcopal conference (one by Christian country) writes its statutes, which must be recognized by Rome. One will envisage, in particular, the permanent Council bishops, commissions, a general secretary.

The central apparatus of government of the Roman Church answers impossibility for the pope of achieving without auxiliaries nor advisers the tasks which are related to its solicitude for all the Churches. The total statute of these supreme authorities was renovated in 1967 per Paul VI (constitution Regimini Ecclesiae universae) so that those which assist the Supreme Pontiff come from all the points of the world; that the loads are exerted during five years only, although the mandates can be extended with the liking of the pope; that the cardinals presidents (cardinal prefects of congregations) leave their post office with the death of the Holy Father, except for the cardinals vicar of Rome, camerlingue and large penitentiary, which have a particular function. From now on, the chancery of State has precedence of the congregations, secretariats, courts, offices and councils.

From now on also, each Roman congregation understands seven bishops, who preserve their respective dioceses, but take part each year in the full sessions, where the problems are discussed foreground and where are taken the decisive orientations, the experiment of the whole world penetrating thus automatically in the offices of Rome. The decision of Paul VI was applied on on March 1st, 1968, a first change general of holders to the more high level took place on on March 1st 1973. The internationalization of the curia is thus accompanied by the humility of the services of Church, no one not being able to assert, under the terms of its former responsibilities, the right to reach a higher function automatically.

The “aggiornamento” of the Church however caused many interrogations and of concerns. Thus developed a catholic “integrism”, which refuses the evolution of the modern societies, by interpreting the evil of living industrialized countries like a testimony of the “culture of died” to work in the contemporary world, and by noting that the progression of the other great religions, like Islam and the Judaism, is carried out through their most intransigent currents. This dispute of the work of the council was in particular marked by the schism of Mgr Marcel Lefebvre.

During its long pontificate (1978-2005), the action of the pope Jean-Paul II was thus announced by the search for a difficult balance between the partisans of an engagement more shown in the political and economic problems of the world (“theology of the release”) and of the more spiritualistic currents for which the urgency is less to adapt to the contemporary universe to point out the conditions of its safety to him: the task of the Church is from now on of rechristianiser the world.