Christian Captivity
and Return
Similary, when the papacy and church leadership refused
to follow the direction indicated by dedicated monks and
holy men and persisted in their corruption and distortion
of Christianity, God first reprimanded them with defeat
by Moslem armies during the 7 Christian Crusades to recapture
the Holy Land. God's purpose in their defeat was to shock
them into an understanding that they had left the Principles
of Jesus and if they continued such evil practices, God
would no longer support them. Sadly even the defeat of the
Crusaders could not bring the Church to purify it's practice.
Thus, when the papacy did not correct it's evils despite
many warnings and chastisements, it was exiled into the
hands of the French king into Avignon. Since the church
had so often and so disastrously meddled in politics, the
powerful king of France ordered the papacy and his hierarchy
of leaders to move from Rome to Avignon, where he could
keep his eye on or control it. For about 70 years the popes
were little more than vassals of the French monarchy (1309-1377.
It was a period of humiliation for the Vatican and dismay
for the church as a whole. This patterned the Jewish exile.
After 70 years of papal
captivity in Avignon, another pope in Rome was elected so
for a time there were two popes in authority. The next years
were ones of confusion with the papacy being transferred
back and forth from Avignon to Rome. At one time there were
even 3 popes, until at last the papacy was permanently settled
in Rome. Once reinstated in Rome, the papacy gradually revived,
but by that time the prestige of the papacy, the spiritual
strength of the church and the unity of the Christian people
had severely deteriorated. According to the patten of God's
restoration history, the time was now drawing near to the
final stage of preparation for the coming of the Messiah
as True Parents. However, the foundation for their coming
still had yet to be accomplished so God carried out an intensive
preparation plan to lay the necessary foundation within
the next 400 years. This plan was the Reformation of the
Christian Church (1517 A.D.) which was ignited by Martin
Luther, a figure comparable to Prophet Malachi.
Moslem Captivity and
Return
Because the caliphs, sultans
and grand-viziers paid scant attention to the Sufi and Moslem
holy men's supplication to leave their materialistic ways
and return to pure Islam, God's punishment was inevitable.
In a similar pattern to the Assyrian destruction of the
Northern Jewish Kingdom God's punishment reached the Moslems
through the Mongolos' execution of the Gaghdad caliph and
near total destruction of the Abbasid Kingdom (1216-1258
A.D.) and through the Christian Crusaders' attacks on the
Umayyad Kingdom (1095-1291 A.D).
After the destruction of
the Abbasid Kingdom, the Moslems experienced a period of
political weakness, moral disorganization and religious
division. In place of one empire, "Dar al-Islam",
there were in fact more than a half dozen separate Moslem
sultanates in Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Persia, India
and the nominal Moslem empire of the Mongol khans. Thus
from a period of reduced, captive Islamic power and from
the ashes of a Moslem world mauled by Frankish crusaders
and devastated by Mongol cavalry, Islam again rose to power
thorugh the expansion of the Ottoman Empire of the Turks.
This return to political power was completed with the entering
of Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453 A.D. and through
the golden age of the Turks (1453-1566 A.D.). As mentiond
in the previous section the time was now drawing near to
the final stage of preparation for the coming of the Mesianic
True Parents and yet the Moslem world still did not have
a foundation to understand or receive the Messiah. Consequently,
Bod began an intensive program to reform (purify) the Moslem
people. This was accomplished by Suleyman (the 10th Ottoman
sultan, (1520-1566 A.D.), a figure comparable to Prophet
Malachi and Martin Luther.
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