A geopolitical history of the cataclysmic events that shaped the First Vatican Council and the Dogma of Papal Infallibly.

The story of this Christ-nation begins over a thousand years ago with the conversion of this agrarian people and ends in the offices of the most powerful people in the world. The pope, representing a Vatican at peak world-wide influence, and the president of the United States, at peak geopolitical consequence, when at any moment the world might well end in nuclear war – the central, significant, centrifugal, geopolitical, spiritual focus of all these energies lay withing the meager borders and daily struggles of this eastern European nation that sought, century after century to simply be itself. To exist according to its designs. To be free. To be Catholic. To be Poland.

These Christian holy wars emblazoned into modern consciousness that we collectively call the crusades existed before the protestant reformation, and therefore, are explicit Catholic history. The modern papacy as we know it was in fact carefully crafted by crusader-era popes. The most prominent and most universally recognized promoter for holy war to Judea was St. Bernard of Clairvaux, canonized in 1197 and declared a doctor of the Church. Battles of epic scope, accounts of miracles, the most venerated of Catholic relics, and the most renowned holy orders exploded into western European society and its consciousness. Yet in the margins of the pages of the chronicles of these times, despite the overall affirmation of their means, you’ll also find terrible crimes: institutional greed and scandal, thefts on an unimaginable scale, and mass murder. While this is less a condemnation of the behavior of Christians, and rather an indictment of the fallen state of mankind, as Catholics, this particular history is ours to reckon with.