1 This was a century that we can consider as the most difficult for Christianity. Historians call it the “Century of Iron” or “Pornocracy” (the power originating from servile and sexual relations), when great Roman families, and even families from outside Rome, began to intervene in the power of the Church, such as the Tusculans, the Crescentii and the Theophylacts.

2 The Church began to mix itself with temporal power, with the nobles intervening in its questions by means of spurious relations, moved by money and by practices of many orgies. In fact, it was a period of great hardness, also called saeculum obscurum.

3 We can highlight at least five popes who had a quite difficult role in those days of the Church. The first of them, Stephen VI (from the end of the previous century until the beginning of this one), was protagonist of the so-called “Synod of the Corpse”. At the time, the religious had divergences of opinion among themselves; there were many disputes that ended in extremely complicated processes. What did, then, pope Stephen do? He ordered to exhume, remove from the sepulcher, that one who was his enemy and who became known as pope Formosus. This pope was considered heretical, for he committed acts that the Church did not admit and would have become pope in a questionable way. Thus, by order of Stephen VI, he was removed from the tomb and dressed with the papal clothes to be judged. He was condemned, his corpse — that had lain for nine months — was dismembered, and his remains were thrown into the Tiber river, in Rome. He, who had been buried with all the honors of the papacy, was removed from the tomb, taken to judgment, seated in a chair with the papal insignias and submitted to a process in which, evidently, he could only be condemned...

4 By the law of cause and effect, for pope Stephen VI his time had also arrived, for it was decided that he was even worse than pope Formosus. After a popular revolt, he was arrested, tortured in prison and killed by strangulation. It was a terrible episode lived by the Church.

5 The second pope, Sergius III, perhaps was the most terrible of all. He involved himself in such a way with the influential Roman family of the Theophylacts, particularly with two women, mother and daughter, Theodora and Marozia, that both practically commanded the pope. It was the family that determined what he should do, the positions that he should grant and the practice of simony (sale of ecclesiastical positions or of goods of the Church). The daughter, Marozia, was very beautiful and had only fifteen years of age.

6 The third pope, John X, was elected under the influence of Theodora, but tried to resist the interference of the nobility. He ended up being arrested and murdered by suffocation, by order of the family of the Theophylacts.

7 From the relationship of pope Sergius III with the young Marozia, traditions say that a boy was born. This boy grew and, later, by influence of the family, became pope John XI. Therefore, the pope had a son with a young woman of the nobility... Celibacy is a rule of the Church, but there are people who have difficulty in dealing with this. Thus, it is probable that similar facts end up happening. However, celibacy was not always a rule of the Church. It was being instituted little by little, from various councils.

8 It was from the 7th and 8th centuries that the Church officially decided for celibacy, for it did not want that its properties be disputed by the heirs of the popes, cardinals, bishops and priests.

9 This century was marked by great disturbance due to money, possession and sexuality, being quite distanced from the original Gospel of the first centuries. Christianity went through an extremely difficult period. How to return to the concepts and to the original ideas? Very difficult...

10 In this century there still did not exist the press. The copies of the sacred texts were produced in the monasteries by the copyists. There were groups of monks who lived isolated from society, whose role was to copy, on parchments, the biblical texts, producing voluminous copies of the Bible. According to some scholars, many of these men were even illiterate. It was a period of great fragility for the biblical texts, because much could happen. Besides, such works could not be bought in stores; they were made by order by the copyists and were not delivered to the people.

11 The people followed a religious tradition without having access to the sacred texts. There were the Gospels and the manuscripts produced by the copyists, but the faithful did not have access to any document; it was not allowed to the common people to maintain contact with these writings. The faith was blind...

12 Another pope, John XII, was elected at seventeen years of age, also by influence of the family of the Theophylacts. Historians say that he faced the papacy as a Roman principality, involving himself in moral and political scandals. It was a very difficult period for the Church, forcing the religious to begin a process of resignification of many of its procedures.

13 We open here a parenthesis for a reflection, without any criticism. In the measure in which one places the conduction of the whole Church under the responsibility of a seventeen-year-old young man, one perceives the little value that, in that time, was attributed to the role of the papacy. We can conclude that there was little reverence to the spiritual sense of the position. It becomes clear that it was much more of a fundamentally political decision than of a connection with the message of Jesus. There is difficulty in seeing Jesus behind these movements, differently from what we saw in the previous centuries, when one perceived clearly the presence of His thought inserted in the context of the events. Already in this century, it becomes difficult to perceive the thought of Jesus in the acts of the Church; one sees only an institution.

14 And behold that from the ashes there is born a point of hope, because the Divinity never left us orphans, even in the most difficult periods of humanity. Noble spirits were reborn to bring commitment with spirituality and renew the spirit. We reaffirm that the Middle Ages was not, completely, a period of darkness. It was, certainly, a period in which we went through very difficult days, days in which the Church compromised itself a lot. Many historians point this century as the apex of the Middle Ages, when things reached the apex of materiality and of the disdain for spiritual questions.

15 However, a glimmer of light arose in the year of 910, when, in Burgundy, some monks founded the Abbey of Cluny (principal center of monastic and cultural renewal of this century). It was an initiative of Benedictine monks to rescue the rule of Benedict of Nursia: “Ora et Labora” — pray and work; live in community and follow the principles of the Gospel of Jesus. In the way things were going, Rome would end up suffocating Christianity. It was necessary to rescue the Gospel and bring to Earth a piece of Heaven. The Abbey of Cluny proposed itself to be a way of living as one would live in Heaven: all helping each other, working and praying together, within spirituality.

16 This movement was very important and spread throughout all Europe. About eight hundred monasteries arose. There began, then, to form a kind of counterpoint to the excesses of Rome, inspired in the rule of Benedict of Nursia, composed of seventy-three articles and a prologue. They wanted to free Christianity from material excesses.

17 In this century, there began the constructions of churches in Romanesque style. There are different architectural styles: Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical etc. The construction of the Abbey of Cluny inaugurated this movement. They were portentous and solid buildings, destined to transmit a sensation of spiritual welcome.

18 Just a curiosity: the difference between Cathedral and Basilica is that the first is the place where is found the cathedra, that is, the chair of the bishop, of the religious authority. An example is the Metropolitan Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro, where is the cardinal Dom Orani Tempesta. Already the Basilica usually is a church dedicated to the homage or reverence to a certain fact or personality, such as the Basilica of Our Lady Aparecida, in the city of Aparecida, in Brazil. A Basilica can also be a Cathedral, but not every Cathedral can be a Basilica. Where is found the principal religious authority of the diocese is always in the Cathedral.

19 This century was marked, also, by a great growth of Islam in scientific terms. The House of Wisdom, founded in the previous century, extended its influence until this period and found itself in full apex, living an extraordinary moment of intellectual production and generation of knowledge. It was in this time that Avicenna stood out, already mentioned previously, a great doctor and scholar of multiple areas of knowledge, whose presence was intimately linked to the intellectual tradition of the House of Wisdom. Not only he, but various other thinkers arose in this context of cultural and scientific development. Islam lived a period of great splendor, in contrast with Christianity, which, in general way, went through a phase of significant delay.

20 In 969, the Fatimid Caliphate founded, in Egypt, the city of Cairo. It was no longer Baghdad the principal center of influence, as had occurred in the time of the Abbasids. Nor was it Alexandria, which had played relevant role in previous periods. From then on, Cairo became the principal political and cultural pole of the region, coming later to consolidate itself as capital of Egypt due to the influence of the Fatimids. The Crusades, which would begin to occur in the following centuries, would pass through Egypt because there was found the sultan.

21 It happened, in this period, the more effective christianization of Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary, Poland and Scandinavia began to adopt Christianity in a more ample way. The same occurred with Russia, in 988, on the occasion of the conversion of prince Vladimir I of Kiev. At that time, Kiev, currently situated in Ukraine, was the capital of his principality.

22 Russians and Ukrainians are, still today, majority orthodox Christians, consequence of the schism that would occur in the following century.

23 Russia and Ukraine: two countries, two territories, one same people in their origins, today divided...