How One Church Became Two | The Great Schism That Split Christianity (Ep. 6)

On a summer afternoon in the year 1054, inside the greatest church in the Christian world, the worship was interrupted. A delegation from Rome marched to the high altar of Hagia Sophia and laid down a decree of excommunication against the leader of the Eastern church. Within days, the East answered in kind. In that moment, the one church of Jesus Christ tore into two, and nearly a thousand years later the tear has never fully healed. This is Episode 6 of The Church Through the Ages, a cinematic documentary series tracing the full 2,000-year story of the Christian Church. In this episode we uncover how centuries of drift between Rome and Constantinople hardened into the Great Schism, and why the split between Catholic and Orthodox still shapes the faith of more than a billion believers today. In this episode: The two great capitals of Christianity, Latin Rome and Greek Constantinople, drifting apart The small differences and the deep ones, including the disputed word in the creed The real question beneath it all: who holds authority over the whole church? The dramatic break of 1054 and the mutual excommunications How the sack of Constantinople in 1204 made the wound almost impossible to heal The birth of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions we know today The modern gestures of reconciliation, and why the longing for unity remains