how did the Roman Catholic Church survive the fall of the Roman Empire?

[© tweed]

how did the Roman Catholic Church survive the fall of the Roman Empire?

[CatoMinor]

Well, the church as a whole survived because of the combination of the successor kingdoms converting and the Eastern "Romans" still holding on to their empire in the east. But the Roman Catholic Church did not really become a distinct entity, in my opinion, until ~400 years after the fall of the Western Empire and the great east/west schism happened.

[pbrower2a]

The Roman Empire died of economic and military failure.  The Roman Catholic Church survived because it need neither economic nor military success.

[The Mikado]

Clovis' Frankish kingdom converted to Catholicism and decisively chased the Arian Visigoths out of Gaul into Hispania, and Clovis' Francia was the major support for the Church for a long time.  The Arian Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy was similarly crushed under Justinian, and its Italian successor states would be under the Catholic fold (Ostrogothic Italy had featured the Arian Goths ruling over a mostly Catholic population, anyway).  Merovingian Francia was obviously the strongest successor state in the west to begin with, so its loyalty to the Trinitarian orthodoxy gave the Church a major territory to prosper in.

The Church also, rather perversely, would eventually luck out due to the Islamic conquests greatly reducing Eastern Christendom's importance and scope (Eastern Christendom had to turn away from Syria and Egypt and towards converting Slavs).  With three of the five sees of Justinian's Pentarchy "lost," the Papacy naturally increased in prestige in the 7th century.  EDIT: Yes, the official schism wouldn't happen until the 11th century, but even by the 7th century, the divide between Latin (Western) and Greek (Eastern) Christendom is very real, and the dispute over whether the Bishop of Rome is just one of several top Bishops or is the Pontifex Maximus of the whole Church was already a major point of contention.  To the Emperors in Constantinople, the Pope was merely a Latin Patriarch, of no greater stature than the Patriarch of Constantinople.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

The Will of God.

[Insula Dei]

Because the authority of the church was of vital importance to the legitimacy of the new rulers, seems like a very concise, yet not entirely useless, answer.

[barfbag]

They pretty much became the Roman Empire in terms of power. As the empire shrunk, the church grew and forced itself on people. Now that government was ineffective, the church became the new social structure of the land.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The Roman Catholic Church had survived because it had already been independent of the faltering Empire by the time the Turks extinguished its final remnant in 1453.