The plague had quite different impact upon Christianity. People flocked to the Church in terror. The Church explained that the plague was an act of God, and disease a punishment for the sin of not obeying Church authority. The Church branded Justinian a heretic. It declared the field of Greek and Roman medicine, useless in fighting the plague, to be heresy. While the plague assured the downfall of the Roman Empire, it strengthened the Christian church. After the plague, the Church dominated the formal discipline of medicine. The most common medical practice between the sixth and sixteenth centuries used for every malady became bleeding. Christian monks taught that "bleeding" a person would prevent toxic imbalances, prevent sexual desire, and restore the humors. By the sixteenth century this practice would kill tens of thousands each year. Yet, when a person died during blood-letting, it was only lamented that treatment had not been started sooner and performed more aggressively.
The Church had devastating impact upon society. As the Church assumed leadership, activity in the fields of medicine, technology, science, education, history, art and commerce all but collapsed. Europe entered the Dark Ages. Although the Church amassed immense wealth during these centuries, most of what defines civilization disappeared. Technology disappeared as the Church became the most cohesive power in Western society. The extensive aqueduct and plumbing systems vanished.
Orthodox Christians taught that all aspects of the flesh should be reviled and therefore discouraged washing as much as possible. Toilets and indoor plumbing disappeared. Disease became commonplace as sanitation and hygiene deteriorated. For hundreds of years, towns and villages were decimated by epidemics. Roman central heating systems were also abandoned. As one historian writes: "From about A.D. 500 onward, it was thought no hardship to lie on the floor at night, or on a hard bench above low drafts, damp earth and rats. To be indoors was luxury enough. Nor was it distasteful to sleep huddled closely together in company, for warmth was valued above privacy". The vast network of roads that had enabled transportation and communication also fell into neglect and would remain so until almost the nineteenth century. The losses in science were monumental. In some cases the Christian church's burning of books and repression of intellectual pursuit set humanity back as much as two millennia in its scientific understanding. History was rewritten to become a verification of Christian beliefs. Orthodox Christians thought history necessary only in order to place the events of the past into Biblical context.
The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving the world and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves. These clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.
In reality, Christianity was the product of a multinational cabal composed of members of a variety of brotherhoods, secret societies and mystery schools, and was designed to empower and enrich such individuals and to unify their empire. To do so, these conspirators took myriad myths and rituals of virtually all the known cultures and combined them into one, producing a godman to beat them all.
The word Vatican comes from Vaticinia which means place of divinations or place of the sorcerers.
See also: Council of Nicea