One reason the church was so powerful was the fact that clerics (church officials) were largely the only ones who could read. This meant that the common people had to rely on the priests to tell them what the Bible said, and what God intended them to do. Since most people were illiterate, they did not have access to the works of the great thinkers, such as Greek philosophers and Roman historians. Since the ideas of most great thinkers are built on a foundation of the thoughts of other great thinkers, the common man had no means of either reading or writing great ideas that did not come from the church. I wonder how history would have been different had the church not been so powerful. What if literacy had started in another group or religion had come to hold power because of it?
This is interesting to think about. In a way, one could take this to the extreme and imagine if literacy would have survived at all. When the Roman empire collapsed, the Church was the body that not only kept the practices of reading and reading alive, but also preserved writings of earlier times. Without them, could it be possible that knowledge of reading and writing could have been lost with the invasions of the Germanic tribes? Such a development could have set the world back many hundreds of years.
I agree with the comment above. The Church, although very corrupted in its early days, did help pass along the tradition of reading. If there was one book that anyone learned to read from, it was the Bible. The Bible helped spread literacy and various other forms of knowledge; learning a different language was doable by reading the Bible in a different tongue. Had the Church not been the primary literary source, it is reasonable to assume that they would not have become the powerhouse they grew into. Rather, it seems that the Church’s literary achievements both corrupted and helped the Church survive.