From the desk of the pastor for July 20, 2025

The Lord be with you! We want to know why the Western Empire was doomed to fall and how this cataclysm affected the Church overall. Even having a wild sense of this event helps us to appreciate how difficult these times were.

Joseph Tainter provides a simple but depressing explanation of why the Western Empire fell in The Collapse of Complex Societies. He rightly observes that complex societies, like Rome, are essentially problem solving systems. Unlike hunter gatherers or nomads, a true civilization is marked by its ability to adapt and change. This insight raises the question of why any complex society would fall. The answer is diminishing returns from a fixed resource base.

For Tainter a society solves its problems by becoming more complex. This complexity has a resource cost such that increasing levels of complexity cost more and more resources. Eventually, the increase in complexity cannot justify the increased resource cost. Then the society must become more simple, which usually involves political disintegration.

In the case of the Western Empire, this diminishing return was seen in the tension between taxes and border control. Extracting wealth from the Western Empire’s provinces was very difficult due to their distance from water ways. If a farm or town was within ten miles of a river or coast, collecting taxes was profitable. Beyond that it did not make the Empire much money. In a world without automobiles or trains, you could only make so much money via moving goods on an ox cart.

Why not cut services to the part that could not pay for itself? In other words, if the province of Gaul (modern day France) did not make money, just let them deal with their own affairs. Rome did that. The result was that the governors of Gaul (and most of the provinces of the West) began outsourcing their security to barbarian tribes. Eventually the Romans could not pay these barbarian armies, which considered themselves Roman armies, enough money. Instead these armies were allowed to rule themselves becoming de facto independent kingdoms.

The tipping point in the Western Empire was the death of Emperor Theodosius I in AD 395. Over the next eighty years more and more lands were lost till Rome itself was sacked in AD 476. By that time the city was a shadow of its former glory. Only about 30,000 people still lived in Rome when Odocer, the Germanic king, took Italy, and the Roman Senate fled to the Eastern Empire.

The Fall of Rome was seen as a disaster of epic proportions. Since most of the tribes were Arians, the Catholic Church was often persecuted. At the same time the average citizen suffered greatly from lack of basic services and security. Across the Western Empire only one institution remained that could teach, feed the poor, and fix the sewers: the Catholic Church. The more competent the local bishop, the more he would provide - and often the more was demanded. Next time we will look at how the papacy dealt with this change in the life of Pope Leo I.

In His Sacred Heart,

Fr. John