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I gather they don't teach history in the public schools anymore.
Prior to Henry VIII the Pope had considerably more temporal power than now. This was aided by a notorious document called the Donation of Constantine, which pretended that the Emperor Constantine had, in the fourth century, made the Pope his heir and successor -- this document surfaced around the 9th or 10th century and was used by the Church to argue that every European king was a direct subordinate of the pope (this was finally proven to be a fraud by Latin grammarian Lorenzo Valla, circa 1470).
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