The Catholic Church’s world-religion scope required interposing itself between believers and God.

Evidence

Perhaps, however, the Catholic Church could create a world religion only by interrupting even this immediacy: by interposing itself between man and God, it moved God to a height which even in this regard was inaccessible to the unaided individual. — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 5775

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Simmel’s key move: adding further mediation layers multiplies distance, and thus enlarges the group a principle can govern — a definitional statement about how the triad scales.