The Church inherited Rome’s monopoly over cultural direction with penal enforcement.

Evidence

This not only social but national and racial separation between large masses of intellectuals and the dominant class of the Roman Empire is repeated after the fall of the Empire in the division between Germanic warriors and intellectuals of romanised origin, successors of the category of freedmen. Interweaved with this phenomenon are the birth and development of Catholicism and of the ecclesiastical organisation which for many centuries absorbs the major part of intellectual activities and exercises a monopoly of cultural direction with penal sanctions against anyone who attempted to oppose or even evade the monopoly. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 301

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘monopoly of cultural direction with penal sanctions’ prefigures Gramsci’s later hegemony machinery and connects to how colonial/state knowledge monopolies police dissent.