In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church played a central role in social and political life. It was also responsible for education.
The Catholic Church, or simply "the Church": there was no other in medieval Europe, and it certainly wasn't referred to as the Roman Catholic Church until the protestant revolt in England centuries later. The center of the Church was in Rome; the word "catholic" means universal. It was meant as the "universal church", or the church for everybody.
It was the other way around. The merchant was affected by the church. The Catholic Church had control over the whole society as well as the monarchy. It told people what to do and set rules for society. Science was disallowed and considered wrong.
I think you are referring to excommunication, a punishment under which people could not receive communion, among other things.
No, Chaucer and other medieval people did not smoke tobacco.
The term Medieval Church could be construed to apply to the Christian religion. It could also apply to a church organization dominating a given area. So the Church of Rome dominated the Roman Empire of the fifth century, The Eastern Orthodox dominated the eastern parts of Christian Europe after the Great Schism of 1054, just as the Roman Catholic Church dominate the West, and each of these might be referred to as the Church in those areas.
There were no other Christian religions in medieval times. All Christian nations were Christian and still attending the Church that Christ founded.
Other nobles.
It was one of the few places that offered education to people. It also guarenteed people at least two full meals a day.They also provided medicine to the ill and old (It normally didn't help them and sometimes made them worse.) They also provided other services like telling people the time by ringing the church bell to tell them the time.
The stock answer on this one was that clergy were the people who could read and write, and very few other members of medieval society could. I think there is clear evidence that this answer is not entirely true. There is a link below to a related question whose answer goes into more detail on this.
Yeah. They had people who did different acts. Some medieval clowns were fire-eaters, jesters, bards, minstrels, actors, or anything that brought amusement. Other entertainment would involve jousting and sword-fights.
There was no medieval education for people other than nobility. People didn't know how to read or write. Priests taught nobility and a university system began in Italy.
The Church was an organization that existed in practically all of medieval Europe. It had its own rules, which it could impose on the governments of countries, and though it did not do this often, it did have the effect of producing a certain level of uniformity in how kings and other leaders dealt with their people. The Church provided much of the education of the Middle Ages, and what it did not provide usually conformed to the Church's practices. In Western Europe, Latin was the language of this education, and so there was a single language nearly all well educated people used over Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, Greek was used, but the Eastern Churches tended to use the vernacular more. Pilgrimage and crusades sometimes threw people of different countries together.