The Church, Western Civilization and Christendom

What we call the West was built by the Roman Catholic Church. All that we value of our civilization then is Catholic. It is in this sense that Western Civilization is just a euphemism for Christendom. And though the unity of Christendom was forever shattered by the rogue monk Martin Luther, the remains of the West remain, in the end, Catholic. 

The English historian Hilaire Belloc has explained that the Catholic sees Europe (or even the West generally) from within, while others see it from outside. As Belloc wrote: 

“The Catholic brings to history […] self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in his blame, he is absolutely right. […] Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. They have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: he sees it all from its centre in its essence, and together. I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.”

As such, one of the most astounding things I have learned in life is that to be fully Western, completely connected to our Christian Civilization, one of necessity ought to, at a minimum, understand the Catholic Faith. Regardless, as Belloc himself notes in his essay “The Counter-Attack Through History”, reading history the faithful Catholic must presume bias and hostility. The Catholic reader must be on guard for error in that sense, and ideally place the burden of proof on the anti-Catholics. 

Nonetheless, the point remains. The Catholic Church preserved all that was best of Classical Antiquity, and with the Catholic view of assimilating to the faith all that is good and true while rejecting those things which are bad meaning that those cruel and evil aspects of paganism were abandoned and suppressed. It is no coincidence, for example, that the Catholic civilization built after Constantine the Great raised women in their dignity and rights, held back the authoritarian tendencies of the state and slowly built the civilization of the High Middle Ages. 

As Thomas E. Woods has written, the Catholic Church built the consciousness and dignity of mankind. In other words, brought into the world the totality of the moral law. The Church not only preserved knowledge and culture, but also educated the masses, developed architecture, international law, human rights, free market economics, concepts of due process of law, charity, hospitals, universities and the formalization of the scientific method. 

It was the Church that gave a life force to Europe and the West to stand against the barbarism of the Mongol hordes, that converted the Vikings converted the Vikings and held the Islamic conquests at bay, reconquered Spain and defeated the Turks at Lepanto. It is Christianity, then, that gave life and meaning to the West. Therefore, all that is good and great about Western Civilization is therefore Catholic. As Belloc has remarked, all that is durable in non-Catholic societies (especially in a post-Christian West) is that which was kept from Catholicism. 

This process of building a new civilization, a worthier one than Ancient Rome, took centuries. As G.K. Chesterton wrote about the Catholic building of Western Civilization, “Christianity had entered the world to cure the world; and she cured it the only way in which it could be cured; that is, in its conversion to Christianity.” There are real failings in the Church’s history, but the vast majority of that which is hated about the Church is usually based on historical absurdity and ignorance. Moreover, it is, quite frankly, a miracle that the Church has survived all manner of attacks from Emperors to bad Popes and heresy and error. 

A miracle, but not surprising. It is important to recall that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ. It is how Christ remains teaching in the world. In other words, it is Our Lord, through His Church, that built Christian Civilization. As Ven. Fulton Sheen wrote, “Christ, therefore, still walks the earth, now in His Mystical Body, whereas then in His physical Body.” 

But being an organism and a Mystical Body that uses sinful men to operate in the world, it is not a surprise that there are many that fail to meet the standards of God. It is no wonder, either, why the work of slowly restoring the world through Christ is still ongoing twenty centuries since the Incarnation. Restoration takes time with broken tools in a fallen world. 

Since the beginning of Christianity there were Judases that betrayed Him, trials, and persecution. As such, in the Church there lies a paradox, it is the Mystical Body of Our Blessed Lord, and there are worldly men who betray Christ in His Mystical Body and cause harm and danger to others. Yet in every age there are Saints and heroes who meet the challenge and carry on the banner of the Cross. 

As Sheen wrote:

“[Christ in His Mystical Body] still is denied inns, as He was in Bethlehem; new Herods with Soviet and Chinese names persecute Him with the sword; other Satans appear to tempt Him to short cuts of popularity away from the Cross and mortification; Palm Sundays of great triumph come to Him, but they are preludes to Good Fridays; new charges (and often from religious people, as of old) are hurled against Him-that He is an enemy of Caesar, is unpatriotic, and would pervert a nation; on the outside He is stoned, on the inside attacked by false brethren; not even Judases who were called to be Apostles are wanting to betray Him and deliver Him over to the enemy; some of His disciples who gloried in His name walk with Him no more, because—like their predecessors—they find His teaching, particularly on the Bread of Life, to be ‘hard.’ But since there is never a death without a Resurrection, His Mystical Body will in the course of history have a thousand deaths and a thousand Resurrections.”

In short, as Belloc wrote “The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.” 

As such, it is true that if the West is to survive its present crisis it will have to return to its roots, to the faith. As the philosopher Peter Kreeft has noted, no relativistic society endures for very long. When one finds the Church, one finds Christendom. When one joins the Church, one joins in communion with the entirety of our civilization. To be Catholic, then, is to be fully Western.