Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Regency Publishing Inc. 2005.


Few would disagree that historians have often given the Catholic Church a hard time. Religious history is not a fashionable topic (Dan Brown-style conspiracy theories aside), and when the Church is given a starring role in a popular history it is usually in the guise of the villain and not the hero. The Church was the enemy of progress we are told. She was the voice of intolerance, close-mindedness, superstition and cultural oppression. In "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilisation" (the title is fairly self-explanatory and the content does exactly what it says on the tin) Thomas Woods' takes a voyage through two thousand years of Western culture and comes to the emphatic conclusion that things simply didn't happen that way. 

The front cover of "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilisation" almost proves Woods' point in itself. Works by Raphael, Leonardo and Botticelli, the dome of St Peter's, Mont San Michel, a bust of Charlemagne - just a small sample of the people and creations the Catholic Church has inspired over the past two millennia. Woods' reasserts Catholicism's central role in the development of Western art, economics, international law, science, charity and the university system. He argues that the Catholic world-view provided the fertile ground upon which these and other defining aspects of Western Civilisation thrived. Far from being repressive, the Church positively encouraged intellectual enquiry. "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilisation" is a veritable roll call of Western thinkers and cultural achievements.

What made the West the environment in which such a culture could thrive? Woods' answer is unequivocal: Christianity. Christianity presented the world with a radical and unique vision: a God who loved humanity so passionately that He became man. Why should a Christian distain to examine the created world when his God had seen fit to live in it?  How can a Christian not be awestruck by the dignity of human person when "the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us"? God did not only create us, He became one of us. The Gospel message is at the heart of Western Culture and it was not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century that its centrality began to be called into question. 

The notion that contemporary Western Culture is in its death throes is not some fabrication of gloomy Christian thinkers.  The evidence is all around us: the legacy of two world wars, state-sponsored killing, staggering divorce rates, plummeting birth-rates, art is reduced to exhibitionism, the body becomes a mere object, truth is ‘whatever-you're-having-yourself', hope is a delusion, purity is weakness and happiness is in the contents of a syringe. Historically the Catholic Church is not a church which stands apart from culture. She is, as this book demonstrates so eloquently, at the heart of culture, shaping and inspiring it. The word ‘culture' itself is closely related to the Latin ‘cultus', meaning worship of God. In rejecting Christianity, Western Culture inadvertently cut off its own blood-flow. The question that remains is whether or not we will realise what we have done and take our hands from our own throat it before it is too late?