The Case for Christendom

In the modern world much is uncertain. Wars, societal degradation, economic collapse, and an atomistic alienation borne of technology are just a few of the factors that make instability the norm in a myriad number of ways.

However, it was not always so.

There was a time, both far ago and culturally recent, when there was a general civilizational consensus arrived at voluntarily and empirically workable.

It was a time of mankind’s greatest achievements in art, music, philosophy, and faith. But even more than that, it was a time where Christians and specifically Catholics all over the globe looked with confidence at the pillars of the faith, its message, and the future both would bring. It gave voluntary spiritual unity, in most cases, to the Christian ethos worldwide, much to the benefit of vast peoples in need of the hope of a better life that Christianity brings. It, granted imperfectly, brought the light of true faith to remote regions where that light had never shined. It gave order. But vastly more vital, it gave meaning.

It was a concept almost whispered, as if too strong a voice would deny the sublime nature of its beauty and coherence.

It was, Christendom.

In a temporal fashion for we Catholics it ended with the Great Schism brought on by Martin Luther. In a spiritual fashion for Christians it may have ended by the moral relativism of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and its attendant evil of socialism that under the rubric of distributivism even infects parts of Holy Mother Church.

For know full well, the socialist vision, given its inherently false premise of man’s nature, will and has been always eventually enforced but one way, at the point of a bayonet.

But the social order of Christendom had no need of socialism. A free market operated to enable untold multitudes to rise to prosperity and an aesthetic order enhanced truth and beauty.

How so?

The question is reminiscent of the ‘Cuckoo Clock Speech’ in the late 1940s film ‘The Third Man’. Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, comments on the relative merits of cultural or political integrity, using the very Catholic oligarchy of medieval Florence as an example:

“…In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce?

The cuckoo clock.”

The rule of natural law, as conceived by Greek philosophy, The Bible and Roman law, also served to ameliorate the barbarism found outside the reign of Christendom.

To belabor the point:

General Sir Charles Napier, British CINC in Imperial India in the early 19^th century sought to outlaw the native practice of suttee, where widows were immolated upon the funeral pyres of their dead husbands.

When told by native representatives he could not do that as it was a long-standing local custom of law and culture, he responded, “We too have a custom. When you kill a woman? We hang you.”

Ah, for the sheer courage of will and confidence to do right that once pervaded our culture and our leaders. It was a moment in time that may never come again. An age when, yes sometimes stumbling but always eventually advancing, the Christian message and ethos held overwhelming sway in minds and hearts of at least the civilized world.

Lest we forget.