Description
“Each chancellery in Europe, Each court in Europe, was once ruled by these learned, trained and accomplished men—the priesthood of that great and dominant body.”
— President Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom
With stubborn facts historians have handed in their verdict: from the genius of Christianity and the cultures of the Jews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Germanic peoples, the Catholic Church built a new and original civilization, embodying within its structures the Christian vision of God and man, time and eternity.
Its construction and maintenance, amid attrition and cultural earthquakes, is a saga spread over seventeen hundred years. Even if Catholic priests do not hold a monopoly on the struggles or the achievements involved, then again, from A.D. 300 to 1000, because they numbered such a lot of men of heroism and genius in their ranks, and as a result of their leadership positions, they became the pioneers and irreplaceable builders of a new culture and Christian socio-political order.
Heroism and Genius presents a few of these formidable men: Fathers of Western Culture, of free-enterprise economics, and of the institution of chivalry; leaders of nations, statesmen, and defiers of tyrants; music composers, pioneers of universal education, and architects of one of the most world’s loveliest buildings; and, enigmatically, the clandestine revolutionaries in the back of the explosion of the culture of romantic love bonded to Christian marriage whose air of secrecy still enchants the air of the West.