The Catholic Church. These three words evoke more passion, more controversy, and more fascination than perhaps any institution in the history of the world. To her enemies, she is backward, superstitious, anti-science, a relic of the Dark Ages that somehow refuses to die. To those who have never looked closely, she is the great oppressor — the force behind inquisitions and crusades, the silencer of Galileo, the enemy of progress. Even in the halls of higher learning, where one might expect intellectual honesty, she is rarely given a fair hearing. The caricature is easier than the truth.
But the truth is staggering.
This is the Church that preserved Western civilization when the barbarians swept through Rome — when monks in stone monasteries copied manuscripts by candlelight so that the knowledge of Greece and Rome would not perish from the earth. The Church that founded the university system — Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Salamanca — institutions that still stand today because Catholic scholars believed that faith and reason were not enemies but allies. The Church that pioneered the hospital, that built the first orphanages, that established the largest charitable institution the world has ever known — and remains so to this day, operating more hospitals, schools, and relief programs than any government or organization on the planet.
They call her anti-science. The truth is the opposite. It was a Catholic priest, Fr. Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang theory — and had to convince Einstein he was right. It was Jesuit priests who laid the foundations of seismology, who mapped the stars from observatories on every continent, who gave their names to craters on the moon. It was a Catholic bishop, Nicholas Steno, who founded modern geology. It was the Catholic monk Gregor Mendel who discovered the laws of genetics. It was the Church that gave the world the Gregorian calendar by which civilization still reckons time. The scientific method itself was nurtured in Catholic monasteries and cathedral schools long before the Enlightenment claimed credit for it.
They call her the oppressor. In the darkest hour of the twentieth century, when the Nazi war machine consumed Europe, it was Pope Pius XII — slandered after his death as “Hitler’s Pope” — who orchestrated the rescue of an estimated 860,000 Jewish lives, more than any other individual or institution. The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, was so moved by the Pope’s courage that he converted to Catholicism after the war and took the baptismal name Eugenio — Pius XII’s given name — in his honor. The Jewish physicist Albert Einstein wrote at the time: “Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty.”
This is the Church that gave the world Augustine and Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola, Catherine of Siena who stared down popes, and Joan of Arc who rallied a nation and was burned alive at nineteen. This is the faith that raised cathedrals that still take the breath away after eight hundred years — Chartres, Notre-Dame, Cologne, St. Peter’s — monuments not to human pride but to the glory of God. The Church that gave birth to Gregorian chant, to polyphony, to Palestrina and Bach and Mozart — who all composed for the glory of the liturgy.
And this is the Church that was born in the blood of martyrs and nourished by their witness across every century. The Church of Father Damien of Molokai, who embraced the lepers whom the world had abandoned, lived among them, served them, and died with them — beginning his final sermon with the words “We lepers.” The Church of Blessed Miguel Pro, who stood before a Mexican firing squad with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross and cried out “Viva Cristo Rey!” — Long live Christ the King! — as the bullets tore through him. The faith of the Cristeros, farmers and fathers who took up arms not for power but for the right to worship God. The Church of Maximilian Kolbe, who volunteered to die in a starvation bunker at Auschwitz so that a stranger might live.
Constantine conquered under the sign of the Cross. Patrick converted an island. Missionaries from Rome carried the faith to the farthest corners of the earth — to the jungles of South America, the shores of Japan, the plains of Africa, and the monasteries of China — often at the cost of their own lives. The Catholic Church did not merely survive the fall of empires. She outlasted every single one of them.
It is this Church — this inexhaustible, impossible, magnificent Church — that inspired the Protestant historian Thomas Babington Macaulay to write one of the most extraordinary passages in the English language:
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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1840
“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre.”
“The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour.”
“The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old.”
“Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”
— Thomas Babington Macaulay
Essay on Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes, 1840
✦ New to the Church, or seeking deeper roots?
Start Here
Whether you are encountering the Catholic Church for the first time or are a lifelong Catholic who wants to more deeply understand her nature and origins, these seven articles form the essential foundation. Read them in order and you will move from the very beginning of the Church’s story to a clear grasp of what she is, what she teaches, and why her claims are serious.