Europe and the Faith | Page 8

supplanter, he is also the heir of the gods.

EUROPE AND THE FAITH

I
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
The history of European civilization is the history of a certain political
institution which united and expressed Europe, and was governed from
Rome. This institution was informed at its very origin by the growing
influence of a certain definite and organized religion: this religion it
ultimately accepted and, finally, was merged in.
The institution--having accepted the religion, having made of that
religion its official expression, and having breathed that religion in
through every part until it became the spirit of the whole--was slowly
modified, spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it
did not die. It was revived by the religion which had become its new
soul. It re-arose and still lives.
This institution was first known among men as _Republica_; we call it

today "The Roman Empire." The Religion which informed and saved it
was then called, still is called, and will always be called "The Catholic
Church."
Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.
It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth whether it
be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or to a man
who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in
distance, in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to
examine would perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as would
a man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an
intimate part of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the
contemporary atheist, some supposed student in some remote future,
reading history in some place from which the Catholic Faith shall have
utterly departed, and to which the habits and traditions of our
civilization will therefore be wholly alien, would each, in proportion to
his science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped today by the Catholic
student who is of European birth, the truth that Europe and the Catholic
Church were and are one thing. The only people who do not grasp it (or
do not admit it) are those writers of history whose special, local, and
temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic Church, or who have a
traditional bias against it.
These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other
anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal
history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists are
innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still dogmatically
taught in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the world.
Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is
anti-Catholic--that concerns another sphere of thought--but that it is
unhistorical.
To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and its
spirit was the sole origin of European civilization; to forget or to
diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a certain
religion; to conceal the fact that this religion was not a vague mood, but
a determinate and highly organized corporation; to present in the first
centuries some non-existant "Christianity" in place of the existant
Church; to suggest that the Faith was a vague agreement among
individual holders of opinions instead of what it historically was, the

doctrine of a fixed authoritative institution; to fail to identify that
institution with the institution still here today and still called the
Catholic Church; to exaggerate the insignificant barbaric influences
which came from outside the Empire and did nothing to modify its
spirit; to pretend that the Empire or its religion have at any time ceased
to be--that is, to pretend that there has ever been a solution of
continuity between the past and the present of Europe--all these
pretensions are parts of one historical falsehood.
In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is
nothing which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire, or is
not demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it.
In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic, our building
materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut-stone, our cooking, our staple food
and drink; in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower, the
well, the road, the canal; in expression, the alphabet, the very words of
most of our numerous dialects and polite languages, the order of still
more, the logical sequence of our thought--all spring from that one
source. So with implements: the saw, the hammer, the plane, the chisel,
the file, the spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the ladder; all these
we have from that same origin. Of our institutions it is the same story.
The divisions and the sub-divisions of Europe, the parish, the county,
the province, the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the