Christian civilization, Christian culture

This splendid reality, an order and a perfection more supernatural and heavenly than natural and earthly, has been called Christian civilization, the product of Christian culture and a daughter of the Catholic Church.

One is cultured when his soul is not enslaved by the unruly and spontaneous play of its faculties — intelligence, will and sensibilities, but rather has enriched them through an orderly and reasoned effort.

  

It is similar to a field, which does not cause seeds, chaotically strewn by the wind, to bear fruit.  Only a farmer's toil produces something useful and good.

In this sense, Catholic culture is the cultivation of the intelligence, will, and sensibility according to the norms of morality taught by the Church. It is identified with the very perfection of the soul. If it exists in most members of a human society (though in degrees and ways proper to the social condition and age of each one), it will be a social and collective fact.

Moreover, it will constitute the most important element of social perfection.

Civilization is the condition of a human society that possesses culture and has created, according to the basic principles of that culture, its own customs, laws, institutions and literary and artistic systems.

 

A civilization will be Catholic if it is the faithful product of a Catholic culture and therefore, the spirit of the Church is the normal and vital principle of its customs, laws, institutions and literary and artistic systems.

Since Jesus Christ is the true ideal of human perfection and since a society that puts into practice all His laws has to be a perfect society, the culture and civilization born from the Church of Christ must be not only the best civilization but the only true one.

Thus, Saint Pius X said:

“There is no true civilization without moral civilization, and there is no true moral civilization save with true Religion” (Letter to the French Bishops on “Le Sillon”).

Thus, it can be inferred with crystalline conspicuousness that no true civilization exists that is not the result and fruit of the True Religion.

by Plinio Correa de Oliveira

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English: Summer field in Belgium (Hamois). The blue flower is Centaurea cyanus and the red one a Papaver rhoeas.

Author: Luc Viatour

I, Luc Viatour, the copyright holder of this work, has published or hereby publishes it under the following licenses: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".