If our forebears fought to reconquer the Sepulcher of Christ, how could we not fight for His reign over the souls and societies that He created and saved to love Him eternally?

The Church and Christian civilization

One would be singularly mistaken who thinks that the Church’s action upon men is merely individual and that She forms only persons, not peoples, nor cultures, nor civilizations.

As a matter of fact, God created man naturally sociable and meant for men to work for the sanctification of one another in society. That is also why He created them receptive to influence. This can be said about the relations between individuals and between individuals and society. Our surroundings, our laws, our institutions, all exert an influence on us; they have a pedagogical action upon us.

To entirely resist these surroundings, whose ideological action penetrates us even, as it were, by osmosis, through the skin, is an achievement of high and strenuous virtue. Thus it is that the first Christians were not more admirable when facing the wild animals in the Colosseum than when maintaining their Catholic spirit living in a heathen society.

Thus culture and civilization are very strong means of acting on souls – for their ruin when the culture and civilization are heathen; for their edification and salvation when Christian.

How therefore can the Church not take interest in producing a culture and a civilization, remaining satisfied merely with acting upon each soul individually?

In fact, every soul on which the Church acts and which responds generously to such action is as a center or a seed of that civilization, which She actively and vigorously spreads around. Virtue shines through and penetrates. By penetrating, it spreads itself. By acting and spreading itself, it has a tendency to transform itself into a Catholic culture and civilization.

As we have seen, the distinctive feature of the Church is to produce a Christian culture and civilization, and to produce all Her fruits in a fully Catholic social atmosphere. A Catholic must long for a Christian civilization just as a man imprisoned in a dungeon wants open air and a caged bird yearns after the infinite expanses of the sky.

This is our purpose, our great ideal. We move towards the Christian civilization that may arise from the ruins of today’s world, as the civilization of the Middle Ages were born from the ruins of the Roman world. We move towards the conquest of this ideal with the courage, the perseverance, the will to face and overcome all obstacles with which the crusaders marched towards Jerusalem.

If our forebears were capable of dying to reconquer the Sepulcher of Christ, how could we not want – we sons of the Church as they – to struggle and die to restore something that is of infinitely more worth than the most precious Sepulcher of the Savior, that is, His reign over the souls and societies that He created and saved to love Him eternally?

(*) By Plinio Correa de Oliveira.  This essay was first published in Catolicismo in January 1951. First English translation published in Crusade for a Christian Civilization, Vol. 1, no. 1, 1971. Revised, Nov. 1998. Republished as “The Twentieth Century Crusade” in Crusade, Jan.-Feb. 2001, pp. 13-19.