Book Review: How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

This book is both highly important and deeply flawed.
It is important because, while it plows no new ground, it manages to gather together and to explain in easy-to-understand prose numerous sources that demonstrate the role of the Christian Church in building the institutions that today are taken for granted or assumed to have arisen only in the “secularized” post-Enlightenment period. In fact, everything from hospitals to International Law rose from Christianity. As the author puts it, “So ingrained are the concepts that Catholicism introduced into the world that very often movements opposing it are nevertheless imbued with Christian ideas.” This is all very important and cannot be stated enough nowadays.
However, the book is also deeply flawed. First, the author seems to conflate the Church with the radical teachings of Christ and the enormous power that His Spirit and inspiration have had on the individuals who created the hospitals and who created International Law because they took up the cause of indigenous American Indians. Simply stated, given the fact that there was no Church in the West other than the Roman Catholic for roughly 1500 years, anything any Christian did during that period can, and in this book is, credited to that Church. Now this is all okay and fine, were it not for the undisguised disdain the author demonstrates for Protestant Christians. Any time a Protestant appears in this book, it is only to act as a foil for something good that a Roman Catholic did. Protestantism, apparently, has had nothing to do with building Western Civilization. This leads to another flaw I will note below.
The second flaw is the style. Perhaps because he was trying to write an easy-to-understand book – which he successfully has – the author reuses empty phrases to the degree of annoyance. There are more “father of” something in this book than in the lineage of Jesus in chapter One of Matthew. And the word “milieu” gets a workout that would leave Lance Armstrong panting.
The third flaw is that the author, apparently to avoid giving Protestantism any credit, turns a blind eye to other highly important developments in Western Civilization that came from the Protestant side of the catholic Church. For instance, oh, I don’t know – widespread use of the printing press? Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the use of the printing press was very confined, and translation of the Bible was verboten -- some were burned at the stake for it. Once the Protestants got started, however, the political and economic power of the Roman Church crumbled.
Overall, this is a worthwhile book with a few warts that can be ignored if you are cognizant of them going in.