Books of the Day

Plus an interview with the author, Tom Woods, at Human Events OnLine.

With a background in American history and a deep interest in the Roman Catholic Church, Suffolk County Community College professor Tom Woods worked tirelessly over the past year on two books—The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a New York Times bestseller, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. (Both were published by Regnery—a Human Events sister company.) During a recent visit to Washington, Woods spoke with Managing Editor Robert Bluey and intern Mary Ellen Burke about the books.


You outline the contributions the church has made to society. What do you personally see as the most significant?

Woods: One of them would be the university system and the intellectual life of the high Middle Ages. I cite a great many scholars—Catholics and non-Catholics—who say that the church and the university gave birth to a culture that was very rigorous in its treatment of intellectual topics. Look at Thomas Aquinas. He’s someone who takes an issue and chews it over, looks at it from every angle and considers all the objections to his position. That’s the kind of intellectual life that would bear such fruit in Western Europe and that culminates in the Scientific Revolution. They looked at all sides of the question and investigated it thoroughly.
The other thing would be charitable work. People don’t know how important it was quantitatively, but also the qualitative difference there was between the ancient worlds’ charitable work and that of the church. In the ancient world, in Greece and Rome, there was often contempt for the poor, and when people did show liberality toward them it was often just to show off or to put the poor in their debt. That’s why it was a culture in which you saw infanticide. There’s no emphasis on the sanctity of life. The church totally overturned that and brought a completely new way of thinking about the poor and about human life. That’s why it has been a formative influence on western civilization.


Why is the church so bad at promoting the accomplishments you highlight in the book?

Woods: Individual popes have written about the church’s devotion to learning, and I believe it was Leo XIII who started the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and established an astronomical observatory. But in spite of those efforts, at other levels of the church, people are not talking about it. We need more laymen in the church to write books like this one. For a lot of laity and churchmen, it just hasn’t hit them how much of a cultural revolution there has been. The church now never gets the benefit of the doubt.


Why are the church’s contributions ignored or disregarded?

Woods: The opinion-makers in the United States tend to be agnostic or atheist, or at least not in the Christian tradition. Ever since the Enlightenment, there’s been an attempt on the part of non-Christian intellectuals to claim for themselves all the accomplishments of the West. All you have to do is look at the European Union constitution. It doesn’t mention a word about the Christian foundations of Europe. All you have to do is walk down any European street and look at a cathedral. They can’t acknowledge it. But what do they acknowledge? The ancient world and the Enlightenment. So there’s been this prejudice ever since the term Middle Ages was coined, suggesting the church doesn’t owe anything to that past.