From the genius of Christianity and the cultures of the Jews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Germanic peoples, the Catholic Church built a new and original civilization, embodying within its structures the Christian vision of God and man, time and eternity. Its construction and maintenance, amid attrition and cultural earthquakes, is a saga spread over sixteen hundred years.
This is a popular history of the role of the Catholic priesthood in laying the foundations for the socio-political-cultural ethos of Western Civilization, along with a sketch of various institutions characteristic of that civilization that first budded in that time period.