Dogmas were building stones in the construction of western civilization

Catholic Dogma and the West

by S.E. Mons.Giampaolo Crepaldi

• The influence of Catholicism on western civilization is often interpreted in a reductive manner in the sense of thinking it is nothing more than influence alone. 
• That is tantamount to arguing that Catholicism had an influence on western civilization with its works of charity, art and literature, social networks bearing the imprint of religion, and the coronation of sovereigns, etc. 
• This is all true, but Catholicism’s profound relationship with the west has to do with dogmas and is the expression of the historicity of dogma. 
• The expression ‘the historicity of dogma’ does not mean that a dogma historically evolves in its objective truthfulness in a manner parallel with the self-awareness believers have of it. 
• This would be the modernist view of the issue. 
• What it means is that a dogma always has an historical and real content, and cannot be relegated to the realms of either abstraction or myth. 
• Dogma nourishes the Church, and the Church is the Body of Christ in history, the Body that remains in eternity[1]. 
• Between dogma and Body there is an inseparable unity, and therefore dogma is not present only in the conscience of believers, but by its selfsame nature becomes history, and hence civilization. 
• This is the realism of the Christian faith, and the Catholic faith in particular.
• The Church moulded western Christian civilization with its dogmas defined in its dogmatic Councils. 
• Prevailing nowadays is a general underrating of the importance of doctrine in the life of the Church and an emphasis on pastoral praxis, with the risk of the latter overshadowing the former. 

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