[Book Review]: "Yours is the Church"-What Modern Man Forgets

This post is a Book Review on "Yours is the Church: How Catholicism Shapes Our World" by Mike Aquilina. You can read more book reviews that I have done My Library. If you want to learn more about the Author of this book, Mike Aquilina, you can visit his website: http://mikeaquilina.com/. You can see more of his books here, and you can find this particular book on Amazon here. 

"Yours is the Church: How Catholicism Shapes our World"

Mike Aquilina

Servant Books, 2012

134 Pages

I have read one previous book by Mike Aquilina, and I heard him speak recently on the persecutions of the early Church, and so I was very excited to pick up this book (this is the other book I read of his). Mike is a devout Catholic man who is also a very honest intellectual, a man with a breadth of knowledge of Catholic teaching and most specifically the way that those teachings played out historically. Mike's love for the truth of the history of the Church comes out in a particular way in this book, where he examines the Church's impact on nearly every major aspect of modern culture in a thorough while also readable and brief way. His ability to tell a story in an interesting way, even if it is a story from a culture which we can hardly imagine, makes this book not read like a history lesson, but rather like a very enjoyable trip through 2,000 years of developments, highlighted by some of the more interesting ways that culture grew over that time. 

As you can tell, I was very pleased with this book. From the beginning, it has no problem being blunt and probably offensive to people who don't want to hear about the Church's important impact on culture: "Everything about our modern world we think is good is there because of the Church. The only reason we care about the poor is because Christianity has won. The only reason the rights of women and children are important is because the Church has made them important. The only reason we have science is because the Church taught us how to think" (Introduction, pp. vii-viii). After this opening claim, which to modern sensibilities seems ludicrous, the book jumps right into backing it up; from art to music to literature, science to the dignity of the person, and finally to peace and the future of the world, the argument that the Church is the basis of modern culture is defended in a skillful and brilliant way. I will be honest: his bluntness took me back at first, I am sure mostly because I have been trained to subconsciously think that the Church couldn't possibly be behind all of this. When reading, though, I was convinced of this fact: the historical evidence clearly shows that the world would not look the same had the Church not been a part of it. 

If the idea that the Catholic Church is responsible for the intelligence of modern science, the beauty of music and art, and the dignity of women and children sounds wrong to you, you owe it to yourself to read this book. This book does not shy away from some of the mistakes that people in the Church made throughout history, but it points out something which is often ignored: all people were making the mistakes (and still are), both inside and outside of the Church, but it was only within the Church that people were seeing them as mistakes and fighting back against them. Even in the Dark Ages (I had a professor in college who would take offense at them being called that, so I apologize to Dr. G, but I think she would agree with what he says about the time), a time when it is assumed that no learning or advancement took place, the Church still held a light. As Aquilina says in this book, this was a time when "it goes without saying that all those [speaking of the people who took the ideas of Aristotle that the Muslims brought in his works to Spain and applied them in a way we still look to today] great thinkers were in the Church. There simply wasn't anywhere else where thinking was done" (p. 16).  In the times that people see as dark, the Church held a light; in the times that people see light blazing forth, the Church was the one carrying the torch. In Ancient Rome, the darkest of times for women and children (and most people, for that matter), it was the Church that changed sensibilities to see all people, regardless of age, sex, or color, as people worthy of dignity. 

What Aquilina does here is tackle the breadth of culture, explaining that it all owes a debt to the Church. The things that we see as being wrong in modern culture, often asserted against the Church, we can only see are wrong because the Church taught us values of right and wrong. If we are to truly evaluate culture, then, we have to look to the basis of it, the Church, and see the way that the Church holds us to what culture should look like. 

I could talk all day about some of the points in this book, but instead I will encourage you to read it and find out for yourself why the culture owes a debt of gratitude to the Church. Until you have the chance to read it, I will leave you with his conclusion about what the Church might look like going forward, based on what it has looked like for the last 2,000 years: 

"It will look like the human race--colorful, infinitely diverse, but all one family of God's children. It will be truly Catholic--a word that means 'universal.' It will be enriched by beautiful traditions from all over the planet. Like the living body that it is, the Catholic Church will continue to grow and learn. But it will always be the same Catholic Church, always true to itself, and always faithful to the teachings of the apostles. Yours is the Church." (p. 130)

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this review, start by picking up his books (http://mikeaquilina.com/), and then please comment below and/or share this with your friends. God bless you.