by Bradley J. Birzer

The Movement of World Revolution by Christopher Dawson (from the introduction, published by The Catholic University of America Press)

Having witnessed the loss of an idyllic Edwardian world to the deadening trenches of the first world war, the rise of communism and the gulag state in Slavic Europe and China, and the advent of national socialism and the holocaust camps in Germanic Europe, Christopher Dawson found the ideologies that spawned such twentieth-century atrocities profoundly disturbing.[1]  Could a more gentle, Christian world ever arise again?  Possessing a subtle and acute mind, Dawson never held out any real hope that a true Christendom might reemerge after the vast bloodshed observed in his life time.[2]  He did, however, rightly note that past ages had seen horrors as well.  We moderns, he thought, might do well to pattern our own behavior after the Christian exemplars of the past.

The only remedy is to be found in that spiritual force by which the humility of God conquers the pride of the evil one.  Hence the spiritual reformer cannot expect to have the majority on his side.  He must be prepared to stand alone like Ezekiael and Jeremy.  He must take as his example St. Augustine besieged by the Vandals at Hippo, or St. Gregory preaching at Rome with the Lombards at the gates.  For the true helpers of the world are the poor in spirit, the men who bear the sign of the cross on their foreheads, who refuse to be overcome by the triumph of injustice and put their sole trust in the salvation of God.[3]
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