What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: Catholic Social Teaching
Pray and work
In 529, Benedict of Nursia established a monastery at Monte Cassino and wrote a Rule. Welcome every stranger as Christ. Feed the hungry. Tend the sick. Preserve the books. Work with your hands. Seventy-three short chapters that rebuilt European civilization after Rome fell. The Benedictine monasteries became the hospitals, schools, agricultural stations, and centers of communal life that held the continent through five centuries of collapse.
We say this not to boast. We say it because someone has to remember, and the people living inside the institutions we built have forgotten.
Islam’s contribution is part of this story. The translation movement, the mathematical innovations, the philosophical traditions flowing through al-Andalus. Aquinas read Aristotle through Ibn Rushd. This is not a debt Christianity owes Islam. It is a debt Western civilization owes both.
The secular critics are right about our failures, and we will not hedge. The Crusades were not defensive wars misunderstood by modern sensibilities. The Inquisition was not a regrettable excess. These were institutional projects, authorized at the highest levels. We do not get to claim Aquinas and disclaim Torquemada. They served the same institution.
The secularization was not ingratitude. It was a rational response to an institution that had betrayed its own principles so thoroughly that the principles became suspect. We did that. Not modernity. Not the Enlightenment. We did that. The civilizational inheritors are sometimes our concern — they trace the lineage triumphally, as if the inheritance proves superiority rather than the depth of obligation. We are not triumphalists. We are penitents who happen to have built the hospital.
Where we concede ground: A father who builds a house and sets fire to half does not get to demand his children admire the architecture.
What would change our mind: The post-Christian West sustaining dignity, care for strangers, and power subordinate to moral law for three generations without the sacred.
Read the full synthesis: What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?