How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Thomas E. Woods

May 2005 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Ask someone today where Western Civilization originated, and he or she might say Greece or Rome. But what is the ultimate source of Western Civilization? Bestselling author and professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. provides the long neglected answer: the Catholic Church. In the new paperback edition of his critically-acclaimed book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Woods goes far beyond the familiar tale of monks copying manuscripts and preserving the wisdom of classical antiquity. Gifts such as modern science, free-market economics, art, music, and the idea of human rights come from the Catholic Church, explains Woods. In How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, you’ll learn:

• Why modern science was born in the Catholic Church
  
• How Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five hundred years before Adam Smith
  
• How the Catholic Church invented the university
  
• Why what you know about the Galileo affair is wrong
  
• How Western law grew out of Church canon law
  
• How the Church humanized the West by insisting on the sacredness of all human life
  

No institution has done more to shape Western civilization than the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church—and in ways that many of us have forgotten or never known. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is essential reading for recovering this lost truth.

About the author

Thomas E. Woods Jr. is the New York Times bestselling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, among other books. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. A recipient of the Templeton Enterprise Award and the O. P. Alford III Prize for Libertarian Scholarship, he is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.