Reviving Christendom

The real means of reviving Christendom is evangelisation. Only by conversion to the Faith can a just society be built. Anything else is a pipe dream.

From Crisis

By Fr Mario Alexis Portella

Five-hundred years on from the Protestant revolution and Christendom is not just dismantled, but in full apostasy. Can it be revived, and if so, how?

St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was the greatest Christian philosopher of antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence, maintained that a Christian state is the only type of state where true justice can be achieved. This is because, in such a state, the body politic would rule according to Christian tenets and values, which would align the state’s laws with divine law. 

Writing after Christianity was proclaimed as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the Emperor Theodosius I in 380, he said: “Were our [Christian] religion listened to as it deserves, it would establish, consecrate, strengthen, and enlarge the commonwealth in a way beyond all that Romulus, Numa, Brutus, and all the other men of renown in Roman history achieved.” 

In a congenial manner, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in his address at Hungary’s 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago, denounced the agenda of left-wing protagonists who are actively working to “replace Christianity and the nation” in Western society.

My friends, two plans are on the table. One is the liberal plan, and the other is the patriotic plan for Europe. The liberal plan sees the old, cultural, Christian Europe as obsolete. They want to move beyond it. For decades, they have been working to fabricate a new identity to replace Christianity and the nation.  

Christianity certainly did not start in Europe, and therefore it cannot be defined as a European religion. Nonetheless, it received “in Europe its most effective cultural and intellectual imprint and remains, therefore, identified in a special way with Europe.” 

The Christian faith—via the institutional Catholic Church—not only provided humanity with a purpose in life in this world and in the next, but it helped the human individual harness his individual gifts so that he, too, could contribute to the well-being of others and of society. We see this, for example, during the Middle Ages when there was no longer a Roman Empire to maintain a united civilization. 

In its place, the Catholic Church assumed this role and was vital in the formation of laws, universities, architecture, literature, art, and so forth, right up to the Renaissance. And this happened not just in the West but in the East, too, with Sts. Cyril and Methodius who, during the ninth century, brought Christianity to the Slavic peoples and helped create a civilization.

Yet, as indicated by Mr. Orbán, the globalized politics of the West for the last few decades has done nothing but berate the Christian foundations upon which Western society was built. Non-governmental organizations, like the United Nations through its exploitation of soft law, have sought to replace the Christian virtues ingrained in society with altruistic guidelines and codes of conduct as human rights that are unbecoming. The European Union has also been a part of this anti-Christian crusade. Both have led to the dismantling of the infrastructure of civilization—the family—by promoting abortion and imposing the use of artificial contraception under the term of “reproductive rights,” or recognizing homosexual unions or transgenderism under the pretension of equality.

Incidentally, this is a reason why Muslims have gained a firm foothold in our Western society. They collectively refute any relativization of gender identity as advocated by the LGBTQ+ activists and, likewise, oppose abortion and artificial contraception, whereas we in the West are aborting and contracepting ourselves out of existence. 

Ironically, part of the anti-Christian movement has come from those who profess to be Christian, such as certain Roman Catholic bishops and priests or cafeteria Catholics and ecclesiastical communities like the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists or Christian fundamentalists. The former is due to their dissent from Church teaching. The latter, whether they have a systematic theology or not, is because of their approach to their faith. 

Roman Catholicism incorporated Greek philosophy and Roman law to shape a united Christendom in both the West and in the East (at least until the fall of Constantinople in 1453). Protestants, however—because they reject, outside of Baptism, the need to avail themselves of the Sacraments for salvation—place their focus on the primacy of the individual. In other words, Protestants refute the need of an intercessor, a priest, between them and God. Subsequently, they refute the need to be united under a Church. 
Their faith is subjective, or rather, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, interpreting Divine Revelation as they see fit. This is one reason why Christian fundamentalists and certain Protestant communities, while being firmly against abortion, favour in vitro fertilisation and the use of artificial contraception, both of which hinder, if not dismantle, the moral fabric of society—the institution of the family.

This does not mean that a nation-state must automatically be a Catholic one. Historically, when it was this way during the modern era—that of the absolute monarchs—such unity between Church and State was counterproductive, at best. A prime example was King Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed religious freedom and certain rights to Protestants in France. As a result of the king’s decision, either one became a Catholic if he or she wanted to enjoy whatever rights were granted to the common folk, or one was compelled to leave France. This ultimately led to the French Revolution as insurgents violently reacted and institutionalised the anti-Catholic liberté, égalité, fraternité.

In like manner, as late as 1778, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s patent religio, aimed at the peasantry, banned all Protestant books, laid down that only Catholics could marry, saw that those who left the Faith were publicly flogged, and stated that only persons certified as being members of the Catholic Church could purchase and own property. Those who were not compliant were expelled to neighboring Hungary—a reason why the Presbyterians are still numerous and continue to hold anti-Catholic sentiments. Austria was spared a revolution because of the reforms of Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II. 

Getting firsthand accounts on what was happening in Catholic France from his sister, Maria Antonia, better known as Marie Antoinette, Joseph implemented reforms, albeit controversial, such as the Patent of Toleration in 1781. It granted non-Catholics full civil rights, such as the right to equal employment and the right to get married. 

The emperor, nevertheless, required the Catholic clergy to teach in state schools; and as a daily attendant at Mass, he encouraged the laity to be devout Catholics. He also abolished serfdom, which granted the peasants the freedom to leave their holdings, marry, and place their children in trades—measures that would be acknowledged as part of the Church’s social teaching a century later in Pope Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum.

In his epic City of God, St. Augustine argued that while true justice could only be realised in a Christian state, a secular one can still possess a form of “relative justice” since it is not based on divine law. That does not mean that we cannot make every effort, just as the apostles did at the inception of the Church, to once more embed the teachings of Christ in society. This will not ipso facto equate to the Christendom of the Medieval era, but it will create a Christendom of sorts.