May 2025
Followed by our monarchy, the papacy is the West’s oldest institution. The enormous interest in the first Anglosphere pope in almost a thousand years could well signal a growing realisation of the fact that our Judeo-Christian heritage is no mere appendage of Western civilisation, but an essential pillar.
It is relevant to recall that in the Australian context, it is within living memory that, especially after Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum supporting workers’ rights, Labor was proud to be the ‘Catholic party’.
Were that still the case, we would never have had the shocking scene, reminiscent of the Bolshevik revolution, showing the tearing down of the Cross over Canberra’s Calvary Hospital, so that it would be yet another abortion slaughterhouse for killing Australian babies.
With Mr Albanese insisting on his Catholic faith during the recent election campaign, he is surely under a moral duty to instruct his ACT proxy to restore the hospital to its rightful owner, the Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, we should all appreciate what our civilisation has achieved. It is not only in the technological and material areas, but also in the scientific, medical, cultural, legal, ethical and spiritual areas, that Western civilisation undoubtedly constitutes the greatest achievement of mankind.
The alternative offered by the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran Axis is the subjugation of the people, even extending to slavery, as with the Muslim Uighur people in China.
As George Orwell warned in his great novel, 1984, it would be hell on earth.
The fact is that Western civilisation emerged by taking the already splendid Greco-Roman civilisation and giving it a spiritual, Judeo-Christian heart, so that for the first time, the individual would be eventually respected through a true rule of law, the separation of powers, and an evolving universal concept of human rights and man’s essential dignity.
This recognition of each and every person is an application of St Paul’s words: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’
This explains the extraordinary role of the Church down to today in her hospitals, in her care for the needy and in her schools and universities.
In these times, Leo XIV could play a role as significant as that of John II aiding Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to bring down the evil Soviet empire.
For Leo XIV, it would be in contributing to what could be the salvation of the West.
Fortunately, he comes from and is greatly encultured by that part of the West, particularly advanced in matters constitutional and political, the Anglosphere. Habemus papam ex orbe Anglico!
Three turning points stand out.
First, the 1688 Glorious Revolution, which turned England and then Britain into, as Montesquieu found, a disguised republic, one which, with its separation and balance of powers, offered a close-to-perfect form of governance.
The second was the 1776 Declaration of Independence, announcing to the world that the Founders ‘hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.
The third was the 1807 abolition of the slave trade by the British parliament and, in 1833, of slavery itself.
This followed a long and effective campaign by a band of Christians whose convictions framed slavery as a terrible moral evil.
Knowing that legislation alone would not be enough, this was followed by the establishment of the Royal Navy’s West African Squadron operating from 1808 to as late as 1870. During this time, 1,600 slave ships were captured and 150,000 slaves released. One sailor was lost for every nine slaves freed, often through a tropical illness.
It was expensive in manpower and money consuming about two per cent of Britain’s GDP, more than many Western countries now spend on defence. Probably the world’s most expensive and most effective humanitarian intervention, it is now almost completely forgotten.
With all this, the question has to be asked: why has support for religion declined in the West when it is rising elsewhere?
I believe this has much to do with the First World War, a terrible and unnecessary civil war in the very heart of Western civilisation.
Not only were 20 million killed and an equal number injured, millions were displaced. Four great empires collapsed, followed by the rise of fascism, Nazism and communism, a second world war and the deaths of well over 100 million people.
It is little wonder that there has been a move away from religion and a belief in God. This resulted in a phenomenon best described by an observation attributed to G.K. Chesterton. My formulation is this: that when man stops believing in God it is not that he believes in nothing. It is that he will believe in anything.
The reason is modern life demonstrates that man has an innate capacity and desire, indeed a need, to believe. Belief is a fundamental quality of mankind. So, when man sets aside the body of Judeo-Christian belief, he is open to new beliefs and new ideas.
It was John Maynard Keynes who realised what is a surprising truth. This is that the ‘power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas’.
All this coincided with the realisation by the communists that Marx was fundamentally wrong and that the workers would not rise to overthrow capitalism, and that the answer was to influence society by infiltrating its institutions, even the boards of great corporations as we saw in the Voice referendum.
So began the long march through the institutions, beginning with education. For many reasons discussed here, this has been remarkably successful.
Based on the truth in the Chesterton attribution, the point is that if our Judeo-Christian religion can be revived to the level it is on other continents, far-left dogmas will have less chance of infiltrating minds in the West.
As a result, Western civilisation can be strengthened and saved.
Australians for Constitutional Monarchy Convenor Prof David Flint AM writes regularly for The Spectator.