Author Thomas Cahill is one of our most eloquent spokespersons for Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism in particular. He is the author of the popular "Hinges of History" series of books addressing the crucial role that both Christianity and the Catholic Church have played in the history of Western Civilization. These books include How the Irish Saved Civilization (1996), The Gifts of the Jews (1999), Desire of the Everlasting Hills (2001), and Sailing the Wine Dark Sea (2004).

This series provide our country's increasing fractious evangelical versus secular cultures a carefully considered and easily readable history of Western Culture from the vantage point of the Judeo-Christian tradition with and emphasis on Roman Catholicism's important role in shaping our civilization over the past two millennia. Cahill shows a knack for being able to reduce the rich history of the Church and its secular effects to its most distilled and most important essences.

As detailed in Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy - What Every American Needs to Know - and Doesn't Americans, for being such a religious and pious nation, are woefully ignorant of our personal religious history, not to mention the religious history of religions other than our own. At least in the respect of the former, the American Christian understanding of Christianity and its beginnings, Cahill succeeds splendidly in his educational efforts to inform an increasingly splintered Christian paradigm.

In what Cahill calls the "Introductory Volume" (How the Irish Saved Civilization) to his "Hinges of History" series, he details Ireland's role in saving the corporate memory (books) of Classical Rome and Greece from complete destruction by the invading unwashed that poured into civilized Europe in the late Fifth Century. With this as a historical backdrop, Cahill juxtaposes the two greatest Christian minds of the period, Sts. Patrick of Ireland and Augustine of Hippo.

No two figures on the same side of the religious fence could have been more different. Patrick was an English deacon's son captured by the Irish and sold into slavery. Returning home six years later, Patrick returned home and entered church life where he distinguished himself as a missionary to Ireland and beyond. While Patrick was spreading the Love of God, the Classically Greek-educated Augustine was establishing the Catholic Dogma and wrecking human sexuality for the foreseeable future. Cahill, while showing each saint the necessary respect, takes Augustine to task for his less than prudent positions of sex within marriage and the dispensing of souls after death.

Following his "Introductory Volume," Cahill inaugurates what he terms, "The Making of the Ancient World" with The Gifts of the Jews. In this volume, the author addresses the development of the people who would become known as Israel. Cahill uses Abraham and Sarah as his springboard in his discussion to the assembly of "The People of the Book." Cahill depicts Abraham not as a hapless old man brought face to face with "I am." Abraham comes off as a savvy landowner and tribal chief in full command of his facilities sans the romance contained in Genesis.

The Gifts of the Jews to modernity include a monotheistic theology, a community built on a nurtured by this theology in such a way that it is woven into the fabric of the community's history. These fibers are ultimately spun with the philosophy of Socrates and Plato into the newer thread of Christianity further woven by the divine tent maker, Paul, himself a citizen of both Roman and Hebraic worlds, Greek educated and tempered on the road to Damascus.

Again from the Holy Land, Cahill provides his second volume from "The Making of the Ancient World" with Desire of the Everlasting Hills. This book deals with the world before and after Jesus Christ. The author considers Christ from the point of view of where he came from and those who knew him. Cahill carefully navigates through each gospel and the image of Christ that emanates from them. Cahill's sympathetic depiction of St. Paul is a must read for those critics intent on criticizing the evangelist as viewed through modern lenses.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills is a beautiful and enduring look at a historical figure who transcend (and should transcend) topical modern criticism. Christ is presented as very human with more in common with us than not. When reading this book, I often wonder if the Blessed Virgin busted Jesus' divine fanny for at 12 years old, stealing away from his family to meet with teachers in the Temple. I am sure Cahill secretly thinks so.

Cahill defines the importance of the Greeks in Sailing the Wine Dark Sea (2004). The title is derived from Homer’s Iliad, one of the two large figures looming in the book. The second is the short-lived specter of Alexander the Great and his tremendous impact on the formation of Western Europe. Alexander can easily be considered the pagan Constantine had the latter not remained pagan until his death bed.

All of what can be considered philosophy as applied to Christian thought came from the Greeks. Oregin and Augustine were patently Platonic while Thomas Aquinas was Aristotelian. The evangelist Paul was Greek educated as was Luke. Greek was the first non-Hebrew language that Holy Scripture was first translated. Hellenism was one of the greatest things to happen to Christian thought, jettisoning it forward by a millennium.

These books comprise the series “Introduction” and “The Making of the Ancient World,” respectively. Cahill’s newest book, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (2006) represents the first of three volumes to address “The Making of the Modern World.”

Cahill readily reduces the Middle Ages into readily understandable and assimilatable motifs. He begins in Alexandria at the close of the Classic era prior to the long yawn of the Dark Ages. Cahill again juxtaposes characters as he did with Patrick and Augustine in How The Irish Saved Civilization, Cahill provides profiles of the Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard von Bingen, and Dante (whom Cahill compares to no one).

Cahill offers special homage to Francis, homage not seen since his writing on Patrick. The author's organic descriptions of these saints can make the reader proud of being the same genus and species as Francis and Patrick. In Mysteries of the Middle Ages Cahill completes his homage to Francis thusly,

“At the end he asked to be stripped of everything, even the bed on which he lay, and to be laid naked on the floor. ‘I have done what is mine,’ were his last whispered words to his companions. ‘May Christ teach you what is yours to do.’ Larks sang and flew in circles above the house where he died. As Francis had always noticed, they are the birds who ‘are friends of the light.’

And that is how romance became prayer.”

Mysteries differs from the previous volumes in being more fully integrated with references to the previous volumes. It also contains heat in Cahill’s defense of Catholic thought where there once was almost fatherly apology.

In his chapter, “How the Roman’s Became Italians,” Cahill addresses the recent spate of Catholic intrigue thrillers by closing a discussion on Constantine thusly,

”The depiction of Christianity in the popular thriller The Da Vinci Code as a fraud perpetrated by Constantine not only is preposterous to any reader with a modicum of historical knowledge but rests on melodramatically anti-Christian Assumptions. The book’s further premise that the Catholic Church sends out Opus Dei hit men to murder anyone who has stumbled on the truth is straight anti-Catholic libel…”

To be sure, this is not Cahill singing the praises of a misunderstood epistle writer in the face of similar assessment. Cahill is certainly passionate enough to take up the sword to slay anti-Christian and anti-Catholic sentiment, real and unreal. In doing so, he runs the risk of overstating his position. However, it may be time to do just that.

"Love in the Ruins, a Dantesque Reflection" finds Cahill departing further from his typical fatherly pedantic into a well-justified organic polemic. In no previous volume of "The Hinges of History" does Cahill so often address the present as in Mysteries of the Middle Ages.

Where Cahill readily defends the Catholic Church's important place in history while readily acknowledging its warts; the author opens the floodgates with respect to the late 20th century "priestly pedophile" scandals. Cahill obviously loves the Mother Church but hates what it has been turned into by an almost Byzantine clerical hierarchy, what he refers to as "surely imposters."

The author bemoans the Church's Soviet-style cover up of the scandal and the Vatican's constant effort to shift the blame first to homosexual priests (clouding the waters as sexual orientation has nothing to do with pedophilia), prompting Cahill to observe that,

"This would be comical to anyone who knows a variety of Catholic priests and bishops (since so many are homosexual in orientation, if not in intergenital activity)..."

Another place Cahill cites the Vatican shifting the blame is his noting that cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos suggests that this is a problem of the English speaking world. Cahill allows this because,

"The truth of the matter is that the English-speaking world has a tradition of truth-telling in public that is not replicated elsewhere, especially not in Italy, where an admission of forced buggery (like the admission of rape by a woman victim in a Muslim country) would be such opprobrium on the male victim that he could never hold up his head again but could well expect to be further brutalized"

and Italy is a seat of "Civilization?"

Cahill's most brutally eloquent argument is reserved for his reconnection with Dante in the final chapters of Mysteries of the Middle Ages,

"Dante bewailed the selling of church offices, describing this practice as 'Christ's [being] bought and sold the whole day long' in the Rome of Pope Boniface VIII. That was, however a far less depraved situation than the current one, where Dante would be forced to conclude, the twelve-year-old Christ, who conversed with the doctors of the law in the Temple of Jerusalem (in Luke 2:41-52), is made to give blow jobs and rammed up the ass the whole day long by the doctors of the law of the New Jerusalem, while the high priests of the Temple stand guard at the entrance lest any uninitiated outsiders should discover what is going on.

Cahill's final sword thrust clearly scrapes with wide margins,

"However shocking these words may sound to some ears, there can be no doubt that this is what clerical dissemblers have done to the Jesus they claim to care so much about. For 'Whatever you do to the least of these...you have done to me' (Matthew 25:40)

Cahill hold little hope for the Western Catholic church opining,

"The Catholic Church in the United States may be doomed in any case, unless the episcopate as a whole resigns, divesting itself of its gorgeous robes and walking off the world's stage in sackcloth and ashes. The bishops who now hold office are surely imposters."

Cahill makes these observations with obvious profound sadness and anger. He is like many other Catholics who continue to attend mass and observe Holy Days of obligation, honoring the Church as community and not hierarchy. But for a good many more Catholics (including this one cum Methodist), the Church's credibility is so profoundly damaged that the circumstances cast doubt on 2000 years of doctrine and dogma.

Not to pick on Catholicism alone, evangelical Christians are equally misguided in their narrow portrayal of the Christ Who is supposed to belong to all of us. Evangelical Christians do not build bridges, they build pedestals, installing themselves atop them as the greatest tradition of the "My shit don't stink Christians." Forget the Church (universally), it is beyond help and will eventually evolve as nature takes its course. Today, Jesus Christ requires rehabilitation. Not for anything He has done, but for what we have made him. Indeed, Francis' closing words to us should sound loudly,

"May Christ teach you what is yours to do."