Msgr. Phillip Hughes
Each of the twenty councils presented in this unique book is an individual reality, with its own special personality. "It is hardly possible to write the history of these twenty General Councils as though they were sections hewn from the one same log. They are not a unity in the sense in which successive sessions of Congress are a unity. This is partly due to the fact that each had its origin in a particular crisis of Church affairs, which are presented with precision and intellectual care while gleaning the infallible teaching of the church so necessary for the modern world.

Orestes A. Brownson
The American Republic Volume 85

Orestes Brownson was a Catholic convert and one of a few American Catholic intellectuals to be critical of  Protestantism, which he identified with Capitalism. 

Although he favored “rule by law”, he was careful to make the  distinction between secular law and the Law of God and likewise between the voice of the people and the Voice of God.

He loved America and, like many others, saw her as a “model for the world.”  This model however, to be effective, had to first successfully integrate the Catholic faith.  This earned him the repute of non-Catholics and even of upwardly mobile Catholics and members of the hierarchy who were protecting their respective flocks while working to make Catholicism more American while seemingly less concerned about making America more Catholic.

His ideas might be more relevant now than when he wrote them!

Kolbe’s Greatest Books Volume 31

Paulus Orosius (375-418) was born in the Roman province of Hispania Gallaecia, in Northern Portugal-Spain. He won renown an historian and correspondent to Saint Augustine of Hippo and of Saint Jerome whom he met in Jerusalem.

Orosius’ research on the pagans was an integral contribution to St. Augustine’s City of God.  His Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, completed in 418 shotly after the sack of Rome by Alaric, won him renown as an historiographer. He composed these books in response to request for detailed research about the history of the pagans that could support his own research and conclusions about the down fall of Rome, which he attributed to the perverse religious practices of the pagans.

Orosius provided Augustine, and he provides all of us, with detailed and accurate information about the pagan peoples from antiquity up to the fourth century in which they lived. Like Augustine, he intended to demonstrate the great improvement in moral, social, political, economic and overall human well-being that the Christian brought to  people steeped in the darkness of paganism.

Plato (424-347 BC) was a Greek philosopher of first rank.  His writings are part of most every philosophy curricula in the entire Western World. Plato was taught by Socrates and was, himself, the teacher of the incomparable Aristotle. Together these three are the original founders of both science and philosophy.

In general it may be said that Plato is to St. Augustine as Aristotle is to St. Thomas Aquinas.  That is, he is responsible for a great and legitimate school of philosophy that has had more than a major impact on Christian civilization and on Christian philosophy and theology.

Plato’s  Republic, Laws  and Statesman are the three treatises in which he grappled with the political question . He did in systematic style, relying on previous mastery of metaphysics, ethics and psychology, which is a hallmark of brilliant minds. Plato’s eminence is shared by a rare company of theologians and philosophers including St.Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, the already mentioned Aristotle and Socrates as well as others such as St. Bonaventure, St. Robert Bellarmine and Cicero.