The Soul of the World
The challenges faced by early Christians were strikingly similar to those encountered by Christians of the Third Millennium. We labor to recover the integrated vision they bore witness to — and to live it in our own time.
An excerpt from A Letter to Diognetus, written around 150 AD, shows that the difficulties faced by the early Church were not so different from our own. Sadly, there is a tendency among Christians to forget our history. This ancient letter expressed an integrated vision of life in the world — one that the Foundation seeks to bring forward into the present.
For Christians are distinguished from the rest of mankind neither by country, nor by language, nor by the customs which they observe… they dwell in their own countries, but as sojourners. They display the wonderful and confessedly striking method of life of their own citizenship. They live in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. To sum up: what the soul is in the body, that the Christians are in the world.
An Integrated Vision
We believe the crisis of our time is not principally economic or political, but anthropological and spiritual. Recovering the truth of the human person — created, loved, and called to communion — is the necessary foundation for the renewal of every institution of public life.
Following the witness of figures such as Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we are convinced that civic life cannot long endure when severed from its transcendent source. Authentic freedom is rooted in truth; the true common good is rooted in the dignity of the person and the priority of love.
Why Now
Our public square is increasingly shaped by an aggressive secularism that seeks to remove from view the wonderful contributions of the Church and the great ideas, informed by faith, that have shaped the West. The Foundation exists to propose, recover, and witness to a better way — for the sake of our neighbors, our children, and the generations to come.