"What are all these things compared with the loss of souls?"

Under this title -- words taken from Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno -- Rorate Caeli (August 6, 2011) writes:

One of the "cornerstones" of modern economy, the unassailable credit of the United States: downgraded.

Ours is an extraordinarily interesting age, of which this latest piece of news is just a very minute sign: the explosive energy that sprung up in the small western end of Eurasia in the Middle Ages, shaped by Christendom, a burst of creativity and missionary spirit which covered the whole world: the originally Christian West, whose good (and sublime) and bad (and hideous) ideas shaped the world as we know it, and that, in a kind of lifeline, lived its last decades of influence after the European disasters of the 20th century in some of its old colonial outposts - that energy seems to be finally spent. Many aspects of that civilization, enormously wealthy and yet bankrupt as well as spiritually exhausted, remain and will survive, but its hegemonic presence seems likely to be replaced. By what? And does it matter, in the eternal scheme of things?

Despite rivers of ink in "social" and "economic" doctrinal documents since "the Council", it is astounding that the best Catholic commentary on the troubles of this age was written 80 years ago.This is not the first time some of these words of Pius XI are posted here - but they never seem to get old: ...

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