Professor Anthony Esolen is well known for the skill with which he wields his pen, as well as his passion for teaching the great treasures of Western civilization, especially those that find their roots in the Catholic Faith.

After several years of regular writing for MAGNIFICAT, with different themes and topics from year to year—from the sacraments to the Last Things, from liturgy to literature, including an entire year dedicated to Dante’s Divine Comedy—in December of 2013 Professor Esolen began writing a new column, “How the Church Has Changed the World.” It is a column he still writes, and which continues to garner the interest and appreciation of readers.

This volume, which comprises the first two years of that column, responds to a steady flow of requests to make his essays available again. They are back, as the saying goes, by popular demand.

In these twenty-five essays—which include the inspiring witness of priests, religious, and laity; which touch on the arts and sciences, civilian life and government, the realm of ideas and practical works of mercy—Professor Esolen displays how the Church is truly the “leaven and, as it were, the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into the family of God” (Gaudium et spes, 40).

It is not uncommon to find books and articles presenting arguments that the Church has failed the world. Under Professor Esolen’s tutelage, however, we will enjoy discovering how Holy Mother Church, as she leads us home to where all the angels and saints are gathered around the glorious throne of God, has indeed made our world a better place.

The Apennines run along the peninsula of Italy like a spine, carved and turned by volcanic action beneath the earth. So it is that abrupt cliffs of fire-founded rock rise up, smoothed a little by the long ages, pitted with grottoes, covered on their gentler western slopes with rich soil for farming, and crowned, often enough, by the walls and tile roofs and spires of a medieval town.

And here, in one such grotto, beyond the walls of one such town, a little man in brown rough cloth is working quietly. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he has been in himself something of a volcano, if that word can properly apply to one who, by all appearances, hardly ever raises his voice. He is leading a great lumbering ox and a donkey over to the grotto, to tether them there, in front of a very large trough filled with hay so they won’t grow restless, and a cistern full of water. The animals seem unusually tame, or maybe he just has a way with them.

Two other men in brown are watching him.

“Brother Rufino, what is the master doing now?” It’s never been easy for the followers to catch up with him. It is like trying to hold still the flashing points of a fire.

“I don’t know. He said something about the chapel being too small.”

“Too small for an ox and a donkey?”

“No, Brother Giles. Too small for the crowd that will come to celebrate the vigil with us.”

Rufino and Giles approach the master. He is now strewing cedar branches and laurel along the sides of the grotto, as if he were decorating a stage. “My little brothers!” he cries out to them. “Come and assist me. Now is the time when what is great is small and what is small is great.”

So they assist him, as if they were trying to transfigure a mountain and deck it as a sanctuary; as if the earth itself could now be a church once more, at the coming of the Lord who made it. At first they don’t know what the task is, but after a while the plan takes shape in their minds too, and they pitch themselves into it with a will. The afternoon soon fades into evening, for the days are short, and in the waning light the people come, most especially children, some of whom the master dresses in white robes, giving them country horns and pipes to play with. Men and women come too, leading sheep, and a frisking lamb or two, just born this summer. Naturally, with the commotion come man’s oldest and most loyal friends, the dogs, wagging their tails and barking, as the good Lord made them to do.

“Master,” says Rufino, a man who was always a little too touchy about boundaries, “may we do this thing? Have we permission? What will the bishop say?” Rufino is the sort who, if he missed a word while saying his paternoster, would repeat the prayer three times over to make up for it. The master has had to correct him at times for that.

“The bishop of all the bishops has had his say. I have asked him, and he has approved. Brother Rufino,” he says, his eyes glinting upon his friend, “when have you ever known me to take upon myself the burden of a priest? You know that my back is too weak to bear it.”

It is now quite dark above, a winter sky with stars like flakes of fire. The master leads a little girl and a little boy by the arm, and instructs them to kneel in front of the feeding trough, their hands folded in prayer. Then he brings a statue of an infant boy, which he had hidden for just this moment. He kisses its forehead, and falls to his knees.

All the people, hundreds of them, fall to their knees.

What can we hear, in that grotto on the slopes of Mount Subiaco? The earth is not trembling. Angels do not trumpet their songs from the skies. Some of the people are muttering a prayer, Magnificat anima mea. One of the lambs gives a shy bleat. The ox and the ass look on, padding now and then in their places, snuffling at the hay, or looking upon the people with their large expressive eyes.

Then the master arises to his feet, and begins to sing. Puer nobis nascitur: A boy is born for us!

Song after song, some in Latin, some in the Italian dialect of Umbria, rises up from the men and women and children, from the brothers in their coarse brown tunics, and from the angels surrounding the grotto, made all the lovelier by the occasional confusion of the animals, for they too partake of this glory. A few of the grandees of Assisi are present, but in this world, the real world, what is small is great and what is great is small, and not all their gay robes draw the eyes of the people as do the children in white, the ox and the ass and the sheep, the girl Mary and the boy Joseph, and the figure of the Holy Child.

Then, after the poetry of praise, and after a time of silence that even the dogs in their sagaciousness observe, the poor man of God, Francis Bernardone, steps before the people and preaches to them of the meaning of this night.

“This is a new thing in the world,” he says. “This is perhaps the only new thing the world has ever seen.” And he speaks to them of the Child in the manger. It is not only that God has deigned to come among us in so humble a guise. It is that he is instructing us even now. Even from the manger does Christ preach, saying, “If you would enter the kingdom of heaven, you must become as I am, you must become as little children.” The child has nothing; the Son does nothing but what he sees the Father do. And therefore the Father has robed him in splendor.

“See the swaddling bands that wind him about,” says the master. “Whose hands wove the cloth? It was Mary, in the quiet house in Nazareth, who wove those bands for the child she was going to bear, along with her dearest friend and my beloved, the Lady Poverty, and she and Mary spoke of many things as they worked, and no one but God beheld them.”

So for an hour and more did Saint Francis preach, and the people there at the second crèche in the history of the world—for the first was at the stable-cave in Bethlehem—listened, as they always did, as if his clear and boyish voice swept them from that hillside into the land where the boy Christ looks upon his own, and makes the lion lie down with the lamb, and, more remarkable than that, the rich man to bow in homage to the poor, and leads them to streams of living water.

And in the rushing of Francis’ words, the people for a time forget themselves. They forget to lift the chin and throw back the shoulders and strut like foolish peacocks in a cage. They forget to be great, and seem as if they had returned to childhood themselves, their eyes bright with delight and their lips parted in that happy look that children have when they are all wonder and no self. For the whole world, from the stars above to the rock beneath their feet, is a grotto for just this moment, to which the people have been invited, if they would but bow their heads and become small enough to fit into the universe.

The Evangelists tell us that the earth shook on the day when Christ died upon the cross. But that was the great after-tremor of Jesus’ first act of love, when in the silence of Mary’s house he became flesh and dwelt among us, and then, on the night of the Nativity, first showed to Mary and Joseph, then to the humble animals, and only then to mere shepherds, his sacred face. The earth shook with the fire of love, and from that day unto this, wherever men and women still remember the name of Jesus and how he was born in a lowly stable, they will feel that tremor, and know, somehow, even if they have forgotten the words, that the meek shall inherit the earth, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that all the pomp and glamour of the world will pass away, all its capitols and senates and universities and towering dynamos of business leave not one scorched stone upon a stone, but the Child born in the manger will remain, and he alone can tell us the secret of who we are and where we must go.

Two women are in the fields outside of Wakefield, tying bean seedlings to stakes. It’s a clear and sunny day, with just enough of a breeze to bring to their ears the bass voice of a man, raving:

“Dear me!” cries one of the women. “Are they brawling at the public house again?”

“Nay, not indeed,” says the other, laughing. “It’s my good husband, Will. He’s playing Herod again this holiday. Twenty-two years has he done it, and still he will drop a rhyme or two, so he gives his lungs the airing whilst feeding the pigs.”

“Ah, the mysteries! Fool that I am, I had forgotten. I hear that the brave lad of the Waters will be the Christ this year. He has not the look of a priest about him.”

“Not if the bailey’s daughter has anything to say about it! They are to be wed this Lammastide. But listen!”

“Aye, there’s a voice of a man indeed! He does so enjoy playing that murdering rogue of a king.”

“So long as the Lord not mistake him for Herod when he shall stand before him!”

I imagine such a conversation between two wives, in the little English village of Wakefield, in the merry old days of Catholic England. They’re talking about their village plays for the three-day festival of Corpus Christi. It’s something the people of Wakefield have known and loved for many generations.

We who go to the movies may suppose there’s always been such a thing as drama. It isn’t so. Drama is the most erratic of the arts, like a wild sweet fruit that grows only in a sheltered place, when the sun and rain are just right. They were just right in Athens, five centuries before Christ, when the old religion of Greece met a new thing called democracy, and the poets invented the play—meditations on man and the gods, complete with dance and song, and what we’d call a civic liturgy, to celebrate all that they revered as holy.

Conditions were right again when my mother was a little girl, when quite a few Catholics directed movies that were brilliant works of art. How did that happen? Men like John Ford and Frank Capra didn’t graduate from film school. There wasn’t any such. They had their hard education in human joy and suffering. They and their comrades knew what it was like to go down a coal mine, or sweat ten pounds a day in a foundry, or haul freight on the docks. They also knew what it was like to fall to their knees in worship. Even if they strayed from the Faith, they felt in their bones that only a holy day can ever really be a holiday. Back in my mother’s time, there was a tiny theater on Main Street, called the Grand, a few blocks from the church, Saint Thomas Aquinas. I like to think that Thomas would have gone to a movie once in a while, especially if, as in You Can’t Take It with You, we see love and merry folly defeat avarice and self-regard, or, as in Sergeant York, we see a humble and peace-loving farm boy become a hero in wartime, putting his life on the line for his fellows in the field.

But did Thomas ever see a play? Sure he did.

In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church re-affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Body, Blood, soul, and divinity. It was a cause for great rejoicing, and to mark the event, Pope Honorius declared a new holiday: Corpus Christi.

The feast was celebrated on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday. That was a deft theological move that Pope Honorius made. We were meant to think of the three great Thursdays in the history of salvation: the Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, the Thursday of the Lord’s Ascension, and now the Thursday of the Lord’s presence among us in the sacrament of the altar, until the end of time. The feast was held for three days, too—echoing the three days commemorating Christ’s Passion and Death, before the triumph of Easter. But these three concluded with the Sunday that celebrated the most profound mystery of God, that he is both One and a Communion of three Persons. Overnight the holiday became immensely popular. It didn’t have the sweet merriment of Christmas, or the solemn joy of Easter. It had the boldness and breadth of summer days filled with light.

So, some priest, somewhere—call him Francisco Capra—got an idea. Why not celebrate the holiday by putting on stage the whole of the cosmos, the whole of the history of salvation? Not just one play, but a whole series of plays, rejoicing at the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and drawing near to the Blessed Trinity?

With the swiftness of a wildfire and the rush of a mighty stream, drama swept across Europe, and for once the slang held true, that everybody got in on the act. It wasn’t professional. Each of a town’s guilds would commit to the play nearest their hearts; so that the carpenters might stage the one about their hero, Noah the ark-builder. The plays would be performed on wheeled platforms, what we’d call floats, moving from station to station through the town, from chapel to chapel, over the three days. Imagine it! Fifteen or twenty or thirty plays, and who are the actors but your neighbors? Who built that “special effect” spring-action Gate of Hell that Christ bursts open with a finger-touch? You did. Who prepared the bread and meat and sweets for the crowds? You did. Who stood a-tiptoe in the audience, mouthing the words you knew your boy had to say, and laughing inside when he got them right? Who could sit at a fireside forty years later and recall with your friends the words of Jesus to Pilate, or how the big-bellied miller was “struck” in the forehead by the stone that David slung? You could do that, you and your neighbors, from Prague to Lisbon, from York to Rome, for almost four hundred years.

It was a rollicking, bumptious theater, smelling less of the schools than of the grocer’s. Look at the plays from Wakefield. A sheep-stealer named Mak tries to “hide” his theft in a manger, pretending that his wife has given birth to a boy child in the night; while the true Lamb is born that same night nearby, as the good shepherds will see. Noah’s got his ship all stocked, but he still can’t budge the most reluctant creature to get into it while the rains are coming—Mrs. Noah. Your friends aren’t fooled by any fussy limitations of time or space, so that a boy, cheering the defeat of Pharaoh and his charioteers, gives praise to “the Lord Emmanuel,” as is right and just.

Many of these plays, from here, there, and everywhere, still survive, and we can see, behind the plain language and the popular stage action, a way of thinking about the world that informs the greatest Christian artists. We don’t see time as a line from one point to another. All of salvation is reflected in each moment; the shadow of the cross falls upon the stable at Bethlehem; in the very curse upon Eve is the blessing that she will be the Mother of One who will crush the serpent’s head.

Saint Thomas must have seen them when he was little, and his Grand Theater was the vault of the summer sky. But the greater drama to which he gave his heart, and for which he composed his own beautiful hymns, was the drama that the holiday commemorated. That drama was held every day, before every tabernacle in the world. We know its climax: FOR THIS IS MY BODY.

And when plays from classical Greece made their way west in the Renaissance, and when a new world was discovered hiding behind the western sea, poets didn’t have to invent the drama all over again. They already had it, vibrant, popular, and deeply theological. The man of muscles was ready for action.

So the Church revived the drama, and gave the world the greatest dramatist who ever lived, a man from a Catholic family, who saw those rough and tumble plays when he was a boy, and learned from them, even as his poetry soared beyond what heights the villagers could attain.

That boy’s name was William Shakespeare.

When Jesus came down from the mountain of the Transfiguration, he met a crowd with the rest of his disciples, surrounding a man whose son was possessed. The disciples had tried to cast out the spirit, but failed. And Jesus, disappointed by their weak faith, turned to the man and said, “If you can believe, all things are possible.”

“Lord, I do believe,” said the poor man, overcome by love and sorrow. “Please, help my unbelief.”

Then Jesus rebuked the foul spirit, and when it departed it left the boy senseless upon the ground, as if dead. But Jesus raised the boy by the hand and led him home. There the disciples took Jesus aside and asked why they could not cast the spirit out.

“This kind,” said Jesus, “comes out only by prayer and fasting.”

Father John treasured these words. They had been his anchor of hope. Not that there was much visible turmoil in the village to which he had been sent. It was not, there, as it had been in Paris some years before, when the people rose up in revolt against their rulers, and then against the very leaders of their revolt, and runnels of blood ran fresh from the Place de la Concorde, as the national barber, the guillotine, did its swift and efficient work. For a while it seemed as though the very seasons had been sent to the scaffold, and men no longer could reckon time by the great works of God, but by foolish and ugly names invented by the new deities, names like the month of Thermidor. And in their madness they had removed the statue of the Blessed Mother from her cathedral and replaced her with a harlot to whom, without irony, they gave the name of Reason, and honored her as a goddess.

No, it was not like that here. In some ways it was worse. It was not the whirlwind. It was the wreckage after the whirlwind. The sun shone and the rain fell and the land yielded its fruit, and men and oxen worked the fields, and children ran about and got into trouble, but it was as if the village had been thrown to the ground by a deaf and dumb spirit. The church on Sunday was empty but for a few old widows in their black country lace. The miller cheated his customers, young men kept knives under their shirts, several men had taken women to their beds without bothering about marriage, every morning saw someone in a drunken sleep in a ditch; and far from the joy of the Faith, there was not even human mirth, but the hard cynical laughter of people who have given up on life. “Let us eat, drink, and be merry,” they said, but their eyes were dull and their lips hard.

To this place, then, Father John had been sent. It seemed that the whole of France had heaved itself into apostasy, and what could one frail priest do about it?

“If you can believe,” said Jesus to that desperate father, “all things are possible.”

Perhaps a more learned man would have been desperate. What could one simple man do against the witty slashes of Voltaire, who had cried out against the very Church to which he owed his humane education, Ecrasez l’infâme! Tear down the unspeakable thing! What could he do against the still deadlier poison of Rousseau, that urbane fellow who, having abandoned his own children, dared to write about the natural goodness of man, seeming to praise the teachings of Jesus while dismissing him to oblivion?