by David G. Bonagura, Jr.

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), Catholic convert and eminent historian of culture, despised the tripartite division of both secular and ecclesiastical history into early, medieval, and modern periods. For the Church's history, by his erudite reckoning, there are six ages, each lasting three or four centuries. "Each of them begins, and end, in crisis," he writes in one of his final books, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture.

From the crisis point, each age, except the first, spanning from Pentecost to Constantine's conversion, passes through three phases of growth and then decay: intense spiritual activity and birth of new apostolates, achievements in the Church and in culture, assaults from enemies inside and outside the Church that depreciate or destroy these achievements.

If you are curious about the six ages, I encourage you to read this short book, included in its entirety in a wonderful volume of Dawson essays edited by the late TCT contributor Gerald Russello. For now, Dawson's sixth age, which began with the crisis of the French Revolution and continued at the time of his writing, is worthy of special attention.

Dawson describes the post-Revolution years as "an atmosphere of defeat and disaster:"

Everything had to be rebuilt from the foundations. The religious orders and the monasteries, the Catholic universities and colleges and, not least, the foreign missions had all been destroyed or reduced to poverty and impotence. Worst of all, the Church was still associated with the unpopular cause of the political reaction and the tradition of the ancien régime.

Does this sound familiar?

According to Dawson's criteria, we could well consider the crisis in Catholic practice, theology, education, and social standing that began after Vatican II as a new age of the Church. What happened in 1789 happened again in the 1960s, only this time the assaults chiefly came from enemies within.

The post-conciliar crisis sparked stark changes in every aspect of Catholic life, so much so that the Church appeared to many as if she were beginning a new age. Theologian Karl Rahner, who apparently had not read Dawson, thought so: he called Vatican II the dawn of the third age of the Church.

But Dawson's criteria for a distinct historical age require a certain type of change to follow the crisis: a spiritual response, accompanied by new apostolic endeavors, that returns the Church to her evangelical core. These spiritual works eventually shape the age by bearing ecclesial and cultural fruit.

Though not as dramatic as the work of St. Francis or the Counter Reformation that precipitated prior ages (at least, not yet), the apostolic spirit of the would-be seventh age of the Church that began at Vatican II is marked by what the Council desired: a return to Scripture and Tradition, which are harnessed to bringing the secular and the skeptics into union with Christ. The leading figure of this new age is Pope St. John Paul II. Its name is the New Evangelization.

The apostolic works of this new age are physical and virtual, in-person and online. They span the gamut of modern life: publishing houses, online platforms, think tanks, liturgical institutes, sacred music and sacred art revivals, faithful schools and universities, new religious communities that are traditional in substance and contemporary in style.

At the beginning of this new age, we cannot yet see the fruits. Even in times of renewal, the weeds grow along with the wheat in every season and in every soil. Dawson cautions that a time lag exists between the spiritual sowing and the cultural harvest: "The spiritual achievement of today finds its social expression in the cultural achievements of tomorrow."

Devoted student of history that he was, Dawson would likely blanch at identifying a new historical period while within it. Yet, since for Catholics "all successive ages of the Church and all the forms of Christian culture form one part of one living whole in wh...