The Renewal of Civilization: Essays in Honor of Jacques Maritain

In 1965 Vatican II, the twenty first Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, issued Gaudium et Spes, - a blueprint for a new engagement between the Catholic Church and Modernity. The Church, while "scrutizing the signs of the times" and "interpreting them in the light of the Gospel," responded "to the perennial questions which men ask about the present life and the life to come."

Jacques Maritain, in The Peasant of the Garonne, showed that the challenge to internal renewal of the Church w...