The Church of Cathedral and Crusade, Volume 1

The Church of Cathedral and Crusade is the third installment in Henri Daniel-Rops' monumental History of the Church of Christ. This volume includes the first seven chapters of that work, surveying the salient characteristics of the period 1050 to 1350; the religious foundation of the age and its expressions in prayer and pilgrimage, liturgy and sacrament; the archetype of medieval manhood, St. Bernard of Clairvaux; the leavening labors of reform and renewal by Popes Gregory VII and Paschal II and Sts. Francis of Assisi and Dominic de Guzman; the relationship between Church and State, popes and monarchs, and ecclesial and secular hierarchies; the governmental model of the medieval Church and its effects on the moral and material economies; and the tension between such Christian ideals as fidelity, humility, and charity (symbolized by St. Louis IX) and those all-too-human realities of impetuosity, vanity, and violence.

Spectacular in scope and detail, The Church of Cathedral and Crusade presents Christ-endom in "the springtime of its youth" in which it "built the cathedrals, compiled the summae, embarked on the crusades, spread and intensified the Gospel message; while the Church's power reached heights hitherto unexplored, and she herself became the guide of human thought." The cause of this incomparable creativity? Simply, on Daniel-Rops' studied assessment, that "from the lowest to the highest, society believed."