It is the nature of heresy to sacrifice Catholic truth and Christian unity by concentrating its attention on the immediate solution of some pressing contemporary problem of Christian thought or action. The heretic goes astray by attempting to take a short cut, owing to a natural human impatience at the apparent slowness and difficulty of the way of pure faith.
But the Church also has to take the difficult way of the Cross, to incur the penalties and humiliations of earthly failure without any compensating hope of temporal success. She is not an alternative and rival to the State, and her teaching does not take the place of political needs and ideologies; yet she cannot disinterest herself in the corporate life of the community and confine her attention to the individual soul. The Church is no human society, but she is the channel by which divine life flows into human society and her essential task is the sanctification of humanity as a whole in its corporate as well as its individual activities.
—Christopher Dawson, “Christianity and Contradiction in History,” pgs. 275- 282 in Dynamics of World History. ed. John J. Mulloy (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007),281.
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