Four Legs of the Chair: The Decline and Restoration of Western Civilization’s Foundations

Description

Why does a civilisation need four legs?

A chair needs four legs. Three will wobble; two will collapse. Western civilisation rests on four such legs: the Family, in which human beings are made and formed; Society, the web of associations, friendships and civic bodies that sustain common life; the Church, which supplies the transcendent horizon without which the others lose their reason for existing; and Education, which hands inherited wisdom to the next generation. Damage one and the others strain. Over the past sixty years, the West has damaged all four at once.

What does the evidence actually show?

Ours is an age rich in opinion and poor in data. Four Legs of the Chair sets the competing moods aside and looks at the record: marriage and divorce rates, Mass attendance, ordinations, fertility, school enrolments, mental-health data and international test scores. It traces a decline that is worse than most Catholics realise, and a renewal that is more substantial than the pessimists allow.

What will you discover inside?

• Why marriage, birth rates and community life collapsed together, not separately
• What really happened to the Church after 1965, from Ireland to the Netherlands
• Why more education spending has bought less learning, and what classical Catholic schools do differently
• How Rerum Novarum, Humanae Vitae and Evangelium Vitae foresaw today’s crises
• Which dioceses, movements and communities are growing, and what they share
• What one family and one parish can do now

Who is this book for?

It is written for the ordinary Catholic in the pew, as well as parents, catechists, teachers, priests and parish leaders. Every statistic is explained and every encyclical unpacked. The book does not claim the past was golden or that decline is destiny: the same record that documents the collapse also shows where it did not happen.

About the author

Robert Milan has spent more than twenty years in Catholic education and faith formation, teaching primary, secondary and adult groups. He writes at EternallyCatholic.com, where the motto is “Educating for Eternity.”

Available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon.