By William Slattery

"Every chancellery in Europe, every court in Europe, was ruled by these learned, trained and accomplished men the priesthood of that great and dominant body."
President Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom

With the evidence of stubborn facts, historians have given their verdict: from the genius of Christianity and the cultures of the Jews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Germanic peoples, the Catholic Church built a new and original civilization, embodying within its structures the Christian vision of God and man, time and eternity.

Heroism and Genius presents some of these formidable men of the Dark Ages and the medieval period, sketching their decisive role in the building of the landmark social, artistic and economic institutions that mark Western Civilization: Fathers of the Western socio-political ethos, and Free-Market Economics; leaders of nations, statesmen, and defiers of tyrants; music composers, pioneers of universal education, and architects of some of the world's loveliest buildings; and the clandestine revolutionaries behind the flowering of the culture of romantic love that is the classic model for relations between men and women.

• Binding: Hardcover
  Pages: 300

Fr. William J. Slattery, ordained priest in St. Peter’s Basilica by Saint John Paul II in 1991, was awarded the Ph.D in philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the S.T.L. in theology at the Pontifical Lateran University. He speaks French, Spanish, English, and Italian and has also studied Latin, Greek, Gaelic, and German. Born on the Atlantic coast of Ireland in Dungarvan in 1961, he studied in Abbeyside at the Augustinian Friars’ high school, and later in Dublin, Salamanca, and Rome. He has worked in the U.S.A., Canada, Ireland, and Italy. While residing at the Pontifical North American College in Rome during his Ph.D and S.T.L. studies, he prepared a series of books on the formation of priests, to be published in the future. He has given the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in both English and French in North America. His published works so far are Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Built Western Civilization (Ignatius Press, 2016) and The Logic of Truth: St. Thomas Aquinas’s Epistemology and Antonio Livi’s Alethic Logic (Leonardo da Vinci, 2016).