Originally published at crisis magazine
With the light glistening off the mirrors in Louis XIV’s fabulous palace of Versailles and the ink still drying on the treaty, Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the United States and victor over the Central Powers in the Great War, thought he had created a freer, more progressive world out of the ashes of the old. Believing he had deciphered the complex and endlessly problematic European balance of power, he foresaw a glorious and prosperous future ahead for America and the world.
However, as only future generations would fully appreciate, he had in fact put the finishing touches on a revolution the scale of which would have made Robespierre blush. With the conclusion of World War I went the destruction of three Christian kingdoms which had for over a century, since the French Revolution, formed the bedrock of what was left of Christendom. The last to fall and the most ancient of these, Austria-Hungary, was heir to the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and the last political link with a classical and medieval past that had placed the Catholic Faith at the center of society. It was the final remnant of the secular half of that edifice which Constantine and
