This paper proposes a Catholic narrative structure for the story of Western civilization, a general outline that eschews secularism and historicism as much as biblical literalism and Catholic triumphalism. In brief, St. Augustine is more correct than Leonardo Bruni: There is only one age of man. We, God’s wondrous creatures, do not change over recorded time. Everywhere in the world, best documented and demonstrated in the West, we see mankind struggle against himself more than merely respond passively to impersonal and improbable social, economic, political, or gender-based “forces.” God, the author of history, writes straight across crooked lines. He shows us that the path of history points toward unity in diversity. Can there be a “Catholic” reading of history, particularly in the case of Western civilization, and, if so, what would it say? The question challenges the academic discipline’s status quo, because normally no such thing is allowed. On the whole, professional historians, especially those who write books about Western civilization, either do not believe in God or Christianity, or they write as if God did not exist and Christianity were just one set of shared discourses, ideas, and practices among many. 1 While historians sometimes write about religion as a reality for some of the people they study, they are generally not supposed to imply, let alone argue, that what might have been true for those people is still true for us today. When it comes to God, the historian is supposed to fall silent. 2 The rule of self-censorship, however, does not apply if one is a disciple of any number of modern, secular theoreticians (Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Durkheim, Foucault, et al.); in that case, dogmatic pronouncements are perfectly in order. Christian or Catholic historians, however, almost without exception, are expected to keep their faith to themselves and out of the classroom and their writing. This double standard is particularly flagrant because all historical writing, beyond the relation of bare fact, always has a moral intention, a competitive set of attitudes, values, assumptions, and beliefs. Historians, then, serve a purpose, a goal, or a master, if you will, when they teach and write. They try to persuade, to seek acceptance for their arguments. As writers, they try to convert their readers to their