Once again our Pope wrestles with 'Americanism' and the 'subversion of primary truths'

“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church."

So wrote Lord Macaulay in the October 1840 issue of the Edinburgh Review when discussing von Ranke’s History of the Popes.

Macaulay went on to say: "The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon.