Followed by our monarchy, the papacy is the West’s oldest institution. The enormous interest in the first Anglosphere pope in almost a thousand years could well signal a growing realisation of the fact that our Judeo-Christian heritage is no mere appendage of Western civilisation, but an essential pillar.
It is relevant to recall that in the Australian context, it is within living memory that, especially after Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum supporting workers’ rights, Labor was proud to be the ‘Catholic party’.
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