About us
Academia Christiana is a training institute and think tank created in 2013.
Our goal is to educate young Christians and people of good will who want to commit themselves to serving the Common Good and restoring a Christian social order. Academia Christiana strives to defend the True, the Good, and the Beautiful by drawing on the sources of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and the Tradition of the Church.
Rooted in Heaven by faith and in the Catholic Church by baptism, we also sink our roots into a three-dimensional identity ground: our small carnal homelands, our community of national destiny and our common civilization, Europe.
"This means," writes Dom Gérard[1], "that the cross which has been planted for thirteen centuries on Christian land, this cross representing the Catholic religion with its institutions, its customs, its families, its churches, its schools, this cross will only be effectively defended and saved if we defend the land which supports it."
To take root in order to rise, such is our aspiration.
Humans do not live by bread alone, but God's grace does not ignore the needs of nature. An economic organization driven solely by the pursuit of short-term profit, within a borderless global network, reduces humankind to the status of a consumer and strips work of its primary meaning: personal fulfillment and the satisfaction of the needs of the city.
Such a model closes man in on himself instead of making him grow.
Only on the basis of properly understood social justice will we bring man back to the primacy of the spiritual. Between individualism and collectivism, the two faces of the same egalitarianism, one seeing man as a god among his fellows and the other as a head of cattle, we advocate a third way in which man is first conceived as a brother. A third way where freedom – “the power to do good as understanding is the faculty of knowing the truth[2]” – is accomplished in a community, in the service of others.
In the school of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the work of social Catholics, distributism, counter-revolutionary thought and integral ecology, we seek remedies for the disorders of our time to act here and now.
Faced with the materialism of atheist society, faced with the inertial force of a secular technocracy that governs badly but defends itself well, we want to take up the anthropological challenge.
"It is not a question of creating an electoral majority," wrote the poet Frédéric Mistral, "but of rebuilding a people," that is, of restoring to man the awareness of what he was, of what he is: an heir, an eternally insolvent debtor to his predecessors. It is only in the humility of the heir that we will rediscover the ardor of the builder.
Armed with the "sword of the Spirit, that is, the word of God," and "shod with the ardor to proclaim the Gospel of Peace[3]," we work serenely in the light of a simple maxim: all truth is ours.
[1] Tomorrow Christianity, Sainte-Madeleine Editions.
[2] Monsignor Gaume, The Treatise on the Holy Spirit.
[3] Letter of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians.
Academia Christiana is a program of the Cultural Association of Integral Education (ACEI).
