For us Catholics, faith in the Son of God, loyalty to the Church, communion with Peter: these things stand in an intimate and necessary connection. And therefore since we desire not to abandon Christ, we do not abandon Peter. And therefore is it our quiet but confident hope, a hope set in our souls by our Lord at Caesarea Philippi, that it cannot be otherwise, that it must be so again, that all who seek Christ shall likewise again find Peter. Heiler writes in moving language of the longing for the “angelic pastor” (pastor angelicus), to him a beautiful dream.[7] But for us it is no mere beautiful dream, but a certain expectation. The divine life, the life full of grace and truth, has been revealed and given to us once for all in Christ. Nor can there be any permanent and fruitful life of nations and of men, which is not nourished on that original divine life. There can be no unity of the West, no communion of souls, which does not draw all its motives, yearnings and hopes from this divine source. Christ is and remains the heart of humanity, its true and only native land, wherein it shall find rest for its soul. That is our faith, though western civilization should collapse—and the prophets of its downfall are already with us—or though it should be born again in Him who is our life. And the organ and instrument of this Christian life will be that Church which He built upon Peter. For to her alone was made the promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against her. She alone possesses the guarantee of permanence, to her alone belongs the future. Just as the Church by the compact unity and strength of her Christian faith gave the Middle Ages their inward unity and their strength of soul, and just as in her severe and inexorable struggle with primitive pagan instincts and with the forces of extravagant imperialism, she defended the sublimity, purity and freedom of the Christian faith and of Christian morality, so she alone is able in our modern day to introduce again amid the conflicting currents, the solvent forces and growing exhaustion of the West, a single lofty purpose, a constructive and effective religious power, a positive moral energy and a vitalizing enthusiasm. And she alone can reunite the severed threads which joined our western civilization to that great and rich past whence it sprang. Whether we look forwards or backwards, we realize that without the Church of Peter there will be no inward dynamic unity, no further “history” for the West, but only a succession of experiences without goal or purpose, the convulsive movements of a body that has lost its soul. We need the Church that we may live.