"I think the criticism which we find it most uncomfortable to meet ..."

... is when they tell us that the Catholic Church is all right when you consider it a priori, on paper, as a system, but when you look at its actual record in history you do not find its effects on human life the kind of effects which you would expect a supernatural institution to have. The world, to be sure, has advanced a great deal since the times of our Lord. Slavery has given place to freedom, savagery to kindness, selfishness to philanthropy; men are no longer (in the more favoured countries) executed for slight offences, or tortured when they refuse to give evidence, or killed in duels; some attempt is made, at any rate, to give working men decent wages, and rescue them and their families from destitution; and in a thousand other ways it is possible to show that the world has become a more comfortable place to live in. But how much, we are asked, has all this to do with Christianity, or at any rate with the Catholic Church? Is it not true that the improvements which have been made in the condition of human living have been made, for the most part, without any effort of sympathy on the part of Catholics, and sometimes in the teeth of theIr opposition? And if that is so, how can we claim that the Catholic Church, as we find the Catholic Church in history, is the Church which our Lord referred to in his parables? How strange that the leaven which has leavened the world has not, noticeably at any rate, proceeded from her!

The answer to that kind of objection is not an easy one, and I think it is rather a humiliating one. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is this. During the period between the Ascension and the Reformation, that charge is not true. During the period between the Reformation and the French Revolution that charge is true, but it was not our fault; in great measure at least it was not our fault. In our own day, the situation has grown so desperately complicated that It defies analysis. What seems to emerge from it is that under modern conditions we Catholics ought, more than ever, to be taking the lead in enlightening the conscience of the world; that, largely, we are not doing it, and it is our fault that we are not doing it; and moreover, that in proportion as we do succeed in our efforts, we shall not be given any credit for it; we shall be cried down as much as ever by the prophets of materialistic humanitarianism for not going about it in a different and more wholehearted way.

— Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, from "The Church and Human Progress", a chapter from In Soft Garments: Classic Catholic Apologetics.