Fr. Mario Alexis Portella: Reviving Christendom

By Fr. Mario Alexis Portella, Crisis Magazine, June 16, 2025

Fr. Mario Alexis Portella is a priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence, Italy. He was born in New York and holds a doctorate in canon law and civil law from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. He is the author of Islam: Religion of Peace?—The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-Up (Westbow Press, 2018).

Five-hundred years on from the Protestant revolution and Christendom is not just dismantled, but in full apostasy. Can it be revived, and if so, how?

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was the greatest Christian philosopher of antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence, maintained that a Christian state is the only type of state where true justice can be achieved. This is because, in such a state, the body politic would rule according to Christian tenets and values, which would align the state’s laws with divine law.

Writing after Christianity was proclaimed as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the Emperor Theodosius I in 380, he said: “Were our [Christian] religion listened to as it deserves, it would establish, consecrate, strengthen, and enlarge the commonwealth in a way beyond all that Romulus, Numa, Brutus, and all the other men of renown in Roman history achieved.” …

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