By Daniel J. Mahoney, The American Mind - All friends of Western civilization, and of the great and enduring causes of liberty and human dignity, cannot remain indifferent to the contemporary fate of the Roman Catholic Church. However imperfect it is at the merely human or institutional level, the Church has ceaselessly reminded human beings of the limits of conceiving of human persons as mere animals, dominated by self-will, vulgar hedonism, and an illusory autonomy that pretends that woefully imperfect men are in fact self-contained gods.