"We are inferior to many far less advanced cultures"

“ALL the great historic civilizations of the past recognized the existence of some spiritual principles or ends of this kind and made them the key of their interpretation of reality and their concepts of moral order. Hence a system of education like that of the modern secular state which almost totally ignores the spiritual component in human culture and in the human psyche is a blunder so enormous that no advance in scientific method or educational technique is sufficient to compensate for it. In this respect we are inferior to many far less advanced cultures which have retained their consciousness of a spiritual order, for wherever this consciousness exists the culture still possesses a principle of integration.”

~Christopher H. Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Part III, Chap. XV—Western Man and the Technological Order.

"Modern secularized culture has become a closed world"

“THE present situation is that modern secularized culture has become a closed world and has lost all contact with the higher world of spiritual reality. In the past this higher world was rendered intelligible and visible to Western man through the medium of Christian culture, which provided a whole series of ways of approach adapted to the different types of mind and the different forms of intellectual activity. Today all these avenues have become closed by ignorance, prejudice or neglect, and they have to be re-opened by the spiritual and intellectual action of Catholics, each working in his own field towards the common end, and it is here the work of the educated Catholic is of such importance. There is an apostolate of study as well as an apostolate of action and of prayer.”

~Christopher H. Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Part III, Chap. III—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture. (1961)