This final volume on the history of Christendom is concerned with the crises of the modern era, the turning points in the diseases which plagued humanity during these two centuries. The book discusses in detail Nazi and Japanese militarism and its crisis in World War II, the damage caused by the inhuman system of communism and its fall in 1989, and the origins and consequences of the denial of the dignity of the human person in the modern culture of death. As did earlier volumes in this series, the book reflects an unabashedly Christian and Catholic view of history, taking as one of its major themes the centrality of the papacy to the destiny of the West. Carroll holds that God and individual men and women, not impersonal social and economic forces, make history.-- From publisher's description