Called in his own lifetime il Divino, Michelangelo is generally regarded as the greatest artist that Western culture has produced. How wonderful that the subject matter of this most sublime of artistic geniuses was almost exclusively the Christian religion. The Pieta, the David, the Sistine Chapel. His work—in painting, architecture, and sculpture—is rightly characterized as representing the high point of the Renaissance, but it should also be appreciated as one of the signal contributions to the Catholic tradition, easily ranking with the work of Aquinas, Augustine, Mozart, and Dante.

St. Augustine of Hippo is possibly the best example of how faith in Christ changed a person. Born into a wealthy family with a Christian mother and a pagan father, Augustine lived a life focused on career and sensual pleasures before meeting St. Ambrose, who convinced him that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Augustine’s narrative of personal transformation in his book Confessions provides a template for life in Christ that still rings true today.

Many would argue that St. Benedict of Nursia contributed more to saving western Christian culture than anyone else. Born just after Rome fell, Benedict founded the religious community that would, in time, preserve the best of the early Christianity and allow for the emergence of an authentic, way of life in Christ.

A brilliant academic, Catholic prelate, writer, evangelist, and television personality, Fulton J. Sheen was also a mesmerizing public speaker, endowed with extraordinary oratorical gifts, a charming sense of humor, and a magnetic personal presence. At the height of his fame, Sheen’s radio program, The Catholic Hour, had an audience of four million and his television show Life is Worth Living was viewed by an estimated thirty million people each week. He had the courage and the imagination to use the new media in the mid-twentieth century to engage a world growing increasingly skeptical of Christianity.

One of the quirkiest and most intriguing of all the Pivotal Players was a twentieth-century Catholic writer of fiction from the American South, a woman whose macabre, puzzling, and luminous stories have had a transformative impact on both the Church and the wider culture. Flannery O’Connor had the courage to show just how dark are the hearts of fallen human beings in her fiction. But at the same time, she had the incomparable grace to demonstrate how God continues to work even on that bleak and blasted ground.

Christ demands a decision. Will we serve him or some other master? A soldier who became a mystic and eventually the founder of the Society of Jesus, commonly called the Jesuits. St. Ignatius’ decision to give his life over to Christ without reservation gave rise to a movement that would not only transform lives, but also changed the world.

From where does the cultural regard for human rights emerge? What informs the Church’s teaching concerning the dignity of the human person? This 16th century scholar who became a Dominican friar represents how the Church has engaged the culture as the advocate for the least among us and provided a social theory that accepts as foundational the inherent dignity of the human person.