James Hitchcock in his 'History of the Catholic Church' makes the following important insights:

1) Christianity created civilization

“Christianity played a crucial role in the development of man’s understanding of history itself, vanquishing the cyclical view of endless repetition that expressed a kind of despair, the sense that men were trapped in a process they could not control. Christianity gave history an eschaton, a goal toward which it relentlessly moves and which for the first time allowed that movement to have meaning.”

Note: Hitchcock uses 'a crucial role'. The Catholic Church played 'the' crucial role in the development of everything from technology to science.

2) Free will: Good and evil

“Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares teaches that good and evil exist together in the world, and the reality of human freedom provides the only satisfactory explanation of moral evil—God’s mysterious willingness to grant that freedom and permit its full exercise, even when it is used to thwart His divine plan.”

The Atheist abortion doctor, or the Nazi SS Concentration Camp worker, can only be understood in the context of free-will and evil destroying the innate right to do what is moral and good. No other metaphysical program other than Christianity discussed free-will. Marxism and Evolution both negate and deny free-will.

3) The truth of Christiianity:

“Martyrdom was inflicted in a variety of ways. Stephen was stoned to death, which was the Jewish penalty for blasphemy. Under Nero (54-68), Christians were coated with tar and set on fire in the amphitheatre to light the night games, and over the next two centuries, numerous Christians were sent into the arena to be torn apart by wild beasts, as Ignatius anticipated would happen to him. Paul, as a Roman citizen, was honorably beheaded, while Peter was dishonorably crucified (upside down, according to tradition, because he did not consider himself worthy to die as his Lord had died). Some martyrs were mutilated, sent to the mines, and worked to death; others were buried alive, burned en masse, or strapped into iron chairs that were slowly heated until they roasted to death.”

No one undergoes persecution, beatings, torture and a cruel death unless they are convinced they are right and that their belief justified and sanctified. All of the early Church leaders died a cruel death at the hands of pagans and polytheists. They all must have believed in the resurrected Christ and his miracles. Otherwise most if not all would have recounted. This is powerful testimony as to the veracity of Christianity.