Portrait of Benedict XIV by Pierre Subleyras.
A big 'Thank you' to Fr Rutler for this most engaging profile of the great Benedict XIV, Fr Hunwicke's beloved Papa Lambertini, who was pope from 1740-1758, the holy intellectual and wit with
whom he often indulges in fancied conversations - in Latin, if you please! - about current affairs in the Church.
A faithful Pope of the Enlightenment
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER
April 25, 2018
In the early 1950s, children watched a puppet show, "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie", broadcast from Chicago all the way to the Eastern seaboard through the innovative marvel of television. It was more of a children’s show for adults, for how else could the sophisticated puns make sense, or what child could understand how Ollie the Dragon confused “The Mikado” with “Madame Butterfly?” Beulah the Witch was a puppet of a mien too ridiculous to frighten any but the most neurasthenic child. One day she threw down her broomstick and declared that she had decided to abandon witchcraft for the wonderful world of empiricism.
A psychologist, Steven Pinker, author of a new book
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress seems bemusingly ignorant of how the case of religion as a benevolent partner of empirical science has been addressed eloquently and convincingly over the past several generations.
His notion of reason and science is that it is the other side of the coin of religion and faith, not symbiotic but hostile, with physics unmasking the pretensions of metaphysics. This flies in the face of the fact that most of the nurturers of new knowledge in the eighteenth century were devout religionists.
Has he ever heard of Bacon and Newton and Locke, Montesquieu, Adams, and Tocqueville? And does that caricature of the “Enlightenment” consider that autonomous human reason became the engine of a Reign of Terror and its sequels in the gulags, eugenics, and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century?
If priests in the so-called Age of Enlightenment were sorcerers like Beulah the Witch before she came to her senses, there is the contradictory figure of Pope Benedict XIV who threw down no broom but raised a crozier in the name of the Divine Logos who “came to testify about the Light”
(John 1:9).
Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini (1675–1758) was born in Bologna, where his tutors set him on a course that would shape him as one of the greatest scholars in the history of the papacy. The Benedictine pioneer in paleontology and archeology, Bernard de Montaucon, master of Greek and Hebrew, said of the eident prodigy: “Young as he is, he has two societies: one for science and the other for society.”
Montfaucon was not a social butterfly, but he quickly summed up Lambertini’s elegant admixture of scholar and saloniste, for whom there was no tension between the library and the drawing room, and whose amiability made him like one of the Chestertonian angels able to fly because they take themselves lightly.
As Bishop of Ancona, the clergy were devoted to him, and when he was transferred to his native Bologna, his cheerfulness was a tonic for the ills of discontent among some of the priests. It was said that none left his presence sad or angry, and even the less studious among them felt honored by the time he spent reforming the seminary curriculum, with more emphasis on Sacred Scripture and Patrology.
In August of 1740, Lambertini was one of fifty-four cardinals who had struggled and intrigued for six months to elect a pope. The days were baking hot and, though news travelled slowly, that year saw Frederick II assume power in Prussia, the song “Rule Britannia” was first sung at Cliveden, Adam Smith began studies in Oxford, George Whitfield brought Methodism to the colony of Georgia, and the University of Pennsylvania was founded, shortly after the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Finally Lambertini rose and said in weary jest: “If you wish to elect a saint, choose Gotti; a statesman Aldobrandini; an honest man, elect me.” The joke turned on him and the 247th pope was astonished and somewhat befuddled, but not shy about accepting.
Some thought he conceded too much to foreign interests, but it was
never at the expense of the Church’s legitimate rights in promotion of the Gospel. It became difficult for the most virulent foes of the papacy to resist the charm of his humor and brilliance, and the local Romans enjoyed passing along his jokes and bons mots. When informed of a rumor that the Anti-Christ had been born into the world and was three years old, he replied: “In that case, I shall let my successor handle the problem.”
Complex matters of revenues required reform of banking systems and regulation of usurious corruption. Daunting was the corruption in the Papal States, especially since the coffers had been exhausted by his predecessors, Benedict XIII and Clement XII. Lambertini restructured the administration of his territories, promoted agricultural reforms, and frequently walked among the poorest people in the most dangerous neighborhoods.
With commonsense, he was lenient in implementing censures of the neuralgic clients of Jansenism. While monies were raised to fight Muslim pirates off Tripoli, the pope had a graceful correspondence with the “Good Turk.” Not hasty in lifting social and financial restrictions against Jews, he at least enjoined the Polish bishops to resist anti-Semitic pogroms, and declared that the ‘blood libel” against Jews was a lie.
The encyclicals of Lambertini are models of precise thought and clearly identified purpose, reflecting his Thomistic formation. The bull
Magnae nobis admirationis set the standard for canonical treatment of marriages between Catholics and Protestants, and
his laws for canonization lasted right into the twentieth century.
Because of their gravity, he was careful that canonizations not be rushed, but “If anyone dared to assert that the Pontiff had erred in this or that canonization, we shall say that he is, if not a heretic, at least temerarious, a giver of scandal to the whole Church, an insulter of the saints, a favourer of those heretics who deny the Church’s authority in canonizing saints, savouring of heresy by giving unbelievers an occasion to mock the faithful, the assertor of an erroneous opinion and liable to very grave penalties.”
He instinctively would have been cautious about canonizing popes in rapid succession
subito lest the practice become like the “apotheosis” of Roman emperors, which was a hint of decay in the Imperial dynasties. That flexibility of the pantheon had made sober Roman citizens cynical, like Vespasian himself:
Vae, puto deus fio! (“Woe is me, I think I am becoming a god!”)
Anyone who imagines that the liturgical books were sealed for all ages by Pope St. Pius V like a fly in amber should note that
a cataract of changes followed Trent, inciting the liturgical conservatism of Benedict XIV to sulphurous contempt. It was in fact the only one of his many attentions that beclouded his sunny nature.
He opposed the Kalendarium changes, multiple collects, and the number of new Breviary offices with the rank of “Duplex.”
The only addition he permitted during all of his eighteen years as pope was to bestow the title of Doctor on Leo the Great. There was a plan to simplify the Breviary, to make it more practical for parochial use, but the resulting four-volume study was so vast, that the task was abandoned, save for a reform of the Roman Martyrology. The Stations of the Cross that the pope erected in the Colosseum stood until they were destroyed by the Italian government in 1870.
An encyclical of 1749,
Annus Qui Hunc, gave guidelines to sacred music, denouncing the profane music that had crept into churches, ordered an end to informality and undignified celebrations, and even corrected neglect of proper clerical dress. Much of what exists today in the structures of the Melchites and Maronites are the fruit of Lambertini.
Humility did not tax his love for the beauty of the Mass, whose ceremonials he embellished, knowing the evangelical power of splendor, while prudence mastered the art of pomp without pomposity. He saw the dangers of false humility in advertising austerity, just as he had little use for the kind of uninformed aestheticism that caricatures aesthetics.
The enlightened pope was a feminist in a solid sense, encouraging women in science and mathematics, beginning at the university in his native Bologna even before becoming pope. He enrolled the female pioneer in Newtonian physics and electricity, Laura Bassi, in his group of twenty-five leading intellectuals, his “Benedettini,” charged with promoting theoretical physics and other sciences.
And as a proper liturgist as well as feminist, he abhorred any ideological manipulation of the liturgy as deeply as he resented the politicization of physical science. In so many words, he understood the “theology of the body” before that awkward term was invented and appropriated by half-educated lecturers on the subject.
Consequently, Benedict opposed attempts to invert the anthropology of the sacred rites. He decreed in the encyclical
Allatae sunt of July 26, 1755:
“Pope Gelasius in his ninth letter (chap. 26) to the bishops of Lucania condemned the evil practice which had been introduced of women serving the priest at the celebration of Mass. Since this abuse had spread to the Greeks, Innocent IV strictly forbade it in his letter to the bishop of Tusculum: ‘Women should not dare to serve at the altar; they should be altogether refused this ministry.’ We too have forbidden this practice in the same words in Our oft-repeated constitution Etsi Pastoralis, sect. 6, no. 2, 1.”
Lambertini has as great a claim as any pontiff for having founded the Vatican museums, as well as establishing four academies for the study of antiquities, canon law, and liturgy, plus augmenting the Vatican library with, among other works, the Ottoboninian treasury of 3,300 volumes.
By one measure, he was a micro-manager, but an edifying one, examining candidates in the Roman College for the chairs of mathematics and chemistry that he endowed, while he also supervised the publication of the works of Galileo.
In matters academic and spiritual, he cast a suspicious eye on the Jesuits, and entrusted a reform of the Society in 1758 to Cardinal Saldanya, but that ceased with his death. He never admitted a Jesuit to the College of Cardinals.
Rationalists and skeptics widely respected his knowledge of the world uncontaminated by an inferior worldliness, fascinated by the right way he told them that they were wrong. He suffered fools gladly without making them feel foolish. Of a balanced temper, he had no capacity for sarcasm or insult, and cajoled rather than humiliated.
When the French ambassador Choiseul presumed to instruct him on the appointment of bishops, he took the surprised man by the arm and placed him on the papal chair:
Fa el Papa (“You be the Pope”). Even the intimidating Empress Maria Theresa of Austria was bedazzled by the elegance of the pope’s mind and manners, and King George II permitted the free publication of his letters in England. Hard as it is to believe, Voltaire fell under his spell and composed a distich (a verse couplet) in his honor:
"
Lambertinius hic est, Romae decus, et pater orbis
Qui mundum scriptuis docuit, virtutibus ornat."
And lest anyone think that this tribute to
“Lambertini the father of the world and adornment of Rome. Who teaches that world by his writings and honours it by his virtues” was just a calculating flatterer, the same Voltaire dedicated to him his play “Mahomet” in 1741:
“To the head of the true religion a writing against the founder of all that is false and barbaric.”
Lord Chesterfield, whose antennae were attuned to subtleties, suggested that Voltaire was being ironic here. Howbeit, Voltaire had nothing bad to say about the pope, but what he did say about the false Prophet was acidic enough for Muslims to protest in the street in Ain, France when the play was revived in 2005.
Horace Walpole, an inspirer of the Gothic Revival that stood as a rebuke to the Enlightenment, was compelled by this congenial child of “the true light, which enlightens everyone”
(John 1:9):
Beloved By Papists
Esteemed By Protestants
A Priest Without Insolence or Interestedness
A Prince Without Favourites
A Pope Without Nepotism
An Author Without Vanity
In Short A Man,
Whom Neither Wit Nor Power Could Spoil
The Son Of A Favourite Minister
But One Who Never Courted A Prince,
Nor Worshipped A Churchman,
Offers In A Free Protestant Country
This Deserved Incense
To The Best Of Roman Pontiffs
MDCCLVII
A cordial evening with the three most brilliant successors of Saint Peter, might include the polymath Sylvester II*, this Benedict XIV (matched for wit perhaps only by Leo XIII), and the second Benedict after him. *
[I had no idea who he was, but I read his bio on Wikipedia just now - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_II - and marvelled anew at the rich variety of 'the best and the brightest' in the Catholic world who did become pope. How fortunate I am to have lived under three of them - Pius XII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.]
Exactly one hundred years before Lambertini died, a beleaguered cavalier, Sir Thomas Browne, published “Hydriotaphia,” a study of ancient funerary urns in Norfolk, England. Its dedication to “The Ancient of Days, the Antiquaries truest object, unto whom the eldest parcels are young, and Earth itself an infant,” could have been written by the pope who was bright enough to know how little he knew, and was grateful for knowing it.
Thank God for oases like this in the infernal soul-wrenching desert of the daily chronicles about this perverted pontificate!
And here's a tribute to an early martyr of the Church whose life work should set an example to defenders of the faith today.
Left: Engraving of Justin Martyr in André Thévet, “Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies Hommes Illustres” (1584); right: A bearded Justin Martyr presenting an open book to a Roman emperor. Engraving by Jacques Callot (1632-1635).
The unapologetic apologist:
Five lessons from St. Justin Martyr
Our forebears in the Faith were much stronger than us morally and spiritually. Not for them
the lax observance and flaccid sentimentality that characterize so much of contemporary Christianity.
by Edward Feser
April 22, 2018
“You can kill us, but you cannot harm us.”
– Justin Martyr to Emperor Antoninus Pius
By the second century A.D., the Christian religion had spread beyond its original Jewish context into a pagan world that very often misunderstood and hated it. Its circumstances were, in that respect, much like our own. Only worse, of course.
For in those days, to become a Christian was to invite more than merely the contempt of the intelligentsia or mockery within the popular culture. It was to risk death at the hands of the state.
But though in a much weaker position than us politically and culturally, our forebears in the Faith were much stronger than us morally and spiritually. Not for them the lax observance and flaccid sentimentality that characterize so much of contemporary Christianity.
No, the response of the Church to its second-century predicament made the highest demands on the will and on the intellect.
- First, rigid obedience to Christian moral and theological teaching, to the point of death if necessary.
- Second, the rational demonstration of the superiority of orthodox Christian doctrine to the errors of infidels and heretics.
In short, martyrdom and apologetics. That was their program, and it worked. Slowly but surely, the Church conquered the empire that had sought to conquer her. More importantly, she saved the souls of the persecuted and persecutors alike. Sooner or later this program will become ours too. For it is the only program that works, and it is the only program which – in the rigor both of its theory and its practice – can bear witness to the truth of the Catholic Faith.
We cannot expect the world to accept that Faith unless we are able to prove it, and willing to live by it and to die for it.
St. Justin Martyr set the pattern. He is widely regarded as the first Christian philosopher and the first great Christian apologist. As his name implies, he defended the Faith to the death. Having lived c. 100-165 A.D., he was extremely close in time to the era of the Apostles, so that he had a visceral understanding of the ethos and teaching of the primitive Church. Accordingly, his intellectual, moral, and theological credentials cannot be disputed. What might he teach us about how the Church ought to encounter a hostile world?
Lesson 1: The Faith has no place for fideism
Throughout his First Apology, Justin emphasizes that Christians can and must provide “the strongest and truest evidence” for their religion, and that “we do not make mere assertions without being able to produce proof.” The modern reader might find this surprising. For doesn’t Justin speak also of the Christian’s “confession of faith”? And isn’t faith a matter of believing something without evidence?
No, it is not. In traditional Catholic theology, faith is essentially a matter of believing something because it has been revealed by God.
And when we speak of “the Catholic Faith” or of “the deposit of faith,” what is meant is that body of divinely revealed moral and theological doctrine that has been handed down to us from the time of the Apostles. But how do we know that something really has been divinely revealed and is not just a human invention? How do we know that the deposit of faith really does come from God? For that, the Church has always acknowledged, we need rational arguments.
In particular, we need what are called
“the preambles of faith” – philosophical arguments that establish the existence and nature of God and the possibility of a divine revelation backed with miracles. And we need what are called
the “motives of credibility” – philosophical and historical arguments showing that a purported divine revelation is genuine, because it is associated with events that could not have occurred without special divine action (e.g. the resurrection of Christ).
Only if these things can be rationally and independently established can the question of faith even arise, because only when we know through reason that a true revelation has occurred can we have something to have faith in.
Properly understood, then,
faith is not in conflict with reason but presupposes rational arguments. And as Justin’s example shows, this basic idea was not the invention of medieval Scholastic theologians like Aquinas but goes back to the very beginnings of the history of the Church.
As Justin recounts in his
Dialogue with Trypho, it was his study of Platonist philosophy that prepared the way for his conversion to Christianity. Specifically, Justin’s philosophical formation was in what modern historians of philosophy call Middle Platonism, which had incorporated Aristotelian elements into the Platonist system, such as Aristotle’s famous argument for a divine Unmoved Mover of the world.
Needless to say, Justin and other early apologists were, in their thinking about God and his nature, also deeply influenced by scripture and by Christ’s emphasis on God as our heavenly Father. However, as L. W. Barnard points out in his book
Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought:
The earliest Christian writers were much concerned with God as Creator and far less with his attribute of Fatherhood. This was quite natural in the face of the popular eclecticism of the age which addressed its worship to many deities…
Although… [their] ideas derive from the biblical background of the early Church they also reflect contemporary philosophic speculation. Thus Clement of Rome’s references to God’s ordering the cosmos echo later Stoic beliefs. This influence becomes more pronounced in the writings of the Greek Apologists as would be expected in view of their philosophic training. Aristides of Athens opens his Apology with an outline demonstration of God’s existence based on Aristotle’s well-known argument from motion…
This twofold background is also evident in the writings of Justin Martyr… Justin remained a Platonist even after his conversion to Christianity. He retained the idea of God as unknowable and transcendent, the Unmoved first cause… (pp. 76-77)
It may seem surprising that a Christian apologist would put initial emphasis on notions such as these rather than on the idea of God as Father, but on reflection it should not be. As Barnard notes, the pagan context in which the early apologists were operating reflected an “eclecticism” which “addressed its worship to many deities.” Hence, much of Justin’s audience did not even properly understand what God is. It is no use preaching that God is a Father and Jesus is his Son if your listeners are likely to interpret that as comparable to (say) Zeus being the father of Apollo.
Hence Justin and other apologists first had to demonstrate the existence of God understood as the transcendent, unchanging, uncaused cause of everything other than himself. Only with that background in place can it be clear that to speak of God as Father is not merely to speak of the head of some novel pantheon. This takes philosophical reasoning, and it is reasoning that even some of the pagan philosophers themselves had already done much to develop.
Hence the apologists could use the work of these philosophers to do double duty: They could appeal to ideas like those of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics as a common intellectual framework by reference to which Christians and pagans could communicate; and they could use these good pagan ideas to criticize the bad, polytheistic ones.
Now, whereas the pagans had too many gods, the trouble with modern secular Westerners is that they don’t recognize even the one true God. But in other respects our situation is not so different from Justin’s. For as with Justin’s audience,
the modern secular listener too needs to be given a rational demonstration of God’s existence before he can reasonably be expected to take any specifically Christian claims seriously. Today no less than in Justin’s day, philosophy must establish the “preambles of faith” before faith can be a live option.
Once those preambles are in place, though, the job is still only half done, for the “motives of credibility” have also to be established.
Justin’s own way of doing this was to emphasize fulfilled prophecy – and in particular, the various ways in which the Old Testament predicts the details of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth – as evidence that a genuine divine revelation has occurred. This is an appeal to miracles, and nothing less than a miracle – the occurrence of something that cannot in principle have a natural explanation but can only have been brought about by special divine action – possibly can justify the claim that a divine revelation has occurred.
Old-fashioned apologetics of the kind that emphasizes philosophical proofs of God’s existence, historical arguments for the occurrence of miracles, etc., was a staple of the Neo-Scholastic theology that dominated Catholic thought in the decades prior to Vatican II.
But in recent decades it has been dismissed by many Catholics as too “rationalistic,” and resort is made instead to the longings of the human heart, the beauty of the Faith, etc. as means by which to convince a modern audience to take Catholicism seriously. Unsurprisingly, such intellectually soft and subjectivist approaches have succeeded only in giving aid and comfort to the New Atheist accusation that Christianity stems from wishful thinking and lacks any rational foundation.
As the case of Justin (not to mention Aristides, Clement, and other Fathers) shows, the old-fashioned apologetics of the Neo-Scholastics is the approach that actually follows the example of the early Church. The New Atheist phenomenon, as well as the widespread apostasy from the Faith that has occurred in recent decades, show that this approach is as necessary today as it was in Justin’s time.
Lesson 2: The point of dialogue is conversion
As his familiarity with and respect for the best of pagan philosophy indicates, Justin was no bigot. The
Dialogue with Trypho recounts his quest to learn from the different schools of thought extant in his day, and he consistently tries to reason with his opponents rather than to heap abuse on them. All the same, Justin was not afraid to criticize pagan culture for its superstition and degeneracy, and he was not afraid to call a heretic a heretic.
Christians of Justin’s day were accused of atheism because they rejected the gods of the various polytheistic religions. Justin does not finesse the issue in the interests of politeness. Rather, in his First Apology, he frankly admits that “we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned”; he condemns these false deities as “wicked and impious demons” and ridicules idols as “soulless and dead”; and he commends thinkers like Socrates for criticizing the superstitions of his fellow pagans.
Justin also condemns the sexual immorality and infanticide that were rampant in some parts of the pagan world, and
he denounces the view that good and evil are mere matters of opinion as “the greatest impiety and wickedness.”
This was Justin’s model of “inter-religious dialogue”:
Where non-Christians get something right, acknowledge and praise it. And where they get something wrong, call them out on it and clearly condemn their errors.
His approach to ecumenism was even more uncompromising. In the First Apology, Justin harshly condemns heretics such as Simon Magus and Marcion, complaining that since these false teachers were labeled “Christians,” their erroneous doctrines often came to be attributed to all Christians, which helped bring the Church into disrepute among the pagans. (Compare the way that fideism and other tendencies and doctrines which the Catholic Church has always condemned tend to get indiscriminately attributed to Christianity in general by New Atheists and other critics.)
This mixture of calm, rational discourse on the one hand and frank criticism on the other may seem paradoxical to some modern readers, but in fact it is perfectly consistent. Justin is interested in pursuing the truth, not in mere affable chit-chat. That is precisely why he both praises the pagans when they get something right and criticizes them when they fall into error.
And since he is convinced that Christianity is both true and rationally demonstrable, he wants to persuade pagans to convert to it and heretics to stop distorting it.
These days, “dialogue” has become a buzzword for those who want to avoid proselytization or clear condemnations of doctrinal error. They can find no support for such an attitude in Justin or the other Fathers. On the contrary, the aim of Justin’s Dialogue with his Jewish interlocutor Trypho was to change Trypho’s mind.
These days, when a Christian “apologizes,” he is typically badmouthing the Church of the past for its purported wrongs. Justin’s apologetics was aimed at showing that the Church is right.
Lesson 3: Damned if you don’t
Now, the reason Justin was so keen to convert non-Christians was not merely that he held that Christianity is true, though of course that is part of it.
The main reason was in order to save their souls. Again and again in his First Apology, Justin warns his readers of the damnation that faces those who do not repent of their sins. He speaks of “everlasting punishment,” “punishment in eternal fire,” and the fate of “the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, [sent] into everlasting fire with the wicked devils.”
Once again Justin appeals in part to pagan thinkers themselves – in this case,
Pythagoras, Plato, and the like – who argued on philosophical grounds for the soul’s survival of the death of the body and its postmortem reward or punishment. But he also has in view the teaching of Christ, who unambiguously warned of eternal damnation. And given his proximity to the time of the Apostles, there can be no doubt that once again Justin was simply reiterating the common teaching of the early Church.
Here too modern Christians have strayed far from the example of Fathers like Justin. Their tendency is instead to hold that all will be saved, or at least to speak as if we may have good hope that all are saved. Justin, like the early Church in general – which, again, was much closer in time to Christ and the Apostles and thus had a much more immediate knowledge of what they actually taught – evidently saw no grounds for such optimism.
Lesson 4: What kills us makes us stronger
With so much at stake, it is no surprise that Justin and so many other early Christians were willing to suffer martyrdom rather than renounce the Faith. As Justin writes in the First Apology:
For if we looked for a human kingdom, we should also deny our Christ, that we might not be slain… But since our thoughts are not fixed on the present, we are not concerned when men cut us off.
In his Second Apology, Justin explains that Christian steadfastness even in the face of death is part of what drew him to the Faith while he was still a pagan:
For I myself, too, when I was delighting in the doctrines of Plato, and heard the Christians slandered, and saw them fearless of death, and of all other things which are counted fearful, perceived that it was impossible that they could be living in wickedness and pleasure.
Living in danger of violent death made the early Christians serious. If you are willing even to be slaughtered for Christ’s sake, and know that this is a live possibility, then following his teachings is relatively easy. The hardest decision has already been made. The everyday temptations of the flesh, and the prospect of being scorned by the surrounding culture, are trivial by comparison with being crucified, torn apart by lions, or burned at the stake. This moral seriousness is attractive, and won converts like Justin himself. As Tertullian, another early Christian apologist, famously put it,
“the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
We modern Catholics in the West are a pretty sorry spectacle by comparison.
Whereas our forebears in the Faith were willing to die for it, enormous numbers of contemporary Catholics will not even live by it. They casually reject the solemn teachings of Christ and his Church as if they were options rather than requirements of salvation. Even many orthodox Catholics minimize the significance of unpopular doctrines, and refrain from talking about them even if they would not go so far as to deny them.
Whereas the Christian leaders of Justin’s day faced execution with equanimity, many of today’s churchmen live in terror of finding themselves criticized in the media or shunned by the intelligentsia.
To the Roman emperor reigning at the time of the First Apology, Justin declared, with a nobility that seems beyond our reach today:
“You can kill us, but you cannot harm us.” He knew that what counts is our eternal destiny, and that absolutely nothing that we suffer in this life – not the secular world’s contempt, not persecution, not illness or poverty, not even death itself – matters one whit so long as we are true to Christ.
Lesson 5: Go and do likewise
- Where St. Justin and his generation were intellectually rigorous, we are woolly-minded and sentimental.
- Where they insisted on conversion and orthodoxy, we tolerate grave error and immorality lest we hurt anyone’s feelings.
- Where they warned sternly of eternal damnation, we pretend that all is well and thereby endanger souls.
- Where they did not fear even death, we are frightened by bad press.
- Where they won the respect of their persecutors, we have earned the contempt of the secular culture we flatter and endlessly compromise with.
- They converted the world, whereas the world is converting us.
- They had things hard in this life, but have things easy in the next. We want things easy in this life, and will find them hard in the next.
- They were doing something right, and we are doing something wrong.
We need to return to their example. What that requires, as St. Justin shows is, is more intellectual muscle, more moral austerity, more doctrinal consistency, more holy intransigence. Fewer apologies and more apologetics. Less comfort and more suffering. We need to be less effeminate and more like our Fathers.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/04/2018 05:02]