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I spent this past weekend involved in two things: watching the U.S. Open Golf Tournament which was on TV here on the East Coast from suppertime till midnight for four straight nights, and during the afternoons reading my second killer history book this month, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis [2022] by John T. McGreevy. The golf tournament was exhilarating—an upset winner by one stroke—but the book is more discomfiting because [a] it is thinning my herd of sacred cows, and [b] the last third of the book covers my lifetime, a very troubling thing when you still feel young enough to be making history.
McGreevey’s book deserves a lot of attention and discussion. I review books for Amazon, which you may see posted from time to time, but I have a 1,000-word limit on those submissions. [My last review was my 190th with Amazon, dating to 2000.] But in many cases a book deserves a multi-faceted discussion, necessitating a brief Amazon summary for its book site and a longer treatment on the Café blogsite, which has no word limit beyond human compassion and exhaustion. Catholicism deserves a lot of thought and soul searching. I suppose the first question would be the relationship of the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon to the era of Vatican II? McGreevy is not the first historian to begin a modern church narrative with Napoleon. In his What Happened at Vatican II Father William O’Malley begins with a lengthy overview called “The Long Nineteenth Century” in which he essentially dates the moving forces for Vatican I and Vatican II from the era of the French Revolution, which is dated from 1789. The French Revolution—caused in part by French government bankruptcy incurred, ironically, assisting the American Revolution—created a chain of events in Western Europe that ended what is often called “the marriage of throne and altar,” or the interlocking of church and state. After the Napoleonic Wars there was a shift across Western Europe from the older absolute monarchy model toward representational or democratic government with an emphasis upon independence from churches, particularly Roman Catholicism. Coupled with this was the emergence of strong grassroots nationalism and newfound belief in the freedom and conscience of man independent of religious discipline, rooted in the modern philosophies from Descartes to John Locke. In shorthand, the modern secular era had arrived for good. No two nations went through these processes precisely the same way, and McGreevy’s book discusses variants of the process, but across the board the changing face of the West in the nineteenth century created a major challenge to the power, influence, and authority of the Catholic Church. Recall that at the time of the French Revolution Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were Catholic monarchs surrounded by Catholic aristocrats. The immortal phrase “let them eat cake” came from a Catholic queen to an angry and hungry populace. When the French Revolution took its violent turn, the properties and riches of the Church were seized, and the new transitional government would eventually persecute and execute clergy and religious. Ever since the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, the Church had laid claim to secular as well as religious authority—consider, for example, that when Spain and Portugal began exploration and settlement of the Western Hemisphere after Columbus, Pope Alexander VI [conveniently, for Spain, a Spaniard] drew the famous “Line of Demarcation” to divide the claims of the two nations in the New World in 1493. [His line, incidentally, ultimately created Brazil as a Portuguese-speaking nation.] What became very clear in the nineteenth century after the French Revolution was the decreasing influence of the papacy in the course of world events. While Napoleon was finally planted in permanent exile on St. Helena, the future of Europe was debated at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815], which redrew the map of the old Holy Roman Empire through the workings of Metternich and Talleyrand, to cite two famous international diplomats of the day. Although represented in Vienna, the pope was not invited to draw maps as he had three centuries earlier, and few European leaders were disposed to ask him. The post-French Revolution era was marked by the birth of a liberalism characterized by national identity and pride, greater democratic process, emphasis upon the rights of man, economic free enterprise, and freedom of governments from interference from organized religions, primarily the Roman Catholic Church. McGreevy provides examples of Western liberalization and distrust of a monarchical Catholic Church in such diverse nations as the United States, England, and Italy. By the terms of the founding documents written by the thirteen original colonies, the United States should have been a safe haven for Catholicism, and in many locales the practice of Catholicism was tolerated to a degree. However, periodic flareups of anti-Catholicism were widespread and deadly. In her 1997 The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, Carol Sheriff describes the animosity between residents of New York State and the Catholic Irish immigrants, hard fighting and hard drinking Irish Catholics who had come to America to dig the canal from Albany to Buffalo. It is no accident that the “Know Nothing Party,” a powerful third-party xenophobic force in American presidential politics, had deep roots in Western New York. The Wikipedia entry on the Know-Nothings has interesting overtones of recent American electoral politics: Fearful that Catholics were flooding the polls with non-citizens, local activists threatened to stop them. On August 6, 1855, rioting broke out in Louisville, Kentucky, during a hotly contested race for the office of governor. Twenty-two were killed and many injured. This "Bloody Monday" riot was not the only violent riot between Know Nothings and Catholics in 1855. In Baltimore, the mayoral elections of 1856, 1857, and 1858 were all marred by violence and well-founded accusations of ballot-rigging. In the coastal town of Ellsworth, Maine, in 1854, Know Nothings were associated with the tarring and feathering of a Catholic priest, Jesuit Johannes Bapst. They also burned down a Catholic church in Bath, Maine. As more Irish, German, and Italian Catholics poured into America throughout the nineteenth century, white Protestant Americans feared that these immigrants were, at heart, loyal to a foreign power, i.e., the pope in Rome, and if the opportunity arose, would take over the United States as a fiefdom of the Papal States. Catholic politicians in the U.S. were accused of representing the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” a charge that rumbled through American politics well into the twentieth century. And, if you listen close enough to monied American interests even today, you hear strains that Pope Francis is a socialist who wants to take our hard-earned money and redistribute it south of the equator. The more things change… In England, the historical memory of Queens Elizabeth and “Bloody Mary” was enough to inflame similar violence against Roman Catholics throughout the post-Napoleonic nineteenth century. Fears—rational or not—of Roman Catholic takeover of the established Church of England were exacerbated by that nation’s own mistreatment of Ireland, highlighted by the Potato Famine, and resulting in protests and immigration. But by far the most tempestuous impact of the post-Napoleonic era may have been the upheavals in Italy itself, the cradle of the Church. If you are a little rusty on your Italian history, the Wikipedia entry entitled “The Unification of Italy,” often referred to as the Risorgimento, chronicles the civil upheavals of the peninsula in the nineteenth century. Italy had not been a unified nation since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 475 A.D. The papacy—with its hold on “the papal states”—lived in constant conflict with outside intruders dating back to the Goths in the 400’s to the newly minted nation states after the French Revolution. [The Church Council Vatican I was disbanded prematurely in 1870 amidst the canon fire of the Franco-Prussian War on the doorsteps of Rome.] The Risorgimento called for a unified Italy with a measure of self-determination, a direct challenge and threat to papal civil authority and land holdings. Recall that the status of the papal states and some reassure of Church independence in the new, unified Italy was not legally defined until the Church’s Concordat with Mussolini in 1929, an arrangement that deteriorated soon thereafter. The French Revolution and its aftermath had two opposite effects upon the Church itself. On the one hand, a sizeable segment of Catholic intellectuals in the Western World began to assess a new understanding of Church life in the “modern era.” The nineteenth century may have been a period of international unrest and searches for new national identities, but it was also a time of intellectual and economic explosion. Consider that the century after the French Revolution would see the advent of modern industrialization, scientific expansion, historical and archaeological advances, democratic governments, medicine and psychology, and even the theories of air travel and nuclear power. Coupled with this were new philosophies and methods of understanding the world, from Hegel to Darwin to Marx. Religions, including Catholicism, could not isolate themselves from the rapid developments of the times. The nineteenth century saw an explosion in religious scholarship in both Protestant and Catholic circles, and it was impossible for Catholic thinkers and leaders to ignore what was happening around them. Possibly no one better embodies the religious complexities of the time or thought more creatively about them than England’s John Henry Newman, the Anglican priest-scholar who converted to Catholicism in 1845. Newman’s journey to Roman Catholicism was long and complicated. As an idealistic youth his evangelical faith caused him to regard the Catholic pope as the antichrist. In his college years he matured into the mainstream of Anglican faith and scholarship. But convinced that the Church of England stood in need of reform, he joined with other Oxford scholars in a spirited study of the early Church Fathers, which they published as papers or “tracts” that came to be known as the Tractarian Movement or the Oxford Movement. In his studies Newman and many of his confreres came to be believe that the Roman Catholic Church had best embodied the traditions of the Christian roots of the Fathers. He converted to Catholicism and would eventually become a Cardinal of the Church. Newman would become one of the greatest minds of modern Catholicism, and his thought forms the basis of many of Vatican II insights, including his writing on the development of doctrine. He was, in fact, canonized on October 13, 2019, by Pope Francis. Newman appreciated better than most that Catholicism would need to make considerable accommodations to the scholarship and the spirit of the best of contemporary thought and practice to remain intellectually honest, but he appreciated—far ahead of his time—the challenges we face today as Catholics. In a famous essay on the nature of a university, Newman described the dilemma of the Catholic in the new world at hand: [From Wikipedia]: Newman believed in a middle way between free thinking and moral authority—one that would respect the rights of knowledge as well as the rights of revelation. His purpose was to build a Catholic university, in a world where the major Catholic universities on the European continent had recently been secularized, and most universities in the English-speaking world were Protestant. For a university to claim legitimacy in the larger world, it would have to support research and publication free from church censorship; however, for a university to be a safe place for the education of Catholic youth, it would have to be a place in which the teachings of the Catholic church were respected and promoted. Finding the balance of “being in the world but not of it” was one of the significant challenges of Vatican II, but that was still long in the future. For despite the insights of Newman and others, much of nineteenth century Catholicism was governed by two Popes, Pius IX, and Pius X, who saw the Church as the last bastion of a sacred history that must be preserved at all costs, the driving force of the Council Vatican I [1869-1870]. Theirs was the predominant reaction of Catholics to the post-Napoleonic upheavals, the “Ultramontantist Era” [from “the other side of the Alps mountains,” a reference to Rome and the papal states.] In our next discussion of McGreevy’s book, we will immerse ourselves in the Ultramontanist revival, which many of us may recognize as the pre-Vatican II world we grew up with.
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Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s those of us studying Church History depended upon the splendid Penguin History of the Church series for an orientation to the almost two-millennia sweep of Christianity. Now, a half-century later, it is intriguing to look at the story with the advantage of five decades of fresh research. Justo L Gonzalez’s The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation [2010] is both a refresher for us Penguin champions now in our senior years as well as an excellent introduction to Christianity’s story for those whose religious education never progressed past sixth-grade Confirmation and the sixth commandment.
If you are conditioned to “hate history,” [perhaps from education’s tendency to “teach for the test”] then Gonzalez’s style and content might change your mind. than the captivating story of who we are and how we came to be. “The Story of Christianity” is the presentation of history best enjoyed on a quiet evening in a generous leather seat with a brandy or cigar at hand. History finely written is a pleasure to embrace, even when its narratives take us to unthinkable tragedies and outrages. Even details and numbers capture us: did the Black Plague really kill 1 of every 3 Europeans? How do you feed 120,000 Crusaders without starting a second war? This volume [as well as its companion, from the Reformation in 1517 forward] is the story of the Christian experience from the ground up, in a narrative that is informative and rarely overwhelming. We discover, for example, that with a few notable exceptions such as St. Paul, the first centuries’ proliferation of Christianity depended less upon charismatic missionaries as true anonymous word of mouth believers, particularly in the lower echelons of Roman society. [“Nameless merchants and slaves” who transversed the empire, as the author puts it.] Christian fraternity and solidarity—particularly the custom of the agape or love meal—were the characteristics that won new admirers and perplexed many Romans, who tended to view Christians as “low life.” Except for the Emperor Diocletian’s broad persecution in the late third century, Roman harassment of Christians was sporadic, regionalized, and at times eccentric. Gonzalez presents the development of Christian theology and creed in a manageable narrative as the Church defended itself from a variety of external and internal assaults upon its sacred treasury of belief, most notably the humanity and divinity of Jesus defined by the first Church council, Nicaea, in 325 A.D. The most enduring doctrinal crisis of the first millennium was “Arianism,” which, briefly put, denied that Jesus is “of the same substance” as the Father, i.e., that he is God. Arian thinking did not deny the unique mission of Jesus on earth, which is why this errant trend had a long shelf life, including among many of the “barbarian” settlers in the Western Roman Empire who were converted by Arian missionaries. It is clear from this text, and other contemporary works, that historians have been very busy over the half century since I went to school. Gonzalez highlights the discoveries of the “desert mothers” who prayed, worked, and wrote as contemporaries of the “desert fathers,”—those who sought to escape the mediocrity and madness of the later Roman Empire from the fourth century. He continues to highlight the richness of later feminine monastic life parallel to the male orders, and on down to the grassroots independent mystical communities of the late medieval era that marked the democratization of religious experience and exasperated and threatened a male church governance fragmented and running on fumes by the 1300’s. It was this explosion of lay spirituality, known as the Via Moderna, which produced the classic text The Imitation of Christ. Gonzalez provides a steady narrative of the major events of the Christian era, through the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the corresponding emergence of the East, the rise of Islam and the crusading response, the Eastern break from Roman hegemony, the development of the Holy Roman Empire with Charlemagne, the Hundred Years War, the Black Plague, the Avignon Papacy, and the Western Schism of three popes, to cite several. Each subject, of course, remains the object of ongoing study, and this volume will hopefully inspire newcomers to Church history to break off into specific readings on such compelling episodes as the Fourth Crusade or the rise of Ferdinand and Isabella. The author, who has a three-volume history of Christian thought among his completed works, provides insightful descriptions of the medieval thinkers and the universities they raised. Anselm, Abelard [with Heloise, of course], Albert and Thomas Aquinas all get their due, though it is mildly amusing to see William of Ockham, of “Ockham’s Razor fame,” bringing up the medieval decline portion of the narrative. Overall, Gonzalez captures the early Renaissance shift in philosophy and anthropology from a systematic and other-worldly exercise to a subjective celebration of human experience and destiny. The bridge from Ockham to the modern era’s Descartes becomes intelligible. Gonzalez concludes this volume with a lengthy narrative on the Spanish and Portuguese ventures to the East. Although commercial motivations were the initial driving force, the success of both nations in the Western Hemisphere and the Orient raised major ecclesiastical questions. Columbus, for example, originally wondered if he had stumbled into a primordial Eden when he landed in Hispaniola. Just as the Reformation in Europe was taking shape, the Church wrestled with the religious nature of indigenous peoples [did they have souls?], missionary outreach, national jurisdictions in the New World, and moral questions involving slavery and the destruction of existing cultures. It goes without saying that the subject matter of this historical survey is organically connected to Christian/Catholic life today, in part because we are still looking for solutions to yesterday’s questions. But for a Christian, this work is a family history: we carry the religious genetic codes of this narrative in our individual and communal being. In studying Church history, we discover ourselves. During the just completed Memorial Day Weekend there were ceremonies across the country honoring Americans who had died in the service of our country. By coincidence I was reading Justo Gonzalez’s The Story of Christianity Volume One [2010] over the holiday and came across his treatment of St. Augustine’s “just war theory,” which has been the backbone of Catholic moral teaching on warfare for nearly fifteen hundred years.
Augustine [354-430 A.D.] was Bishop of Hippo, a major North African diocese until it was overrun by the Vandals shortly after his death, and by the Moslems two centuries later. [And yes, our English word “vandal” is a derivative of this invader’s behavior in Rome around 450 A.D.] By 700 A.D. all traces of Christianity in North Africa had disappeared. However, it was not the encroaching Vandal threat that prompted Augustine’s treatise on war, but rather, a violent incursion between two populations of Christians along the North African Coast—the Christian Community faithful to the teachings of the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed, on the one hand, and a violent dissenting group known as Donatists on the other. Donatists held that sacraments conferred by clergy who had avoided martyrdom during the Roman persecutions were invalid. In practice, this meant that every sitting Orthodox bishop in North Africa, including Augustine himself, was not, in fact, a legitimate bishop, according to Donatist thinking, as they had been ordained by cowardly bishops who had lost their right of jurisdiction. To correct this error, Augustine established the sacramental principle of ex opere operato, i.e., “by the work of the work.” Put simply, a sacrament—including holy orders—is always valid so long as the correct formula is used, the rite approved by the Church. The sacraments are always valid no matter how unworthy the deacon, priest, or bishop. This doctrine was later challenged in the 1500’s by Protestant reformers, who held the principle of ex operate operantis, i.e., “by the work of the one doing the work.” Luther and others held that the priest’s holiness determined the validity of the sacraments. This was an understandable sentiment in Luther’s day when corruption of the papacy was rampant, but Augustine’s position is the teaching still held today in Catholic tradition. This dispute lingered for over a century, as the Donatists became more radical and apocalyptic. Its extreme adherents physically engaged in bloody combat with mainstream Christians. Augustine understood the need for military defense, but for most of its history Christianity had been a pacifist community. Thus, there was a need to circumscribe the rationale and rules of combat for Christian conflict, and Augustine formulated the backbone of “just war.” As subsequent religious and secular histories have shown, these rules could be stretched like taffy, but they have survived, nonetheless. Augustine’s first principle was that a war must be just, and never to satisfy territorial ambition or as an exercise of power. Second, war must be waged by properly instituted authority. Third, and most importantly to Augustine, amid violence the motive of love must be central. [Gonzalez, p. 248] In the Donatist struggle, Augustine could argue that these dissidents did not represent authorized Church authority. It was also true that Augustine hoped to win them back to the fold by a loving yet forceful counter-intervention, though it was hardly his first choice. In the Medieval Era St. Thomas Aquinas elaborated the rules of war around Augustine’s principles. In his Summa Theologica Aquinas also argues for three requirements. Firstly, the war must be waged upon the command of a rightful sovereign—a king or a churchman. Secondly, the war needs to be waged for just cause, on account of some wrong the attacked have committed. Thirdly, warriors must have the right intent, namely, to promote good and to avoid evil. These three rules are virtually synonymous with Augustine’s. But Aquinas goes on to say that a just war could be offensive, and that injustice should not be tolerated to avoid war; in other words, it would be immoral not to engage in war if an evil was of a significant magnitude. Nevertheless, he argued that violence must only be used as a last resort. On the battlefield, violence was only justified to the extent it was necessary. Soldiers needed to avoid cruelty and a just war was limited by the conduct of just combatants. Aquinas argued that it was only in the pursuit of justice that the good intention of a moral act could justify negative consequences, including the killing of the innocent during a war. A thorough history of the Church through the ages indicates that these principles were not bulwarks against violence, and that in many instances churchmen themselves construed the Augustinian-Thomistic principles into their own advantages. Popes of the medieval era understood “the good of the Church” and the intention of love as inherent to the sovereignty of the papal office, i.e., an extension of power. Pope Innocent III [r. 1198-1216] intervened politically and militarily in the affairs of at least a dozen nascent civil states as far away as Bulgaria to centralize all European power—civil and religious—into the office of the successor of St. Peter. His future successor Boniface VIII issued history’s most famous or infamous—but certainly the most audacious—position paper of all time, Unam Sanctam [‘one, holy”] as the ultimate claim of universal papal power. Wikipedia describes it thus: Unam Sanctam is a papal bull that was issued by Pope Boniface VIII on 18 November 1302. It laid down dogmatic propositions on the unity of the Catholic Church, the necessity of belonging to it for eternal salvation, the position of the Pope as supreme head of the Church and the duty thence arising of submission to the Pope to belong to the Church and thus to attain salvation. The Pope further emphasized the higher position of the spiritual in comparison with the secular order. The historian Brian Tierney calls it "probably the most famous" document on church and state in medieval Europe…The bull was the definitive statement of the late medieval theory of hierocracy, which argued for the temporal as well as spiritual supremacy of the pope. It was the greatest claim of universal papal power ever made, before or since, at least on Vatican letterhead stationery. Innocent III might have written such a claim with teeth a century before. But Boniface himself was seized and maltreated by Philip IV of France just before his death, Philip undaunted by the claims of Unam Sanctam. However, the attitude of ultimate authority held by Boniface’s successors in terms of both religious and secular orders endured as late as 1870. The claim to such expanse of power would inevitably conflict with the Augustinian-Aquinas rules of combat at several points. In the first instance, the Church was claiming to be the ultimate legitimate authority in matters of both altar and crown, virtually justifying any exercise of power and authority to utilize its considerable forces and resources. Second, as the sole organism of salvation, the Church could claim to be acting in love in the exercise of making converts or bringing wayward souls back into the fold. Judge and jury, so to speak. As painful as it is to admit, Church conduct through the centuries has not contributed to the development of a theology of peace. Rather than repeat the details of the moral failures of the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and the forced conversions and submissions of indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere, it may be more useful to look at possible causes for these moral lapses and how the Church can recover its credibility in teaching and preaching on peace. There can be little argument that the Church lost something of its identity in the fourth century when circumstances changed its identity from communities of the poor who gathered to recollect the teachings of Jesus and break bread, to the monarchical church of the Roman Empire. The early Church, as noted, was pacifist because its eucharists were strongly centered around the memory of Jesus, whose Resurrection blessing had been “My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you.” The early Christians were reminded over and over of Jesus’ response to Peter when the latter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear at Jesus’ arrest. “Put thy sword back in into its scabbard.” As Christianity took on more of the trappings of a world empire, its focus turned from its charismatic roots to a large body invested in law and order—whether that be the order of high liturgy in the elegant temples of Rome, the development of an infallible creed and code of law, a structure of governance, or a basis for legitimacy. Among those things that declined through the first millennium and well into the second was the memory of the actual Jesus of Nazareth and the full content of the Gospel narratives. In fact, by the time of Francis of Assisi [1181-1226 A.D.] there was something of an ecclesiastical distrust of the “stand alone Bible” and Francis’s biography may explain at least part of it. He was no subversive—he loved the Church—but he instinctively recognized the gulf between Scripture and Church life of his day. [The Council of IV Lateran, in 1215, is remembered for, among other things, mandating that all Catholics must receive communion once a year, hardly a high bar in communion with the personal Jesus.] Francis’s desire was to live the poverty and meekness of Christ word for word from the Gospel, an idea that originally stunned Innocent III as impossible—or deeply embarrassing, or both. Innocent did ultimately approve of this Franciscan Gospel lifestyle. As more laity followed Francis in what would eventually be called “the third order” [St. Clare’s cloistered women’s order of Franciscan ideals being the “second order”], the Franciscan movement embraced pacifism because this was how Jesus himself had lived. In fact, civil authorities bemoaned the absence of soldiers to fight the city-state wars, so deeply had Franciscan pacifism penetrated European Church life after Francis. The Inquisition did not trouble Francis, given his close association with popes and the deep love of the populace for Franciscan ideals. After his death, the radical element of the Order, the Spiritual Franciscans, came under scrutiny for denying papal authority over interpretation of the Franciscan Rule. In the late 1200’s St. Bonaventure gradually eased the Franciscan life into more conventual clerical norms. The Spiritual Franciscans were ostracized and the frequent targets of Inquisitorial prosecution until the group virtually vanished in the 1300’s. However, from Francis until the Reformation three centuries later, there arose other religious movements in Europe which turned from the highly structured and academic life of the mainstream Church to a simpler, more devout, and Christo-centric religious experience. Collectively referred to as the Devotio Moderna or the Via Moderna, it produced a pious return to the person of Jesus and his lifestyle. One of its most famous literary products is The Imitation of Christ, written around 1425 by Thomas a Kempis. [See Wikipedia’s excellent description of the work.] The Imitation is considered the greatest spiritual work after the Bible: it was a critical text in the lives of St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Theresa of the Little Flower, Pope John XXIII, and Thomas Merton, to cite several---and my only true inspiration during my early years in the seminary, I might add. Adherents to the Devotio Moderna were always under the scrutiny of the Inquisition, given that a collective cultivation of personal religious experience of Jesus could be taken as a kind of democratization of the Gospels—access to the Word without the intervention of Church supervision. The idea of “personal spirituality” without structural link to an official Church organ was novel and suspect—particularly as its adherents usually embraced in some shape or form virtues of simplicity, humility, poverty, and peacefulness, qualities often lacking in medieval Catholicism. Even today, the Catholic who embraces a pacifist ethic based upon the life of Jesus in the Scripture is regarded as something of a “subversive,” particularly in an American culture of power; American exceptionalism can bear a striking resemblance to Boniface VIII’s claim of universal sovereignty, while running many of the same risks. By the time of the discovery of the Americas and the rise of nationalism in Europe and elsewhere, the Church enjoyed less control over the conduct of nations and the ethics of war. The twentieth century—with the horrors of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the first use of the atomic bomb—exponentially increased the urgency of the Church’s ministry for peace, and it was this catastrophic half-century that motivated in large part the calling of Vatican II. We began this reflection with Augustine’s efforts to concoct a concrete ethic of just war. It is worth noting here that Augustine also provided the Church with the theological language of original sin and its damage to the human spirit that we still employ today. One can guess that Augustine’s writings on just war were penned with the knowledge that humanity’s fallen state makes the idea of a violence-free world an impossibility before the Second Coming. Augustine’s own baptism, by the future saint, Ambrose of Milan, took place with imperial soldiers surrounding the structure, threatening an invasion. But Augustine also wrote that history is not static, but rather, that it moves inexorably to its final climax of Christ’s Second Coming. In fact, the term “Middle Ages” was first coined to describe where in time the Christian lives, between the first and second comings of the Christ. Gonzalez notes in his history of Christianity that most converts to baptism in the early centuries came to the faith not by extraordinary missionary efforts but by the sincere and determined example of the baptized in their midst’s. When the faith is lived lively and well at the grass roots, the seeds of Christ’s peace are sown. We live as peacemakers that, when the Lord comes again, he may find us faithfully sowing the seeds of his peace. |
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February 2024
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