I almost forgot that today is the feast of my original blog patron, St. Justin Martyr, Christian philosopher and lay apologist (the first one), who died for the faith around 165 A.D., along with a number of his pupils (one, Charito, was a woman).
In the time of the lawless partisans of idolatry, wicked decrees were passed against the godly Christians in town and country, to force them to offer libations to vain idols; and accordingly the holy men, having been apprehended, were brought before the prefect of Rome, Rusticus by name. And when they had been brought before his judgment-seat, said to Justin, “Obey the gods at once, and submit to the kings.” Justin said, “To obey the commandments of our Saviour Jesus Christ is worthy neither of blame nor of condemnation.” Rusticus the prefect said, “What kind of doctrines do you profess?” Justin said, “I have endeavoured to learn all doctrines; but I have acquiesced at last in the true doctrines, those namely of the Christians, even though they do not please those who hold false opinions.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Are those the doctrines that please you, you utterly wretched man?” Justin said, “Yes, since I adhere to them with right dogma. Rusticus the prefect said, “What is the dogma?” Justin said, “That according to which we worship the God of the Christians, whom we reckon to be one from the beginning, the maker and fashioner of the whole creation, visible and invisible; and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who had also been preached beforehand by the prophets as about to be present with the race of men, the herald of salvation and teacher of good disciples. And I, being a man, think that what I can say is insignificant in comparison with His boundless divinity, acknowledging a certain prophetic power, since it was prophesied concerning Him of whom now I say that He is the Son of God. For I know that of old the prophets foretold His appearance among men.”
Chapter II.—Examination of Justin continued.
Rusticus the prefect said, “Where do you assemble?” Justin said, “Where each one chooses and can: for do you fancy that we all meet in the very same place? Not so; because the God of the Christians is not circumscribed by place; but being invisible, fills heaven and earth, and everywhere is worshipped and glorified by the faithful.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Tell me where you assemble, or into what place do you collect your followers?” Justin said, “I live above one Martinus, at the Timiotinian Bath; and during the whole time (and I am now living in Rome for the second time) I am unaware of any other meeting than his. And if any one wished to come to me, I communicated to him the doctrines of truth.” Rusticus said, “Are you not, then, a Christian?” Justin said, “Yes, I am a Christian.”
Chapter III.—Examination of Chariton and others.
Then said the prefect Rusticus to Chariton, “Tell me further, Chariton, are you also a Christian?” Chariton said, “I am a Christian by the command of God.” Rusticus the prefect asked the woman Charito, “What say you, Charito?” Charito said, “I am a Christian by the grace of God.” Rusticus said to Euelpistus, “And what are you?” Euelpistus, a servant of Cæsar, answered, “I too am a Christian, having been freed by Christ; and by the grace of Christ I partake of the same hope.” Rusticus the prefect said to Hierax, “And you, are you a Christian?” Hierax said, “Yes, I am a Christian, for I revere and worship the same God.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Did Justin make you Christians?” Hierax said, “I was a Christian, and will be a Christian.” And Pæon stood up and said, “I too am a Christian.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Who taught you?” Pæon said, “From our parents we received this good confession.” Euelpistus said, “I willingly heard the words of Justin. But from my parents also I learned to be a Christian.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Where are your parents?” Euelpistus said, “In Cappadocia.” Rusticus says to Hierax, “Where are your parents?” And he answered, and said, “Christ is our true father, and faith in Him is our mother; and my earthly parents died; and I, when I was driven from Iconium in Phrygia, came here.” Rusticus the prefect said to Liberianus, “And what say you? Are you a Christian, and unwilling to worship [the gods]?” Liberianus said, “I too am a Christian, for I worship and reverence the only true God.”
Chapter IV.—Rusticus threatens the Christians with death.
The prefect says to Justin, “Hearken, you who are called learned, and think that you know true doctrines; if you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you will ascend into heaven?” Justin said, “I hope that, if I endure these things, I shall have His gifts. For I know that, to all who have thus lived, there abides the divine favour until the completion of the whole world.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Do you suppose, then, that you will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense?” Justin said, “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Let us, then, now come to the matter in hand, and which presses. Having come together, offer sacrifice with one accord to the gods.” Justin said, “No right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Unless ye obey, ye shall be mercilessly punished.” Justin said, “Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when we have been punished. because this shall become to us salvation and confidence at the more fearful and universal judgment-seat of our Lord and Saviour.” Thus also said the other martyrs: “Do what you will, for we are Christians, and do not sacrifice to idols.”
Chapter V.—Sentence pronounced and executed.
Rusticus the prefect pronounced sentence, saying, “Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and to yield to the command of the emperor be scourged, and led away to suffer the punishment of decapitation, according to the laws.” The holy martyrs having glorified God, and having gone forth to the accustomed place, were beheaded, and perfected their testimony in the confession of the Saviour. And some of the faithful having secretly removed their bodies, laid them in a suitable place, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ having wrought along with them, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
I have been somewhat absent in the last weeks while the final push is on for the St. Elizabeth documentary. Just yesterday I was able to send an DVD that was almost complete (except for the final sound editing and music) to a Franciscan sister in Italy who is going to show it to a large formation group on May 21. It will be great publicity, I hope.
This means that I neglected to write anything about an events of great interest in the Catholic world — the first ever confab between the Vatican and bloggers! It was held in the afternoon of Monday May 2 (my birthday!), after the thanksgiving Mass for the beaitifcation of John Paul II. In all, 150 bloggers from all over the world attended. May of those I like reading most including The American Papist (Thomas Peters), The Anchoress (Elizabeth Scalia) and Rocco Palmo of Whispers in the Loggia were in attendence.
This was a get-together in which the bloggers spoke first and the Vatican responded. Thomas Peters urged the Vatican to give accredidation to bloggers and to offer them advance information about developments in the Church so they can comment before the mainstream media has a chance to mangle the story. The Vatican put forward some plans for its new website and imporovements to its media communication. Then there is the question of the need for Christian charity among bloggers (a sore point), well handled by Scalia, who quoted Pope Benedict. There is more, much more.
The Ancoress has put up a lot of links. Reading them is an inspiration! A really good example of taking Christ to the marketplace of modern culture, one of the reasons I started my blog to begin with.
Of coure, I feel left out, but maybe i’ll be invited to the next one. . .
Now that tax time is (whew!) over for another year, I want to catch up on a few things.
My two stories on the Pope’s (non)-scandal have gained a tremendous amount of interest for this blog, but because of all the time I had to spend on them a few other things suffered.
Here’s a roundup:
Documentary
One project that suffered was actually beyond my control. The work on the St. Elizabeth documentary, which I had hoped would soon be far enough along for me to show a fairly good amount of completed footage with a temporary narration and music track, has been stalled for almost a month. It started with the computer crash on March 20 that I’ve already mentioned. It was a week before the store would condescend to back up the files from disk, though I in fact had most of them backed up already. In the meantime, I was able to use my spare laptop, but it was useless to think of working on video there, because the hard drive was so small.
Well, the hard drive was defective, so the store allowed me to trade in my computer. Then when I got my new laptop (and 500GB hard drive!) home, and all the files had been painstakingly copied back to the right directories — the documentary project file would either refuse to open or would indicate it couldn’t find any of my files. Another frustrating couple of weeks. I first tried to do this on Holy Saturday, at the same time I was helping Jimmy with the famous article.
Right after Easter, I was online with the tech geeks at Adobe, but it was some time before I got the problem solved. And unfortunately, the solution was to re-link all the video in the edited project to the original files, one at a time. That took a lot of time, but fortunately, all my original editing decisions had been saved, and I didn’t have re-do any of that. All the same, a good amount of time has been lost. I feel that I really owe an explanation to everyone who has been waiting patiently for the documentary to be done.
I do expect to have more news soon, including the date(s) I will be showing the footage in the New York area, and some more interesting news I hope as well.
Find out more about the film and donate to its completion HERE
As a consolation, here are a couple of more stills, from the famous scene of the roses:
Book News
In other news, the original print run of The Greatest of These is Love, my biography of St. Elizabeth, has just officially sold out (except for maybe 3-4 copies on Amazon). Get the last ones while you can! I do hope, when I have time, to put out an updated digital edition for Kindle, E-Pub and the like.
Our Patron
And, in all my attention to scandals and taxes, I missed the feast day (in the old Church calendar at least) of the patron saint of this blog, St. Justin Martyr, on April 14. I’ve got to find a picture of him and put it up, but in the meantime here is my imaginary letter to him that serves as the blog’s mission statement:
Update: Here’s something even better — a video on him!
The problem comes, she suddenly realized, when you have to write your second post . . . This is something that I’ve wanted to write for a long time, but didn’t have the proper forum for it. So let it stand as a kind of mission statement for me and what I want to do. I hope others will want to adopt it too. It’s based on the style of another of my mentors, Pope John Paul I, and his letters to famous people.
To: St. Justin Martyr
Dear St. Justin,
You don’t know me, but I have long been a fan of yours. It might sound strange to describe yourself as a fan of a saint, but that’s the word people would use in my culture — almost 2,000 years after your world of second-century Rome. I think you would understand why I chose it, and that’s the reason I admire you: because you were one of the first Christians who tried to build bridges between our faith and secular culture. This is especially amazing since in your time, Christians were not only ridiculed for their faith, as they still are now, but put on trial, tortured and executed. This was the time in which you, a layman, defended the faith in public debate and in an open letter to the Roman emperor — and became a martyr. As someone who wants to reach out to our culture through media and film, I have a tremendous admiration for you.
Very little has been recorded about your life beyond what you yourself have told us in your writings. I do know that you were born around 100 A.D. in the town of Schechem in Samaria. Your grandparents were Roman colonists who had settled in the city when it had been renamed Flavia Neapolis after the Roman takeover of Palestine in 70 A.D. Your family worshiped the Roman gods. But your town also had other religious associations. Did you know as a child, as you played at the town well, that it was said to have been built by the Jewish patriarch Jacob? Perhaps you even heard that once a wandering Jewish teacher from Galilee had crossed the border and sat down to rest at that well, where he spoke to a Samaritan women about the living water that would satisfy her so that she need never thirst again (Jn. 4:14).
As a young man, you felt that thirst without knowing its cause. You tried to satisfy it through philosophical learning. Your parents could afford to send you to the best schools. But the teachers did not live up to your idealistic expectations. One dismissed questions about God as unimportant to philosophy; another was concerned only with his fees; another was only interested in whether you had taken the proper prerequisites for the course. You felt that none of your professors cared about true learning. (You probably won’t be surprised to learn that young people often feel the same about today’s educational system). You were coming to realize that true philosophy meant the study of God.
Finally in Ephesus you encountered the philosophy of Plato, who wrote about the wisdom of another wandering teacher named Socrates. You immediately decided that Plato had the true approach to God. Looking back with a smile on your youthful enthusiasm, you wrote: “In a short time I imagined myself a wise man. So great was my folly that I expected immediately to gaze upon God.”
You often meditated on Plato’s teachings alone by the seashore. One day, you encountered a venerable-looking old man there and began to discuss philosophy with him. The old man told you that Plato did not have the whole secret, and showed you how the Hebrew prophets had foretold the coming of Christ. This inspired you to study the Old Testament, and you soon learned all you needed to know to accept the faith you were unknowingly searching for. You never said anything more about that mysterious old man, but I have often wondered whether he was really human or instead perhaps an angel, or even Christ himself. I suppose you won’t tell even now!
You moved to Rome and rented a room above the public baths run by a man named Martinus. You wore the pallium, or philosopher’s cloak of coarsely woven wool, and began to gather pupils around you. Perhaps you went around the Roman forum, or marketplace, talking to people in all walks of life about truth and God, just as Socrates — and your Galilean master — had done. At that time, Christians were experiencing a period of peace under the Emperor Antoninus Pius. Christians had been savagely persecuted under Nero, and Trajan, in whose reign you were born, had outlawed the Christian religion. Trajan’s successors had made it a practice not to try people for being Christians unless they were actually denounced by someone, but Christians were still largely afraid to practice their faith openly.
Rome then was much like America today — a multiracial, multilingual culture, mad about faddish Eastern religions, but underneath rotting from moral decay. Christians in turn were suspicious of the immoral culture around them, and — as they often still do today — kept their faith secret so it wouldn’t be tainted. Not understanding this aloofness of Christians, the Roman historian Tacitus had condemned them for their “hatred of the human race.”
You felt that the only way this could be remedied was for Christians to stand up for their beliefs. In 150 A. D., you made the daring decision to write an open letter to the emperor, known as the First Defense of the Christian Faith (or the Apologia). You described the Christian concept of God, pointing out it was compatible with those of Plato and other philosophers, and in fact, the true fulfillment of those beliefs.
You even debated publicly with a well-known pagan philosopher, a Cynic named Crescens. Cynics were famous for rejecting all government, philosophical and religious systems and practicing extreme individualism — another thing familiar to us today. Crescens ridiculed Christian beliefs, but you were able to demonstrate that he knew nothing of the teaching he was mocking. Crescens grew angry and threatened your life.
In about 155 A.D., you wrote your second Defense to the Emperor and Senate, in which you continued to insist that Christians should not and could not be alienated from the culture around them, in words that have been remembered ever since: “The truths which men in all lands have rightly spoken belong to us Christians.”
By the time Marcus Aurelius began his rule in 161, Christians were increasing in numbers, and popular feeling against them was growing. Rome had now had enough. No one knows exactly who denounced you — though my money would be on Crescens. In 165, you and some of you pupils were arrested at your school and brought before the Roman prefect, Rusticus. You were in your sixties then, but when threatened with death if you did not sacrifice to the gods and the genius of the Emperor, you boldly proclaimed Christ not only as the greatest teacher of truth, but the Savior. Do you remember how it ended?
“You are supposed to be a learned man,” the prosecutor sneered. “Do you really think you will rise up to heaven and receive a reward?”
“I don’t think it,” you replied, “I know it!”
Rusticus quickly pronounced you and your companions guilty, and you were taken outside Rome and beheaded.
*****
Not every Christian today, of course, can be an intellectual or a philosopher as you were. But those of us Christians today who want to reach out to modern secular culture could learn a great deal from you.
Learn about the culture around you. Some Christians feel that secular culture is either evil or has nothing to offer them. This really hurts our efforts to evangelize. We rightly complain that our opponents are ignorant of the Christianity that they attack, but how much do we know about postmodernism or other beliefs people hold today? It is up to us who live in this culture to know what it values, as you knew the values and interests of yours. You cited not only Plato, but Homer, Epicurus, and other philosophers, poets, and playwrights of your time. Beginning the conversation with the things — some of them true things — people already cared about enabled you to approach them with more of the truth.
Approach the culture in a positive way. Too often we Christians are quick to condemn and slow to praise. It doesn’t hurt to recognize that people other than Christians want to feed the poor or work for justice. And we are too smug about our hold on spiritual truth. You realized that not everyone in your time was a Crescens, who was unable “to recognize any good but indifference.” In the same way, more and more people today have lost faith in materialism and are searching for something more. Many without any religious background still thirst for the waters of eternal life.
There is a delightful illustration of this in the recent film Russian Ark, directed by Alexander Sokurov. In it, the ghost of a nineteenth century French marquis wanders the modern galleries of Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum. When he comes to El Greco’s enormous portrait of the apostles Peter and Paul, he drops to his knees, crosses himself reverently, and then notices a young man in modern Russian dress gazing enraptured at the elongated figures of the apostles with their narrow ascetic hands. The marquis asks: “Are you a Catholic?”
“No, why do you ask?” (This young man, like most of Russia’s youth, had spent his early youth under Communism, probably without religious training). The marquis continues:
“It seemed to me that you were deep in thought while admiring the images of the founders of our Church.”
The young man says, “I looked at them because I like them. Someday everyone will be like them.”
“Really?” says the marquis. He bears down on the young man, who backs into the corner. “How can you know what will become of people if you don’t know the Scriptures?”
All the young man can do is reply: “Look at their hands!” as the camera goes to a
closeup of the apostles’ hands. “They are good and wise. . .”
“So?” The marquis retorts? “You don’t know the Scriptures!”
There are more than a few Christians today who have the same superior attitude towards unbelievers. We have to encounter a great deal of foolishness, but we may well meet unbelievers who can tell us things we don’t know. Especially in regard to understanding the arts, where pagans often put us to shame, while we cling to a narrow intellectual approach. But we should have nothing to fear in this regard. After all, “The truths which men in all lands have rightly spoken belong to us Christians.”
Respect others when you dialogue with them. Today’s Christians could learn from the way you acted in conversation with a Jew named Trypho at a time when bitterness and suspicion between Christians and Jews were at a high point. It was a no-holds barred debate, but carried out in a spirit of fundamental respect. Both you and Trypho learned from each other. You learned that Jews did not believe the outrageous charges that many pagans made against the Christians; in fact Trypho himself had read the New Testament writings. At the same time, Trypho learned about your belief that those Jews who held to the law could still be saved.
Don’t compromise on the truth - even when the truth hurts. Understanding the beliefs of others need not mean compromising our own. You pointed out the foolishness of many pagan religious beliefs, no matter how unpopular this might be. You spoke candidly about the immorality in Roman culture. But you were also willing to admit that many Christians did not live up to the teachings of Jesus.
Take risks. You took the ultimate risk when you spoke the truth to the people of Rome. When we do the same today, we are not risking martyrdom; we only risk being laughed at and called “fanatics.” But that is a small price to pay if it means giving people the water of eternal life.
I think that we would do well to imitate your method, because it is the method of great men like Socrates, and most of all, Jesus himself.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history."
Pope Benedict XVI to the German Parliament, Sept 22, 2011.
