As he continues to reflect on the concept of hope in the early Church, Pope Benedict now turns to the interesting image of artwork found on early sarcophagi, the often-decorative stone coffins in which the dead were placed.  We often associate these with the ancient Egyptians, but they were also prominent among the Romans, both before and after the introduction of Christianity in the Empire.  The artwork on the outside of the coffin offered an expression about their belief in what happens after death.

The Holy Father notes the following about prominent imagery often chosen for these sarcophagi: “The figure of Christ is interpreted on ancient sarcophagi principally by two images: the philosopher and the shepherd.” (SS 6) Regarding the image of the philosopher, the pope writes: “Philosophy at that time was not generally seen as a difficult academic discipline, as it is today. Rather, the philosopher was someone who knew how to teach the essential art: the art of being authentically human—the art of living and dying.” (ibid.)  Though there were many philosophers and philosophies that proposed to be worthy of following, only Christ and His Gospel offer the truth that will enable us to live a good and truly human life, but His life and His Gospel can direct us beyond death into the life everlasting of Heaven.

Times are not so different now than they were then!  There is a plethora of voices in our culture that promise a philosophy that has all the answers, that promises peace and prosperity in this life.  These philosophies often criticize the Gospel and the Church as being out of touch with reality and shackles on our freedom.  At long last, our eyes have been open to the truth and what so many people followed in the past is no longer necessary, so they claim.  There is a certain level of pride to be found in these philosophies, suggesting that our modern times are more knowledge than the past.  And yet, the Gospel and the Church has been around for 2000 years.  Christ continues to inform the lives of people, people who often make the most significant contributions to society and who live lives of great freedom and joy despite “limiting themselves” to the so-called narrow way of the Gospel.  Another flaw of current philosophies is a lack of a solution to death.  If all we have is this world, then our hope is woefully limited.  In Christ, we are given a hope that is not limited just to this part of our journey, but one that opens to eternity, and that hope, as we keep coming back to, “does not disappoint.” (Rom 5:5)

The other image is that of the shepherd.  This one is more familiar to us, for Jesus speaks of Himself as the Good Shepherd in the Gospel (John 10).  Pope Benedict notes how in Roman art of the time, “the shepherd was generally an expression of the dream of a tranquil and simple life, for which the people, amid the confusion of the big cities, felt a certain longing.” (ibid.)  The Holy Father understandably then connects this to the image of the Lord as a shepherd as articulated so beautifully in Psalm 23.  This psalm, writing during the time of the Old Testament, was certainly a source of comfort to the Chosen People, but with the coming of Christ, the Good Shepherd, those words take on an even greater significance, for we have great confidence that through His indwelling in our souls through grace, we fear no evil for He is at our side, which fills us with hope as we look to the uncertainties of the future events of our lives.  Even more consoling, though, is the promise that, at the end of our journey we have hope of eternal rest, for we “shall dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”(Ps 23:6) 

Feast Day: February 16^th 

It was 9 a.m. on February 7^th, 1996, and Sister Felicita Muthonia Nyaga was going about her morning routine in the mission dispensary near the Catrimani river in the Northwestern part of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. She was a Consolata Missionary Sister, herself originally from Kenya, and that day was working the dispensary alone because the other sisters were 350 kilometers away in the City of Boa Vista. Suddenly a man ran in asking for a rifle or pistol, to which Sister Felicita responded that she was a missionary and did not have one. The man ran off, sister following not knowing what was happening. She made her way to the front of their little mission, at the end of the small airstrip that connected them to the outside world. There, surrounded by a handful of other members of the Yanomami tribe, was Sorino Yanomami, lying in a rapidly spreading pool of blood, his skull horribly torn open. 

He, a simple, joyful man with a young wife, a hard worker and good woodsman, had been hunting birds when he was attacked from behind by a jaguar. The animal had mauled Sorino, ripping open his skull, and though he managed to hold off the beast until others could arrive and drive it away, now he was prone on the ground, breathing, barely. Sister recounted later:

I saw Sorino on the ground, in a bloodbath, I remained petrified, frozen and trembling, not knowing what to do. I called his mother and asked for water; then I realized that the scalp was protruding and that Sorino was also bleeding a lot; there was a lot of sand, dirt and part of the brain had spilled out. I pushed the brain in and then took the scalp and put it back, but it kept bleeding; he was alive, but did not speak. Since I hadn’t brought anything with me, I took the only thing I had, the t-shirt I was wearing: I took it off and wrapped it around Sorino’s head, to compress and somewhat stop the bleeding. 

She nursed him with what they had on hand: an iv into his foot because the veins in his hands had disappeared, and then radioed to Boa Vista to request a plane to carry him to the hospital. Sister Rosa Aurea Longo answered the call but said all the planes were already out for other emergencies and they would have to wait. The hours crept by, Sorino barely hanging on, and now the locals, led by over a dozen shamans, decided that there was no way he would survive his injuries, and were pressing on sister to allow them to perform the rituals that would carry him into the afterlife. She begged them to let him be taken to the hospital but they were adamant: “‘No, he can’t go to the city. It is very serious, we saw his brain out of his head, and the jaguar ate part of it. But a person without a piece of brain cannot live”. … ‘the spirits are coming for him, he has to say his yes to leave his body and go with them. This cannot happen outside the forest’”. 

The men grew angry, pointing their bows and arrows at Sister Felicita who only partially understand what they were shouting about and began to cry. Into the din some of the women of the village stepped between their husbands and the distraught sister, protecting her and explaining the shamanic beliefs of the tribe and their anger at the jaguar. Sorino whispered to sister: “Felicita, you are my mom now. They say I have to go with the spirits, but I don’t want to, do some things because I want to live.” And so she stood her ground, trying to hold off the locals from ushering Sorino into the next life while waiting an agonizing additional two hours for the plane to arrive. When it did, she recounts what she did next: “I was a young sister and so, I carried Sorino on my shoulder and took him to the plane which took off to a hospital in Boa Vista.” 

The Yonamami dispersed. Sister occupied herself with radioing what she knew to the team waiting at the hospital and comforting the wife and relatives of Sorino. She returned, finally, to the mission, only to find there the shamans and dozens of warriors with them. They remonstrated with her, explaining that if Sorino died outside of their forest he would be left wandering the afterlife forever. Several of the men planted their arrows in front of her house. “Go into your house. We cannot kill you now because Sorino is not dead, but these arrows we leave here … and if he dies, we will kill you with these.”

Such were the words she carried into their empty chapel, beginning a harrowing vigil of prayer for Sorino. It was the first day of the novena to their founder, the Blessed Giuseppe Allamano.

– Fr. Dominic will return to the Amazon rainforest next week (and eventually to Turin, Italy)!

As he continues to reflect on how Christ brought a new understanding of hope to the early Church, Pope Benedict notes how this new religion of Christianity was not just for those who “belonged to the lower social strata, and precisely for this reason were open to the experience of new hope, as we saw in the example of Bakhita.” (SS 5) There were also many who were more cultured and well-off who began to find a new hope in Christ.  Many had been following the Roman way of life, centered on a view of things being governed by various gods and the cosmic forces of nature and the universe.

The Holy Father quotes the following from St. Gregory Nazianzen, who lived in the latter part of the 4^th century, in the early days of the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire.  St. Gregory wrote “that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ.” (SS 5)

On this quote, the Holy Father offers the following reflection, noting its importance not just in those early days of Christianity, but now as well:

This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view of that time, which in a different way has become fashionable once again today. It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love—a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free.

The Pope’s notes that a worldview of things being governed primarily by the “elemental spirits of the universe” (Col 2:8) “has become fashionable once again today.”  This takes various forms, including reading horoscopes, using tarot cards, and going to fortune-tellers.  Against these practices, the Church has spoken strongly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility. All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to “unveil” the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.  (CCC 2115-2116)

Some might object that such warnings are unwarranted, but the Church offers them in order to guard us from things that can harm us.  As one author I read on this topic concluded: “By consulting a horoscope to show ourselves our path in life, we usurp the place of God in whose hands we should place our concerns allowing Him to lead us down the path of holiness in discerning his will for us.”  (Angelo Stagnaro, National Catholic Register, Blog entry of June 9, 2020) As we entrust ourselves in faith to Christ alone to lead us down that path, we have the assurance that whatever that path may be, we are sustained by hope, a “hope that does not disappoint.” (Rom 5:5)

Feast Day: January 26^th 

We have been slowly making our way up to St. Paula who’s feast was now two weeks ago. She was born into a wealthy and noble family in Rome, in 347 A.D. (so, one decade after the death of Constantine and in the middle of all the civil wars that followed). Jerome was born around the same time (as was St. John Chrysostom actually), and this is all just before Liberius becomes Pope (in 352, his showdown with Constantius II coming up in 355). Jerome, not only a painstaking translator of the Scriptures, wrote dozens and dozens of letters to different supporters, other clergy and theologians, Pope Damasus, friends, monks, and on all sorts of theological topics. And one of the longest letters is written to Eustochium, Paula’s daughter, on the story and character of her mother. 

Noble in family, she was nobler still in holiness; rich formerly in this world’s goods, she is now more distinguished by the poverty that she has embraced for Christ. Of the stock of the Gracchi and descended from the Scipios, the heir and representative of that Paulus whose name she bore, the true and legitimate daughter of that Martia Papyria who was mother to Africanus, she yet preferred Bethlehem to Rome, and left her palace glittering with gold to dwell in a mud cabin. – Jerome, Letter to Eustochium, Letter 108.1., 404 A.D.

The great scholar cites passage after passage of scripture describing the disciple of Christ, how Paula embodied them all. When her husband died in 379, her deepening Christian faith led her to give away all the wealth she had to care for the poor.

How can I describe the great consideration she showed to all and her far reaching kindness even to those whom she had never seen? What poor man, as he lay dying, was not wrapped in blankets given by her? What bedridden person was not supported with money from her purse? She would seek out such with the greatest diligence throughout the city, and would think it a misfortune were any hungry or sick person to be supported by another’s food. – Jerome, Letter 108.5.

So it was that this generous, Christian woman, as Pope Damasus tapped Jerome to begin the extraordinary effort of collecting all the different necessary scriptural texts, comparing, translating, composing, and revising, here was a woman with the means, and heart, to support the work. She left her home, and much of her family, and begins the arduous journey to the Holy Land: sailing south she passed between Sicily and Italy, then through the Adriatic towards Greece, then Rhodes and Lycia and Cyprus – places where Paul preached – Antioch, Phoenicia, Sidon, Zarephath, Tyre – she was tracing Christian history back to its source. Caesarea, Lydda, Joppa, Jerusalem – showing immense reverence for these sacred sites, with Jerome adding citations from all throughout the Old and New Testament to show how she was literally making her way through the entire Bible – and then to Bethlehem. The passage is a tour-de-force of Jerome’s knowledge of the Bible, but also of Paula’s, as she was reflecting on all these different stories as she stopped and prayed in each place. 

Finally, in Bethlehem, she took up her dwelling behind the cave of the nativity, helping to establish monasteries there for men and women and then joining in the work of translating, proofreading, and offering spiritual insight, and practical encouragement, to the more scholarly, forbidding, even irascible, Jerome. She did not just support him, she was an assistant in the work. Her own splendid education made her an invaluable linguistic resource, but her humility, love for the scriptures, passion for Christ, and just the way her heart was moved by the characters, places, truths, and revelations given in the Bible … all of these would have been missed by Jerome working on his own. He did not forget it!:

“You, Paula and Eustochium, who made me undertake this labor… You are my readers, my critics, and my correctors.” – Jerome, Preface to the Pentateuch

“Paula, who was ever intent on learning the Scriptures, left no difficult passage unexplored.” – Jerome, Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings

“She was my companion in study, correcting me when I erred and encouraging me when I grew weary.” — Jerome, Letter 108.31

If she had not made the difficult choice for Christ amid the grief of losing her husband, to go all in for the Church, to help a crazy scholar on an immense mission, it is hard to see how Jerome would have finished his project. And if he had not, Europe would have been fragmented, disconnected, un-rooted in God’s revelation as it plunged into the difficult centuries to come. But with a unified bible, Christians scattered throughout all that would become Christendom, would pray the same prayers, hear the same passages, learn the same stories and songs and sacraments and truths of the faith. Theology, philosophy, scholarship which would grow into the scientific revolution was made possible. Even our constitution, and all the freedoms we have, those depended on a common belief in human dignity, freedom, responsibility, and rights. And that depended on a common scripture. And that depended on an extraordinary woman.

– Fr. Dominic knows well the bustle and blessings of Rome. It is hard to imagine leaving all that for the entirely unknown, but God has bigger plans for our lives than just for us! 

In the next paragraph of Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict looks to the early Church to see how the hope that Christ brings was more than just a theoretical, or “informative”, hope, but one that was “performative”, in that it has the ability to change our lives, both individually and as a society.

A point of reference to demonstrate this performative quality of hope can be found in St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon, the shortest of his writings in the New Testament.  As an aside, we only hear from this letter in the liturgy once in the three-year cycle of Sunday readings (23^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C) and once in the two-year cycle of Weekday readings (Thursday of the 32^nd Week in Ordinary Time – Year II).  Since it is so short, perhaps that could be a worthwhile read this week.  With that said, let us consider how the Holy Father sees this passage as so important.

The pope quotes the following words from St. Paul, speaking to Philemon about returning Philemon’s runaway slave Onesimus to him: 

“I appeal to you for my child … whose father I have become in my imprisonment … I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart … perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother …” (Philem 10-16)

In explaining St. Paul’s encouragement to Philemon to now see Onesimus no longer as a slave, but “as a beloved brother”, Pope Benedict writes the following:

Those who, as far as their civil status is concerned, stand in relation to one another as masters and slaves, inasmuch as they are members of the one Church have become brothers and sisters—this is how Christians addressed one another. By virtue of their Baptism they had been reborn, they had been given to drink of the same Spirit and they received the Body of the Lord together, alongside one another. Even if external structures remained unaltered, this changed society from within. (SS 4)

The encounter with Christ, an encounter which gives us reason for hope, is not just about the promise of eternal life only, but it also transforms how we are called to see one another through a new lens, even as we continue our pilgrimage.  We are invited to see our fellow pilgrims as brothers and sisters who strive to honor and respect one another, loving one another as is appropriate to our state in life.  Distinctions in civil status may remain, but because of the new life given through baptism, those distinctions are no longer primary.  Rather, what takes priority is living the bonds of fraternity with others, under our one Master, whose rule is always rooted in charity.  The idea of our society living this way, which is more than just a theory, but very practical, should fill us with hope in how life and society can be better.

I find this to be a timely message for our society.  Though there have always been divisions, they seem to be more pronounced now than ever before.  We can get preoccupied with some aspect of how we see others, such as their political affiliation, their nationality, their race, just to name a few.  Sadly, that can become the predominant lens through which we view them.  But the gift of grace we have received in our baptism invites us to look through the lens of faith and to see not what divides us, but what unites us as brothers and sisters in Christ.  When that is our starting point, we are far more inclined to work for the good of all, not just what will be best for ourselves.  If all Christians were to live this way, we would indeed see a society transformed!

Father Alford     

Feast Day: January 26^th 

17 years after mobs tore apart the city of Rome, Christian fighting Christian, the sides divided by why they were backing as successor to Pope Liberius, Pope Damasus I, legitimately the successor of St. Peter, had to choose a path forward for unity in the Church (and in the rapidly fraying empire). Jesus’ mission for every Holy Father was the same:

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” – Luke 22:31-32.

The world will always battle against the Kingdom of God. Just as it was up to Peter to stand firm upon Christ for the sake of all the apostles, it was up to Damasus to do so in the 3^rd century. The whole reason that blood was spilled in 366 was over the question of whether unity or truth ought to prevail. Ought we just to go with Arianism if it unites the fragments of the empire?: the bishops and their flocks, the pagans and their idols, the incoming barbarians some of whom are already Arian… Would you deny Christ – deny His divinity, deny His sonship – if it saves the world? That was the question that faced Peter, and now Damasus, and every Holy Pope. In 383, we know he had decided for Christ. That year, Damasus penned an epigraph to be chiseled above the tomb of the early martyrs St. Stephen and St. Tarcisius. We still have the stone with his poem pristinely carved into it:

“You who read, whoever you are, recognize the equal merit of the two to whom Damasus the bishop has dedicated this inscription after their rewards. The Jewish people stoned Stephen when he was instructing them on a better course, he who carried off the trophy from the enemy: the faithful deacon first laid hold of martyrdom. When a raving gang was pressing holy Tarsicius to reveal to the uninitiated the sacraments of Christ that he was carrying, he wished rather to release his spirit, struck down, than to betray the heavenly limbs to mad dogs.” – Damasus of Rome, Epigrammata 15 (ICVR IV, 11078)

Stephen, the first of the martyrs, killed as he claimed to see the heavens opened and Christ at the right hand of God. Tarcisius, carrying the Blessed Sacrament to Christians in prison, refusing to hand over the sacrament to the mob who beat him, holding fast to Christ’s Body to the end. Body, Blood, Soul, Divinity. God and man. These martyrs died defending that truth, now Pope Damasus would uphold them (other saints too) as witnesses to the whole Church of Who Christ truly is. 

One year before, he had begun the first prong of his effort to unify the Church, and it would also have nothing to do with the violence where his pontificate began. in 382, Damasus convoked a synod in Rome, calling bishops and their delegates from around the empire. Among the documents issued from that synod was a list of all the books of the Bible, a “canon” of scripture. For centuries the Church had preached and prayed with these Books, Gospels, and Letters, but some individual bishops and churches advocated for other documents to also be included, other books from the Old Testament, other gospels, letters attributed to the apostles, various teachings from the early church … (many of them now float around as “lost Gospels” and “forgotten books of the bible”). At that synod, these bishops recommended Pope Damasus the list of books that are contained to this day in every Catholic Bible, 46 books in the Old Testament (from the Septuagint which Christ quoted in the Gospels), and the 27 books of the new. This same list would only be infallibly defined by the Council of Trent over a thousand years later, it only being necessary then because the entirety of the Christian Church, East and West, would be in agreement on these books from now until the Protestant Reformation. 

But, there was a giant problem. As the Church had wrestled with defining the faith over the prior decades, again and again debates erupted over language – Greek or Latin for the creeds, Hebrew and Greek for the scriptures – who was to say what meant what, how was clarity to be won, and truth defended, if everyone was talking about the faith using different language and citing quotations from scriptures found in different codices and scripts? Providentially, amazingly, here we had a Pope – certainly no saint yet – yet with the farsightedness to tackle an enormous problem facing the Church. And we also had a brilliant scholar in attendance at that synod with all the skills needed for the enterprise. He was a Roman by birth, but had spent the prior 20 years learning Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Latin to tremendous depth and had also studied (and in many cases rubbed elbows with) the greatest theologians of the Church – Origen, Augustine, Ambrose, Evagrius, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil, and Gregory of Nyssa. These were the men who knew every thread of every heresy and the Lord had placed throughout His Church for the battle fought at that very time. Jerome was the man to make the scriptures accessible to that entire Church of the future. 

– Fr. Dominic was once again setting the stage this week. St. Paula is coming!