Feast Day: January 26th
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 3rd 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!