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| Rediscovering the Ideal Healthcare Plan |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-08-2022, 08:44 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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Rediscovering the Ideal Healthcare Plan
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.fineartamerica.c...f=1&nofb=1]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.fineartamerica.com%2Fimages-medium-large-5%2Fspain-medieval-hospital-granger.jpg&f=1&nofb=1)
JOHN HORVAT II | 2016
[From a 'conservative' Novus Ordo magazine but a good reminder of how things generally functioned in a world oriented towards Christ as in the European Middle Ages. - The Catacombs]
Many people do not realize that the hospital as it is known today was an invention of the Middle Ages. They were established from the desire to extend Christian charity to the poor and needy.
There is a prevailing idea that healthcare plans are necessarily complex and expensive schemes. There was, however, an ideal healthcare plan in the distant past that was amazingly simple. The plan did not list its benefits, clinical metrics or financial data. The main emphasis of this plan was not so much on a plan but care and the health of both body and soul.
Faith Wallis describes this plan in her book called Medieval Medicine: A Reader. Looking at this "medieval healthcare plan" is a refreshing glimpse at the kind of care that is sadly lacking today.
By proposing a medieval healthcare plan as an ideal, it does not mean to say that medieval medicine, primitive as it was, is the ideal formula for the present. Medieval medicine was advanced for its time but certainly not for today. However, the spirit with which people were treated does present an ideal that can and should be imitated.
Hospitals Return to Roots
Many people do not realize that the hospital as it is known today was an invention of the Middle Ages. They were established from the desire to extend Christian charity to the poor and needy. In the early Middle Ages, hospitals first became attached to monasteries where monks would minister to the sick and dying. No other civilization was able to develop anything remotely comparable.
Medieval hospitals provided free care to the poor and needy. They were usually under the supervision of a religious order that had members with vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They dedicated their lives to God and the cheerful service of all that sought their care — including non-Christians.
Not content with those who came to their doors, hospital attendants were obliged regularly to go out into the streets and bring in all those found in need of treatment.
Reception of Patients
The reception of patients was extremely touching in the broad charity extended to them.
Every possible effort was made to take care of their spiritual needs. Upon entering the hospital, the patient, when a Catholic, went to confession and received Holy Communion, as the first steps in the healing process. This provided spiritual peace of mind that often had its repercussion in the physical health of the body.
Once admitted, the patient was seen as another Christ. Each was treated as the master of the house, for so each was, according to the hospital's bylaws. Every need was taken care of as if Christ himself were being served.
During a visit to the 2,000-bed Jerusalem Hospital of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, one cleric noted: "It has happened on a number of occasions that when the space … proves insufficient for the multitude of the suffering, the dormitory of the brethren is taken over by the sick and the brethren themselves sleep on the floor."
Those who attended the care of the sick did not see their role as just a job to be performed. They did not think about their pleasure or profit. They saw their service as something that gave meaning and purpose to their lives. Caring for others was an important means to secure their salvation.
Excellent Care
Thus, the care was as excellent as it could be for the times. Specialists were brought in to take care of extraordinary cases. Doctors made the rounds daily to check on the progress of those in their care. Regulations required that patients should never be left without an attendant and that nurses be on duty at all times both day and night.
The environment was clean and refreshing. In fact, major works of art were often painted on the hospital walls and ceilings to delight and edify the patients, using the same artistic skills that were employed to adorn churches.
The environment was clean and refreshing. In fact, major works of art were often painted on the hospital walls and ceilings to delight and edify the patients, using the same artistic skills that were employed to adorn churches. Such masterpieces can still be seen today in the buildings that survive.
Special attention was paid to cleanliness, ventilation and comfort. Patients were supplied with clean mattresses, white linen sheets and "fleecy blankets." Care was so excellent that the cleric at the Jerusalem Hospital reported that there were "wealthy people who pretended to be poor to stay in the hospital."
Solicitude for the sick was not limited to the doctors and attendants. Likewise, all Christians saw the sick in a similar Christ-like manner. Patients in ordinary hospitals were often heartened by the visits of persons of high or noble rank and charitable disposition. Visitors might include even personages like Catherine of Sweden, Margaret, Queen of Scotland, or King Saint Louis IX of France.
A Touching Reciprocity
However, the sick were not just the recipients of charity. They also had their duties inside the hospital whereby they extended charity to those around them.
Mindful of how God especially hears the prayers of the suffering, the patients, when Christian, were enjoined to intercede for their benefactors, the authorities and all in distress. To the extent that they could, theirs was the duty of prayer, Mass attendance and reception of the sacraments. At night-fall, the wards might end the day with litanies where the "sick lords" of the house would pray for those in need of prayers. In this way, the sick gave their best to reciprocate for the enormous charity extended to them. Above all, this offering gave meaning and purpose to their suffering.
Hospitals Flourish
As a result of practices like these, the hospitals of the Middle Ages flourished. Every diocese and monastery was encouraged to have hospitals attached to them. The Benedictine order alone is credited with founding 2,000 hospitals. Imbued with this spirit of Christian charity, individuals, guilds, brotherhoods, and municipalities also established and generously endowed hospitals of their own. The result was an extensive system of healthcare that provided for the care of body and soul on a scale never seen before in history.
This impressive system was largely destroyed by the upheavals of the sixteenth century when the Church and her hospitals were despoiled and plundered. The infamous suppression of the monasteries by England's Henry VIII in 1540 also suppressed the English healthcare system, leaving the poor in misery and putting an end to hospital building in that country for some 200 years.
In modern times, religious orders that once cared for the sick in this manner now face dwindling membership since they adhered to more "up-to-date" theological currents that focus more on quixotic and "liberating" social justice than concrete medical Christ-like care.
A Lost Ideal Never to Return?
With all the talk about rising premiums and healthcare costs, perhaps it is time to rediscover the ideal medieval healthcare system. The dedicated spirit of this care is so needed in face of today's ever-expanding medical bureaucracies. Perhaps the massive number of complex government regulations and mandates might be better replaced by the selfless work of dedicated men and women who simply treat the sick as if each one is the Person of Christ Himself.
As a result of practices like these, the hospitals of the Middle Ages flourished. Every diocese and monastery was encouraged to have hospitals attached to them.
Someone might object that such an ideal system is impossible in today's secular and hedonistic age. People simply will not dedicate themselves to the service of the sick and needy. The ideal medieval healthcare plan is a dream that will never again reappear.
This is not true. Religious congregations like the Little Sisters of the Poor are flooded with youthful and cheerful young women who minister to the elderly poor in the medieval tradition. Ironically, these same sisters are being prosecuted by the government for failure to comply with government healthcare mandates that would make them complicit in distributing abortion-causing drugs to their employees.
The problem is not the lack of people or even money, but a failure to present the ideal. The ideal healthcare plan will be rediscovered when the Christian Faith is revived in society. Until that return to order comes, there will always be the seeds of this plan inside the Christian souls that await that blessed day.
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| Irish couple vows to go to jail rather than pay fine for attending Mass during lockdown |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-06-2022, 06:12 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Spiritual]
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Irish couple vows to go to jail rather than pay fine for attending Mass during lockdown
‘God’s law was more important to me than Man’s.’
Joe and Ann Ryan
Thu May 5, 2022
DONAMON, Ireland (LifeSiteNews) – A Catholic couple has said that they would rather go to jail than pay a fine for breaking COVID-19 restrictions by going to Mass.
Catholic couple Jim Ryan, 64, and his wife Ann, 59, broke COVID-19 regulations on Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021, by driving over 5 km from their home.
In April, the couple was charged for this alleged offense by Judge Raymond Finnegan at Cavan District Court. According to Independant.ie, the judge ruled that they must each pay a €300 fine.
“I will go to jail before I pay it. I would rather go to jail, without a shadow of a doubt,” Jim, a retired firefighter, reported. “I have no intention of paying them a fine for me going to Mass – for doing what I have done my whole life.”
Up until this point, the couple has led a law-abiding and quiet life in their stone cottage bordering a railway line in Donamon.
“We’re 64 and 59 years old,” said Ann, a retired nurse, and “have never had any convictions, are quiet-living people and are not affiliated to any organizations.”
“We’re just ordinary Joe Soaps – but with one difference, we honor God and we believe in God,” Anne continued.
The couple struggled to be able to attend in-person Mass because of the COVID-19 restrictions. “On one occasion, we went to a church near here and we actually got thrown out,” said Jim.
“The priest was filming a Mass to put on Facebook and when we saw it was on we went in,” he recalled. “But the priest came down to me and said we had to get out of the church.”
“For the sake of keeping the peace, I left the church, but that was the state we were in,” Jim continued.
‘The guards were waiting for us’
In March 2021, Fr. P.J. Hughes announced that he would celebrate Mass on the Feast of Palm Sunday at Our Lady of Lourdes in Mullahoran, County Cavan. This Mass would be open to everyone.
This decision was in contradiction to the Level 5 restriction which closed places of worship. “I will exercise my constitutional right even though people are complaining,” Fr. Hughes said while acknowledging that this was contrary to his bishop’s directives.
“We are committing a grave mistake by rejecting our Lord and God Jesus Christ by staying away because government officials say we must,” Fr. Hughes said in the lead-up to Palm Sunday.
News of this decision reached local media and several checkpoints were set up on the way to the church. “We read online that Fr. Hughes was saying mass at Mullahoran church and that he was going to turn no-one away,” recalled Jim.
“This was Psalm Sunday … the day Jesus rode into Nazareth on a donkey knowing the terrible torture and death he was facing and He kept going for our sins,” he continued.
“Going to mass that Sunday was extremely important to us,” Jim explained. “Ann had just gone through a life-saving medical procedure and we wanted to say thank you to God.”
Accordingly, Jim and Ann determined to travel 70 km to attend this Mass on this major Catholic feast. On the road, they were stopped at a checkpoint by an officer, Barry Mulligan, who instructed them not to continue to the church.
However, the couple continued their journey and participated in “an absolutely beautiful mass.” When it finished, Jim recalled, “the guards were waiting for us.”
The guards “took all the registration numbers and, I’d say afterwards, they contacted the different checkpoints and gave them the list of the cars.”
This April, the couple were called to court to face their charges. Immediately after being charged, the couple filed an appeal.
Jim explained that the restrictions violated their basic rights, saying, “Article 44 of the constitution says that we have the right to practice our religion in public.”
“It also says in Article 15 that the Dáil cannot impose a law that goes against the constitution – and this law did,” he continued.
Additionally, Anne said she chose to obey God’s law above man’s. “I decided on that morning that I was going to honor one of the ten commandments,” she said, “which was to honor the Sabbath Day.”
“On the balance of things, God’s law was more important to me than Man’s,” Ann said, adding, “Man’s law is fallible. God’s is not.”
Outside the court house, Jim told the Anglo-Celt, “Fr. P.J. Hughes, is a very honorable man, and a true priest, who has honored his vocation.”
“The judge said in there that that wasn’t our local church,” he explained. “It was our local church because it was the nearest church to us that was open. All the rest of them were closed and in defiance of the constitution.”
Ireland has had some of the most strict lockdowns and COVID related restrictions, as the country has drifted further and further from Catholicism.
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| Catholic church in Colorado attacked after leaked Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-06-2022, 06:08 AM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
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Catholic church in Colorado attacked after leaked Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade
‘It’s unfortunate to see people acting out like this,’ lamented an archdiocese spokesman.
![[Image: FR7WBs7VsAINygs-810x500.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/FR7WBs7VsAINygs-810x500.jpg)
Thu May 5, 2022
BOULDER, Colorado (LifeSiteNews) – Sacred Heart of Mary’s Catholic church in Boulder, Colorado, was vandalized with pro-abortion graffiti on Wednesday just days after a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked.
According to the Denver Gazette, the vandals spray-painted pro-abortion messages such as “My body my choice,” “Keep your religion off our bodies,” and the self-contradictory statement, “Abortion Saves Lives,” in light blue paint across the outside of the church.
The vandals also desecrated the hands and eyes of a bronze statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus with red paint, according to the local report.
“It’s unfortunate to see people acting out like this. We certainly understand the highly emotional nature of the pro-life, pro-abortion debate as the news from the Supreme Court leaked on the potential outcome,” Mark Haas, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Denver said in response to the assault.
Haas further stated that this is just one of at least 30 attacks against Catholic churches in Colorado over the past two years, with Sacred Heart of Mary being the target of a previous attack last September.
“This is very bad for the people who have to see this and we do talk internally that this is not new for the Church,” Haas added. “The Church has been attacked for 2,000 years.”
Both Haas and investigators think there may be a connection between the September attack and Wednesday’s attack, but police have yet to make an arrest.
RELATED: US churches, cemeteries vandalized and burned during anti-Catholic crime wave in February
The state of Colorado has very lax abortion laws, with Boulder, in particular, being home to one of a handful of clinics in the country that openly advertises that they provide late-term, third trimester abortions.
According to the Boulder Abortion Clinic’s website, they receive “referrals from across the country and internationally” for their services.
While proponents of abortion often state that late-term abortions are “extremely rare,” statistics from the Boulder clinic show that hundreds of these third trimester abortions were carried out between 1992 and 2012, with several occurring as late as week 38 or 39 of pregnancy.
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| Hong Kong Catholic priest speaks out publicly for the first time about the persecution of the Church |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-05-2022, 06:18 AM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
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Hong Kong Catholic priest speaks out publicly for the first time about the persecution of the Church in China
(The following was published in The Wanderer Catholic Newspaper on March 10 and
marks the first time Father Woo chose to speak out publicly about the persecution of the Church in his native country.)
Taken from here.
By Rev Vincent Woo, JCD (Cand.)
In 1917, Our Lady appeared in Fatima and warned us that if we do not repent from our sins, the errors of Russia will spread. How true it is, given what has been going on in the past few days in Ukraine. Yet, the errors of Russia are present in other parts of the world like China as well. The Chinese Communist Party is notorious for its complete lack of respect for human dignity. One example is the restriction of religious freedom. Instead of killing early Christians like the Romans did, the CCP took a different strategy by avoiding to create martyrs. It established a state-run church independent from Rome—called the Patriotic Association—and it desired to corrupt the faith from within. The CCP really wanted Cardinal Kung—then bishop of Shanghai—to lead this national church that pledged allegiance to the state. Cardinal Kung was adamant that he would never betray his faith. The CCP arrested him in 1955, together with hundreds of Shanghai priests, religious, and lay Catholics. Cardinal Kung, together with many of these heroes of the faith, was jailed for 33 years.
Therefore, we are gathered here today for three reasons. First, to pray for the repose of the soul of Cardinal Kung. Second, to pray for the persecuted Christians in the present day and their persecutors. Third, to preserve the authentic history of the underground Church in China.
First, we pray for Cardinal Kung and those who have died because of religious persecutions in China. One distinctive feature of Catholic theology is that we do not assume that the deceased go to heaven immediately. We are obliged by justice to pray for those who have passed away, so that they can be purified from their sins and enter into heaven as soon as possible. For each sin that we commit, we have to make reparation either in this life or in purgatory before we can see God face to face. We should pray for Cardinal Kung, so that he can be with God as soon as possible. Cardinal Kung truly began his purgatory on earth, as Chinese prisons and labor camps are probably the closest thing on earth to purgatory. The Chinese labor camps, known as laogai—that is re-education through labor—is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet gulag. Prisoners have to perform hard labors—often 16 hours per day—apart from receiving Communist indoctrination, so that they would eventually conform their minds to the socialist ideology. How did these men and women of faith survive without losing their minds? It is their belief in eternal life. Only the thought of heaven kept them going and prevent them from committing suicide. It is their belief that all these pains and sufferings have redemptive values in God’s plan. They can offer up these difficulties to God for the salvation of souls and the conversion of the persecutors. Many of these Shanghai Catholics were college students when they were arrested. Some of them were jailed for 20-30 years. Friends, whenever you feel that life is hard and you want to give up, think about these young men and women who suffered so much for Christ.
Second, please continue to pray for the underground Catholics and their persecutors. For a period of time after the 1980s, there was a greater degree of religious freedom in China. However, the CCP has really tightened its control on religions again in the past few years. The CCP persecutes all religions: Christians, Buddhists, Muslims; no one is exempt. Just last May, a hundred armed policemen raided an underground seminary in Henan province because the bishop and priests refused to join the Patriotic Association. Out of Christian charity, we Christians in the free world must speak out against these atrocities because persecuted Christians are our brothers and sisters in the mystical body of Christ. Just imagine if you have a cousin who is abused by her father, how can you not speak out for her? By charity and justice, we need to make the ongoing persecution in China known to the rest of the world: not just the persecutions of Christians, but also the genocide of the Uyghurs that is ongoing at this moment. At least one million Uyghurs are locked up and systemically persecuted. Therefore, my friends, it is out of charity and justice that we speak out for those persecuted, so that Christians would persevere in their faith and never cave in to the unjust demands of the CCP. It is by perseverance that they will save their souls.
In fact, when we speak out we are acting out of charity toward the persecutors as well. We perform a spiritual work of mercy when we correct the evil behavior of others. In contrast, if we remain silent and refrain from saying anything, we are not exercising charity toward those persecutors. We fail to be merciful toward them. They need to know that what they are doing is really wrong so that they would repent before they die. It is out of love, not out of hatred, that we should call these bad actors responsible for their evil actions.
Third, we have to preserve the authentic history of the underground Church in China, as the CCP has been trying its best to manipulate the historical narratives of what happened in the 1950s. It attempts to rewrite the history of the Church in China by claiming that the conflict between the underground Church and the Patriotic Association is merely some human conflict between two groups of Catholics. In fact, some clergy fell into the trap of this false narrative as well. Recently, a Vatican diplomat said: “what blocks Catholics in the underground church is a psychological barrier resulting from being suddenly asked to change their five-decades-old perception of the state-run Church.” According to this official, there are really no dogmatic differences between these two entities. Sadly, this is not the truth. While acknowledging that not all Catholics who belong to the Patriotic Association are bad people, I must forcefully point out that the Patriotic Association as an entity is a state-run Church that is heavily controlled by the government. It was started by some bishops who pledged allegiance to the CCP. Under Chinese law, people under 18 cannot enter into these churches. On the other hand, the underground Church includes bishops, priests, and lay Catholics who try their best to resist the unjust control of the government and remain true to the faith. This is the history of these two entities that no one can deny. As the survivors of the Shanghai persecution are advanced in age, we must preserve this history and not be deceived by the CCP.
I would conclude today’s homily with a personal testimony of Cardinal Kung. After his release, Cardinal Kung was asked what the most difficult moment was in his three decades in jail. According to the Cardinal, the most painful time for him was this: Jesuit Father Jin, who was imprisoned for more than two decades, eventually caved in to the CCP and was illicitly ordained a patriotic bishop of Shanghai; and after ordination, the CCP sent this Jesuit bishop to visit Cardinal Kung, in an attempt to persuade the Cardinal to change his mind and join the Patriotic Association. This was the deepest pain suffered by the Cardinal in his 33 years of imprisonment. This speaks a lot about the Cardinal’s attitude toward the nature of the Patriotic Association, which has remained unchanged in its essence until the present day.
In 1917, Our Lady asked us to pray and fast, otherwise the errors of Russia would spread. Despite the fall of Soviet Union, the errors of Russia are still around. Dear friends, please take heed of the call of Our Lady of Fatima by praying and fasting. If we do not follow the command of Our Lady, the consequence will be very grave. Let’s do our part and trust in Our Lord and Our Lady, for the Immaculate Heart will triumph in the end.
(This column published by The Wanderer was drawn from remarks Father Woo delivered in a homily at a 2022 Solemn Requiem Mass for Ignatius Cardinal Kung at St. Anthony Church in Washington DC.)
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| Excerpt: The Anti-Liturgical Heresy by Dom Prosper Guerange |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-05-2022, 05:59 AM - Forum: Church Doctrine & Teaching
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[Emphasis mine.]
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...%3DApi&f=1]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.pZ94j0ObGmoyED8FwlDacQHaDr%26pid%3DApi&f=1)
Dom Prosper-Louis-Pascal Gueranger, founder of the Benedictine Congregation of France and first abbot of Solesmes after the French revolution, wrote in 1840 his Liturgical Institutions in order to restore among the clergy the knowledge and the love for the Roman Liturgy.
Here we present to our readers a fragment of the Liturgical Institutions, where Dom Gueranger summarizes what he calls the anti-liturgical heresy, a summary of the doctrine and liturgical practice of the Protestant sect, from the XIVth to the XVIIIth century.
As it can easily be seen, many of these principles have a striking similitude with the post-Conciliar liturgical reform.
1. The first characteristic of the anti-liturgical heresy is HATRED OF TRADITION AS FOUND IN THE FORMULAS USED IN DIVINE WORSHIP. One cannot fail to note this special characteristic in all heretics, from Vigilantus to Calvin, and the reason for it is easy to explain.
Every sectarian who wishes to introduce a new doctrine finds himself, unfailingly, face to face with the Liturgy, which is Tradition at its strongest and best, and he cannot rest until he has silenced this voice, until he has torn up these pages which recall the faith of past centuries.
As a matter of fact, how could Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism establish themselves and maintain their influence over the masses? All they had to do was substitute new books and new formulas in place of the ancient books and formulas, and their work was done. There was nothing that still bothered the new teachers; they could just go on preaching as they wished: the faith of the people was henceforth without defense.
Luther understood this doctrine with a shrewdness worthy of the Jansenists, since he, at the beginning of his innovations, at the time he still felt he should maintain a part of the external form of the Latin cult, gave the following rule for the reformed Mass:
Quote:“We approve and preserve the Introits of Sundays and of the feasts of Our Lord, that is to say Easter, Pentecost and Christmas. We should much prefer that the entire Psalms from the Introits should be taken, as was done in former times; but we will gladly conform to the present usage. We do not blame even those who would wish to keep even the Introits of the Apostles, of the Blessed Virgin and other Saints, since these three Introits are taken from the psalms and other places in Scripture.”
He hated too much the sacred songs composed by the Church herself as the public expression for her faith. He felt too much in them the vigor of Tradition, which he wanted to ban. If he granted to the Church the right to mix her voice with the oracles of the Scripture in the holy assemblies, he would expose himself thereby to have to listen to millions of mouth anathematizing his new dogmas. Therefore, his hatred for everything in Liturgy which does not exclusively derive from Holy Scripture.
2. This, as matter of fact, is the second principle of the anti-liturgical sect: to substitute for the formulas of the ecclesiastical teachings readings from the Holy Scripture.
This involves two advantages: first, to silence the voice of Tradition of which sectarians are always afraid. Then, there is the advantage of propagating and supporting their dogmas by means of affirmation and negation. By way of negation, in passing over in silence, through cunning, the texts which express doctrine opposed to errors they wish to propagate; by way of affirmation, by emphasizing truncated passages which show only one side of the truth, hide the other the eyes of the unlearned. Since many centuries we know that the preferences given by all heretics to holy Scripture, over Church definitions, has no other reason than to facilitate making the word of God say all they want it to say, and manipulating it at will.
( . . . ) Protestants . . . have nearly reduced the whole Liturgy to the reading of Scripture, accompanied by speeches in which one interprets by means of reason. As to the choice and determination of the canonical books, these have ended by falling under the caprice of the reformer, who, in final analysis, decides the meaning of the word itself. Thus Luther finds that in his system of pantheism, the ideas of the uselessness of good works and faith alone sufficing should be established as dogmas, and so, from now on, he will declare that the Epistle of St. James is a “straw epistle” and not canonical, for the simple reason that it teaches the necessity of good works for salvation.
In every age, and under all forms of sectarianism, it will be the same: No ecclesiastical formulas, only Holy Scripture, but interpreted, selected, presented by the person or persons who are seeking to profit from innovation. The trap is dangerous for the simple, and only a long time afterwards one becomes aware of having been deceived and that the word of God, “a two-edged sword”, as the Apostles calls it, has caused great wounds, because it has been manipulated by the sons of perdition.
3. The third principle of the heretics concerning the reform of the Liturgy is, having eliminated the ecclesiastical formulas and proclaimed the absolute necessity of making use only of the words of Scripture in divine worship and having seen that Holy Scripture does not always yield itself to all their purposes as they would like, their third principle, we say, is to fabricate and introduce various formulas, filled with perfidy, by which the people are more surely ensnared in error, and thus the whole structure of the impious reform will become consolidated for the coming centuries.
4. One will not be astonished at the contradictions which heresy shows in its works, when one knows that the fourth principle, or, if you will, the fourth necessity imposed on the sectarians by the very nature of their rebellious state is an habitual contradiction of their own principles. It must be this way for their confusion on that great day, which will come sooner or later, when God will reveal their nakedness to the view of the people whom they have seduced; moreover, it is not in the nature of man to be consistent. Truth alone can be consistent.
Thus, all the sectarians without exceptions begin with the vindication of the rights of antiquity. They want to cut Christianity off from all that the errors and passions of man have mixed in; from whatever is “false” and “unworthy of God”. All they want is the primitive and they pretend to go back to the cradle of Christian Institutions. To this end, they prune, they efface, they cut away; everything falls under their blows, and while one is waiting to see the original purity of the divine cult reappear, one finds himself encumbered with new formulas dating only from the night before, and which are incontestably human, since the one who created them is still alive.
Every sect undergoes this necessity. We saw this with the Monophysites and the Nestorians; we find the same in every branch of Protestantism. Their preference for preaching antiquity led only to cutting them off from the entire past. Then they placed themselves before their seduced people and they swore to them that now all was fine, that the papist accretions had disappeared, that the divine cult was restored to its primitive form . . .
5. Since the liturgical reform is being undertaken by the sectarians with the same goal as the reform of dogma, of which it is the consequence, it follows that as Protestants separated from unity in order to believe less, they found themselves led to cut away in the Liturgy all the ceremonies, all the formulas which express mysteries.
They called it superstition, idolatry, everything that did not seem to be merely rational, thus, limiting the expression of faith, obscuring by doubt and even negation all the views, which open on the supernatural world. Thus, no more Sacraments, except Baptism, preparing the way for Socialism, which freed its followers even from Baptism. No more sacramentals, blessings, images, relics of Saints, processions, pilgrimages, etc. No more altar, only a table, no more sacrifice as in every religion, but only a meal. No more church but only a temple, as with the Greeks and Romans. No more religious architecture, since there is no more mystery. No more Christian paintings and sculpture, since there is no more sensible religion. Finally no more poetry in a cult which is no longer impregnated by love or faith.
6. The suppression of the mystical element in the Protestant liturgy was bound to produce, infallibly, the total extinction of that spirit of prayer, which in Catholicism, we call unction. A heart in revolt can no longer love, a heart without love will be all the more able to produce passable expression of respect or fear, with the cold pride of the Pharisee. Such is Protestant liturgy.
7. Pretending to treat nobly with God, Protestant liturgy has no need of intermediaries. To invoke the help of the Blessed Virgin, or the protection of Saints, would be, for them, a lack of respect due to the Supreme Being. Their liturgy excludes that entire “papist idolatry” which asks from a creature what only should be asked from God. It purges the calendar of all those names of men, which the Roman Church so boldly inscribes next to the name of God. It has a special horror for those names of monks and other persons of later times who one can find figuring next to the names of the Apostles, whom Jesus Christ had chosen, and by whom was founded this primitive Church which alone was pure in faith and free from all superstition in cult and from every relaxation in morals.
8. Since the liturgical reform had for one of its principal aims the abolition of actions and formulas of mystical signification, it is a logical consequence that its authors had to vindicate the use of the vernacular in divine worship. This is in the eyes of sectarians a most important item. Cult is no secret matter. The people, they say, must understand what they sing. Hatred for the Latin language is inborn in the hearts of all the enemies of Rome. They recognize it as the bond among Catholics throughout the universe, as the arsenal of orthodoxy against all the subtleties of the sectarian spirit. ( . . .)
The spirit of rebellion which drives them to confide the universal prayer to the idiom of each people, of each province, of each century, has for the rest produced its fruits, and the reformed themselves constantly perceive that the Catholic people, in spite of their Latin prayers, relish better and accomplish with more zeal the duties of the cult than most do the Protestant people. At every hour of the day, divine worship takes place in Catholic churches. The faithful Catholic, who assists, leaves his mother tongue at the door. Apart form the sermons, he hears nothing but mysterious words which, even so, are not heard in the most solemn moment of the Canon of the Mass. Nevertheless, this mystery charms him in such a way that he is not jealous of the lot of the Protestant, even though the ear of the latter doesn’t hear a single sound without perceiving its meaning.(...)
We must admit it is a master blow of Protestantism to have declared war on the sacred language. If it should ever succeed in ever destroying it, it would be well on the way to victory. Exposed to profane gaze, like a virgin who has been violated, from that moment on the Liturgy has lost much of its sacred character, and very soon people find that it is not worthwhile putting aside one’s work or pleasure in order to go and listen to what is being said in the way one speaks on the marketplace. ( . . .)
9. In taking away from the Liturgy the mystery which humbles reason, Protestantism took care not to forget the practical consequence, that is to say, liberation from the fatigue and the burden of the body imposed by the rules of the papist Liturgy. First of all, no more fasting, no more abstinence, no more genuflections in prayer. For the ministers of the temple, no more daily functions to carry out, no more canonical prayers to recite in the name of the Church. Such is one of the principal forms of the great Protestant emancipation: to diminish the sum of public and private prayers.
The course of events has quickly shown that faith and charity, which are nourished by prayers, were extinguished in the reform, whereas among Catholics both still nourish all the acts of devotion to God and men, since they are impregnated by the ineffable resources of liturgical prayer as accomplished by the secular and regular clergy, and in which the community of the faithful participate.
10. Since Protestantism had to establish a rule in order to distinguish among the papist institutions those which could be the most hostile to its principle, it had to rummage around in the foundations of the Catholic structure to find the corner stone on which everything rests. Its instinct caused it to discover first of all that dogma which is irreconcilable with every innovation: Papal authority. When Luther wrote on his flag: “Hatred for Rome and its laws”, he only promulgated once more the underlying principle of every branch of the anti-liturgical sect. From then on he had to abrogate, ‘en masse’ both cult and ceremonies as the idolatries of Rome.
The Latin language, the Divine Office, the calendar, the breviary: all were abominations of the great Harlot of Babylon. The Roman Pontiff weighs down reason by his dogmas and the sense by his ritual practices. Therefore, it must be proclaimed that his dogmas are only blasphemy and error, and his liturgical observances nothing but a means of establishing more firmly a usurped and tyrannical domination. (. . .) One should here bring to mind the marvelous reflections of Joseph de Maistre in his book The Pope, where he demonstrates with so much wisdom and depth that, in spite of the disagreement which should isolate the diay aent sects, there is one thing in which they are all alike, namely, they are non-Roman.
11. The anti-liturgical heresy needed, in order to establish its reign for good, the destruction in fact and in principle of all priesthood in Christianity. For it felt that where there is a Pontiff, there is an Altar, and where there is an Altar there is a sacrifice and the carrying on of a mysterious ceremonial.
Having abolished the office of Supreme Pontiff, they had to annihilate the character of the bishopric, from which emanates the mystical imposition of hands, which perpetuates the sacred hierarchy. From this derives a great presbyterianism, which is nothing other than the immediate consequence of the suppression of the Supreme Pontiff. From now on there is no longer a priest, properly speaking. How could simple election without consecration make a man sacred? Luther’s and Calvin’s reforms only know of ministers of God, or of men, as you prefer. But this is not enough. Chosen and established by laymen, bringing into the temple the robe of a certain bastard ministry, the minister is nothing but a layman clothed with accidental functions. In Protestantism there exit only laymen, and this necessarily so, since there is no longer a Liturgy. (. . .)
Such are the principal maxims of the anti-liturgical sect. We certainly did not exaggerate in any way. All we did was to reveal the hundred times professed doctrines of the writings of Luther, Calvin, the One Hundred Signers of Magdeburg, of Hospinien, Kemnitz, etc. These books are easy to consult. That is to say that what comes out of them is under the eyes of all the world. We thought it useful to throw light on the principal features of sectarianism. It is always profitable to know error.
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| CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-04-2022, 07:17 PM - Forum: General Commentary
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CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders
Newly released documents showed the CDC planned to use phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for many non-COVID-19 purposes too.
Vice.com | May 3, 2022
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.
Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.
The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data to, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.
The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021.
Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data marketplace, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the documents that “The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor to neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’” (The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions “places of worship.”)
Motherboard obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CDC.
The documents contain a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential CDC use cases for data.” They include:
- “Track patterns of those visiting K-12 schools by the school and compare to 2019; compare with epi metrics [Environmental Performance Index] if possible.”
- “Examination of the correlation of mobility patterns data and rise in COVID-19 cases [...] Movement restrictions (Border closures, inter-regional and nigh curfews) to show compliance.”
- “Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.”
At the start of the pandemic, cell phone location data was seen as a potentially useful tool. Multiple media organizations, including the New York Times, used location data provided by companies in the industry to show where people were traveling to once lockdowns started to lift, or highlight that poorer communities were unable to shelter in place as much as richer ones.
The COVID-19 pandemic as a whole has been a flashpoint in a broader culture war, with conservatives and anti-vaccine groups protesting against government mask and vaccine mandates. They've also expressed a specific paranoia that vaccine passports would be used as a tracking or surveillance tool, framing vaccine refusal as a civil liberties issue. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Children's Health Defense, one of the more influential and monied anti-vaccine groups in the U.S., has promoted fears that digital vaccine certificates could be used to surveil citizens. QAnon promoter Dustin Nemos wrote on Telegram in December that vaccine passports are "a Trojan horse being used to create a completely new type of controlled and surveilled society in which the freedom we enjoy today will be a distant memory."
Against that inflamed backdrop, the use of cell phone location data for such a wide variety of tracking measures, even if effective for becoming better informed on the pandemic’s spread or for informing policy, is likely to be controversial. It's also likely to give anti-vaccine groups a real-world data point on which to pin their darkest warnings.
![[Image: 1651520756653-cdc-uses.png?resize=800:*]](https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1651520756653-cdc-uses.png?resize=800:*)
A SCREENSHOT OF THE USE CASES PROPOSED BY THE CDC. IMAGE: MOTHERBOARD.
The procurement documents say that “This is an URGENT COVID-19 PR [procurement request],” and asks for the purchase to be expediated.
But some of the use cases are not explicitly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. One reads “Research points of interest for physical activity and chronic disease prevention such as visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses.”
Another section of the document elaborates on the location data’s use for non-COVID-19 related programs.
“CDC also plans to use mobility data and services acquired through this acquisition to support non-COVID-19 programmatic areas and public health priorities across the agency, including but not limited to travel to parks and greenspaces, physical activity and mode of travel, and population migration before, during, and after natural disasters,” it reads. “The mobility data obtained under this contract will be available for CDC agency-wide use and will support numerous CDC priorities.”
The CDC did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on which use cases it did deploy SafeGraph data for.
SafeGraph is part of the ballooning location industry, and SafeGraph has previously shared datasets containing 18 million cell phones from the United States. The documents say this acquisition is for data that is geographically representative, “i.e., derived from at least 20 million active cellphone users per day across the United States.”
Generally, companies in this industry ask, or pay, app developers to include location data gathering code in their apps. The location data then funnels up to companies who may resell the raw location data outright or package it into products.
SafeGraph sells both. On the developed product side SafeGraph has several different products. “Places” concerns points of interest (POIs) such as where particular stores or buildings are located. “Patterns” is based on mobile phone location data that can show for how long people visit a location, and “Where they came from” and “Where else they go,” according to SafeGraph’s website. More recently SafeGraph has started offering aggregated transaction data, showing how much consumers typically spend at specific locations, under the “Spend” product. SafeGraph sells its products to a wide range of industries, such as real estate, insurance, and advertising. These products include aggregated data on movements and spends, rather than the location of specific devices. Motherboard previously bought a set of SafeGraph location data for $200. The data was aggregated, meaning it was not supposed to pinpoint the movements of specific devices and hence people, but at the time, Edwards said "In my opinion the SafeGraph data is way beyond any safe thresholds [around anonymity]." Edwards pointed to a search result in SafeGraph’s data portal that displayed data related to a specific doctor’s office, showing how finely tuned the company’s data can be. Theoretically, an attacker could use that data to then attempt to unmask the specific users, something which researchers have repeatedly demonstrated is possible.
In January 2019, the Illinois Department of Transportation bought such data from SafeGraph that related to over five million phones, activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) previously found.
The CDC documents show that the agency bought access to SafeGraph’s “U.S. Core Place Data,” “Weekly Patterns Data,” and “Neighborhood Patterns Data. That last product includes information such as home dwelling time, and is aggregated by state and census block.
“SafeGraph offers visitor data at the Census Block Group level that allows for extremely accurate insights related to age, gender, race, citizenship status, income, and more,” one of the CDC documents reads.
Both SafeGraph and the CDC have previously touched on their partnership, but not in the detail that is revealed in the documents. The CDC published a study in September 2020 which looked at whether people around the country were following stay-at-home orders, which appeared to use SafeGraph data.
SafeGraph wrote in a blog post in April 2020 that “To play our part in the fight against the COVID-19 health crisis—and its devastating impact on the global economy—we decided to expand our program further, making our foot traffic data free for non-profit organizations and government agencies at the local, state, and federal level.” Multiple location data companies touted their data as a potential mitigation to the pandemic during its peak in the United States, and provided data to government and media organizations.
A year later, the CDC purchased access to the data because SafeGraph no longer wanted to provide it for free, according to the documents. The Data Use Agreement for the in-kind provided data was set to expire on March 31, 2021, the documents add. The data was still important to access as the U.S. opened up, the CDC argued in the documents.
“CDC has interest in continued access to this mobility data as the country opens back up. This data is used by several teams/groups in the response and have been resulting in deeper insights into the pandemic as it pertains to human behavior,” one section reads.
Researchers at the EFF separately obtained documents concerning the CDC’s purchase of similar location data products from a company called Cubeiq as well as the SafeGraph documents. The EFF shared those documents with Motherboard. They showed that the CDC also asked to speed up the purchase of Cubeiq’s data because of COVID-19, and intended to use it for non-COVID-19 purposes. The documents also listed the same potential use-cases for Cubeiq’s data as in the SafeGraph documents.
Google banned SafeGraph from its Google Play Store in June. This meant that any app developers using SafeGraph’s code had to remove it from their apps, or face having their app removed from the store. It is not entirely clear how effective this ban has been: SafeGraph has previously said it obtains location data via Veraset, a spin-off company which interfaces with the app developers.
SafeGraph did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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| The Solemnity of St. Joseph [Pre-1955] |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-04-2022, 05:37 AM - Forum: Easter
- Replies (4)
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If you are following the pre-1955 Missal, today is the Feast of the Solemnity of St. Joseph (double first class).
The following are a few brief descriptions of the history of this Feast in the liturgical year:
The Solemnity of Saint Joseph
Between 1870 and 1955, an additional Feast was celebrated in honour of Saint Joseph as Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Patron of the Universal Church, the latter title having been given to him by Pope Pius IX. Originally celebrated on the third Sunday after Easter with an octave, after Divino Afflatu of Saint Pius X (see Reform of the Roman Breviary by Pope Pius X), it was moved to the preceding Wednesday (because Wednesday is the day of the week specifically dedicated to St Joseph, St John the Baptist and local Patrons). The Feast was also retitled The Solemnity of Saint Joseph. This celebration and its accompanying Octave were abolished during the modernisation of rubrics under Pope Pius XII in 1955 [emphasis mine]. Source
The Solemnity of St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church
Regarding the various graces conferred upon a rational creature, it is the general rule that whenever the divine grace chooses someone for a particular grace, or for a particular exalted state, it also endows that person with all the gifts of grace which are necessary for the person so chosen, and for the duty (to which he is called), and does so in abundance. This is most especially verified in the case of Saint Joseph, the putative father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and true spouse of the Queen of the world, and Lady of Angels. He was chosen by the Eternal Father as the faithful protector and guardian of His chief treasures, namely, His Son, and Joseph’s own Wife. This duty Joseph discharged most faithfully, wherefore the Lord hath said to him: Good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.
Remember us, therefore, o blessed Joseph, and by the support of thy prayers, intercede for us with thy supposed Son! And also make gracious to us thy Virgin Spouse, t
he Mother of Him Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, liveth and reigneth though all ages. Amen. (From the sermon at Matins, by St Bernardin of Siena.)
The feast of St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, was originally called “the Patronage of St Joseph,” and fixed to the Third Sunday after Easter. It was kept by a great many dioceses and religious orders, particularly promoted by the Carmelites, before it was extended to the universal Church by Bl. Pope Pius IX in 1847, and later granted an octave. When the custom of fixing feasts to particular Sundays was abolished as part of the Breviary reform of Pope St Pius X, it was anticipated to the previous Wednesday, the day of the week traditionally dedicated to Patron Saints. It was removed from the general Calendar in 1955 and replaced by the feast of St Joseph the Worker, one of the least fortunate aspects of the pre-Conciliar liturgical changes; the new feast itself was then downgraded from the highest of three grades (first class) in the 1962 Missal to the lowest of four (optional memorial) in 1970 [emphasis mine]. Source
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| Supreme Court Set To Overturn Roe v Wade, Leaked Draft Opinion Shows |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-03-2022, 05:18 AM - Forum: Abortion
- No Replies
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Supreme Court Set To Overturn Roe v Wade, Leaked Draft Opinion Shows
![[Image: supreme%20court_0.jpg?itok=tcWISTYV]](https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_mobile/public/inline-images/supreme%20court_0.jpg?itok=tcWISTYV)
ZH [adapted] | MAY 02, 2022
A leaked draft of a US Supreme Court decision reveals that the majority of the court has decided to overturn Roe v. Wade by a vote of 5-4, according to Politico, which calls it a "full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right."
"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the draft which was circulated inside the court before someone leaked it to the news outlet. "We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled."
Politico highlighted these 10 passages from the draft opinion:
- “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision....”
- “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
- “In the years prior to [Roe v. Wade], about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process. It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State. … it represented the ‘exercise of raw judicial power’… and it sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half-century.”
- “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
- “In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be more even more [sic] extensive than the right Casey and Roe recognized. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an ‘unborn human being.’ ... Our nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.”
- “We have long recognized, however, that stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command,’ and it ‘is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution.’ It has been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue ‘be settled than that it be settled right.’ But when it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution — the ‘great charter of our liberties,’ which was meant ‘to endure through a long lapse of ages,’ we place a high value on having the matter ‘settled right.’”
- “On many other occasions, this Court has overruled important constitutional decisions. … Without these decisions, American constitutional law as we know it would be unrecognizable, and this would be a different country.”
- ”Casey described itself as calling both sides of the national controversy to resolve their debate, but in doing so, Casey necessarily declared a winning side. … The Court short-circuited the democratic process by closing it to the large number of Americans who dissented in any respect from Roe. … Together, Roe and Casey represent an error that cannot be allowed to stand.”
- “Roe certainly did not succeed in ending division on the issue of abortion. On the contrary, Roe ‘inflamed’ a national issue that has remained bitterly divisive for the past half-century....This Court’s inability to end debate on the issue should not have been surprising. This Court cannot bring about the permanent resolution of a rancorous national controversy simply by dictating a settlement and telling the people to move on. Whatever influence the Court may have on public attitudes must stem from the strength of our opinions, not an attempt to exercise ‘raw judicial power.’”
- “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly. We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
The magnitude of this report is so serious that Politico included this editor's note vouching for the authenticity of the draft decision.
![[Image: 2022-05-02_0.png?itok=DmiDyB__]](https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_mobile/public/inline-images/2022-05-02_0.png?itok=DmiDyB__)
The leak has completely wiped the headlines and Twitter is exploding with hot takes.
https://www.scribd.com/document/572585417/Row-v-Wade-Draft-Opinion#download&from_embed
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| St. Athanasius: Apologia ad Constantium |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-02-2022, 05:58 AM - Forum: Fathers of the Church
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Apologia ad Constantium
Taken from here.
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ffarm4.staticflickr.com%...f=1&nofb=1]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ffarm4.staticflickr.com%2F3569%2F3778277346_fe7ff603e0_b.jpg&f=1&nofb=1)
1. Knowing that you have been a Christian for many years , most religious Augustus, and that you are godly by descent, I cheerfully undertake to answer for myself at this time;— for I will use the language of the blessed Paul, and make him my advocate before you, considering that he was a preacher of the truth, and that you are an attentive hearer of his words.
With respect to those ecclesiastical matters, which have been made the ground of a conspiracy against me, it is sufficient to refer your Piety to the testimony of the many Bishops who have written in my behalf ; enough too is the recantation of Ursacius and Valens to prove to all men, that none of the charges which they set up against me had any truth in them. For what evidence can others produce so strong, as what they declared in writing? 'We lied, we invented these things; all the accusations against Athanasius are full of falsehood.' To this clear proof may be added, if you will vouchsafe to hear it, this circumstance that the accusers brought no evidence against Macarius the presbyter while we were present; but in our absence , when they were by themselves, they managed the matter as they pleased. Now, the Divine Law first of all, and next our own Laws , have expressly declared, that such proceedings are of no force whatsoever. From these things your piety, as a lover of God and of the truth, will, I am sure, perceive that we are free from all suspicion, and will pronounce our opponents to be false accusers.
2. The first charge, of setting Constans against Constantius.
But as to the slanderous charge which has been preferred against me before your Grace, respecting correspondence with the most pious Augustus, your brother Constans , of blessed and everlasting memory (for my enemies report this of me, and have ventured to assert it in writing), the former events are sufficient to prove this also to be untrue. Had it been alleged by another set of persons, the matter would indeed have been a fit subject of enquiry, but it would have required strong evidence, and open proof in presence of both parties: but when the same persons who invented the former charge, are the authors also of this, is it not reasonable to conclude from the issue of the one, the falsehood of the other? For this cause they again conferred together in private, thinking to be able to deceive your Piety before I was aware. But in this they failed: you would not listen to them as they desired, but patiently gave me an opportunity to make my defense. And, in that you were not immediately moved to demand vengeance, you acted only as was righteous in a Prince, whose duty it is to wait for the defense of the injured party. Which if you will vouchsafe to hear, I am confident that in this matter also you will condemn those reckless men, who have no fear of that God, who has commanded us not to speak falsely before the king.
3. He never saw Constans alone.
But in truth I am ashamed even to have to defend myself against charges such as these, which I do not suppose that even the accuser himself would venture to make mention of in my presence. For he knows full well that he speaks untruly, and that I was never so mad, so reft of my senses, as even to be open to the suspicion of having conceived any such thing. So that had I been questioned by any other on this subject, I would not even have answered, lest, while I was making my defense, my hearers should for a time have suspended their judgment concerning me. But to your Piety I answer with a loud and clear voice, and stretching forth my hand, as I have learned from the Apostle, 'I call God for a record upon my soul 2 Corinthians 1:23,' and as it is written in the histories of the Kings (let me be allowed to say the same), 'The Lord is witness, and His Anointed is witness 1 Samuel 12:5,' I have never spoken evil of your Piety before your brother Constans, the most religious Augustus of blessed memory. I did not exasperate him against you, as these have falsely accused me. But whenever in my interviews with him he has mentioned your Grace (and he did mention you at the time that Thalassus came to Pitybion, and I was staying at Aquileia), the Lord is witness, how I spoke of your Piety in terms which I would that God would reveal unto your soul, that you might condemn the falsehood of these my calumniators. Bear with me, most gracious Augustus, and freely grant me your indulgence while I speak of this matter. Your most Christian brother was not a man of so light a temper, nor was I a person of such a character, that we should communicate together on a subject like this, or that I should slander a brother to a brother, or speak evil of an emperor before an emperor. I am not so mad, Sire, nor have I forgotten that divine utterance which says, 'Curse not the king, no, not in your thought; and curse not the rich in your bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which has wings shall tell the matter Ecclesiastes 10:20.' If then those things, which are spoken in secret against you that are kings, are not hidden, it is not incredible that I should have spoken against you in the presence of a king, and of so many bystanders? For I never saw your brother by myself, nor did he ever converse with me in private, but I was always introduced in company with the Bishop of the city where I happened to be, and with others that chanced to be there. We entered the presence together, and together we retired. Fortunatian , Bishop of Aquileia, can testify this, the father Hosius is able to say the same, as also are Crispinus, Bishop of Padua, Lucillus of a Verona, Dionysius of Lëis, and Vincentius of Campania. And although Maximinus of Treveri, and Protasius of Milan, are dead, yet Eugenius, who was Master of the Palace , can bear witness for me; for he stood before the veil , and heard what we requested of the Emperor, and what he vouchsafed to reply to us.
4. The movements of Athanasius refute this charge.
This certainly is sufficient for proof, yet suffer me nevertheless to lay before you an account of my travels, which will further lead you to condemn the unfounded calumnies of my opponents. When I left Alexandria , I did not go to your brother's head-quarters, or to any other persons, but only to Rome; and having laid my case before the Church (for this was my only concern), I spent my time in the public worship. I did not write to your brother, except when Eusebius and his fellows had written to him to accuse me, and I was compelled while yet at Alexandria to defend myself; and again when I sent to him volumes containing the holy Scriptures, which he had ordered me to prepare for him. It behooves me, while I defend my conduct, to tell the truth to your Piety. When however three years had passed away, he wrote to me in the fourth year , commanding me to meet him (he was then at Milan); and upon enquiring the cause (for I was ignorant of it, the Lord is my witness), I learned that certain Bishops had gone up and requested him to write to your Piety, desiring that a Council might be called. Believe me, Sire, this is the truth of the matter; I lie not. Accordingly I went down to Milan, and met with great kindness from him; for he condescended to see me, and to say that he had dispatched letters to you, requesting that a Council might be called. And while I remained in that city, he sent for me again into Gaul (for the father Hosius was going there), that we might travel from thence to Sardica. And after the Council, he wrote to me while I continued at Naissus , and I went up, and abode afterwards at Aquileia; where the letters of your Piety found me. And again, being invited thence by your departed brother, I returned into Gaul, and so came at length to your Piety.
5. No possible time or place for the alleged offense.
Now what place and time does my accuser specify, at which I made use of these expressions according to his slanderous imputation? In whose presence was I so mad as to give utterance to the words which he has falsely charged me with speaking? Who is there ready to support the charge, and to testify to the fact? What his own eyes have seen that ought he to speak , as holy Scripture enjoins. But no; he will find no witnesses of that which never took place. But I take your Piety to witness, together with the Truth, that I lie not. I request you, for I know you to be a person of excellent memory, to call to mind the conversation I had with you, when you condescended to see me, first at Viminacium , a second time at Cæsarea in Cappadocia, and a third time at Antioch. Did I speak evil before you even of Eusebius and his fellows who had persecuted me? Did I cast imputations upon any of those that have done me wrong? If then I imputed nothing to any of those against whom I had a right to speak, how could I be so possessed with madness as to slander an Emperor before an Emperor, and to set a brother at variance with a brother? I beseech you, either cause me to appear before you that the thing may be proved, or else condemn these calumnies, and follow the example of David, who says, 'Whoever privily slanders his neighbour, him will I destroy.' As much as in them lies, they have slain me; for 'the mouth that belies, slays the soul Wisdom 1:11.' But your long-suffering has prevailed against them, and given me confidence to defend myself, that they may suffer condemnation, as contentious and slanderous persons. Concerning your most religious brother, of blessed memory, this may suffice: for you will be able, according to the wisdom which God has given you, to gather much from the little I have said, and to recognise the fictitious charge.
6. The second charge, of corresponding with Magnentius.
With regard to the second calumny, that I have written letters to the tyrant (his name I am unwilling to pronounce), I beseech you investigate and try the matter, in whatever way you please, and by whomsoever you may approve of. The extravagance of the charge so confounds me, that I am in utter uncertainty how to act. Believe me, most religious Prince, many times did I weigh the matter in my mind, but was unable to believe that any one could be so mad as to utter such a falsehood. But when this charge was published abroad by the Arians, as well as the former, and they boasted that they had delivered to you a copy of the letter, I was the more amazed, and I used to pass sleepless nights contending against the charge, as if in the presence of my accusers; and suddenly breaking forth into a loud cry, I would immediately fall to my prayers, desiring with groans and tears that I might obtain a favourable hearing from you. And now that by the grace of the Lord, I have obtained such a hearing, I am again at a loss how I shall begin my defense; for as often as I make an attempt to speak, I am prevented by my horror at the deed. In the case of your departed brother, the slanderers had indeed a plausible pretence for what they alleged; because I had been admitted to see him, and he had condescended to write to your brotherly affection concerning me; and he had often sent for me to come to him, and had honoured me when I came. But for the traitor Magnentius, 'the Lord is witness, and His Anointed is witness 1 Samuel 12:5,' I know him not, nor was ever acquainted with him. What correspondence then could there be between persons so entirely unacquainted with each other? What reason was there to induce me to write to such a man? How could I have commenced my letter, had I written to him? Could I have said, 'You have done well to murder the man who honoured me, whose kindness I shall never forget?' Or, 'I approve of your conduct in destroying our Christian friends, and most faithful brethren.' or, 'I approve of your proceedings in butchering those who so kindly entertained me at Rome; for instance, your departed Aunt Eutropia , whose disposition answered to her name, that worthy man, Abuterius, the most faithful Spirantius, and many other excellent persons?'
7. This charge utterly incredible and absurd.
Is it not mere madness in my accuser even to suspect me of such a thing? What, I ask again, could induce me to place confidence in this man? What trait did I perceive in his character on which I could rely? He had murdered his own master; he had proved faithless to his friends; he had violated his oath; he had blasphemed God, by consulting poisoners and sorcerers contrary to his Law. And with what conscience could I send greeting to such a man, whose madness and cruelty had afflicted not me only, but all the world around me? To be sure, I was very greatly indebted to him for his conduct, that when your departed brother had filled our churches with sacred offerings, he murdered him. For the wretch was not moved by the sight of these his gifts, nor did he stand in awe of the divine grace which had been given to him in baptism: but like an accursed and devilish spirit, he raged against him, till your blessed brother suffered martyrdom at his hands; while he, henceforth a criminal like Cain, was driven from place to place, 'groaning and trembling ,' to the end that he might follow the example of Judas in his death, by becoming his own executioner, and so bring upon himself a double weight of punishment in the judgment to come.
8. Disproof of It.
With such a man the slanderer thought that I had been on terms of friendship, or rather he did not think so, but like an enemy invented an incredible fiction: for he knows full well that he has lied. I would that, whoever he is, he were present here, that I might put the question to him on the word of Truth itself (for whatever we speak as in the presence of God, we Christians consider as an oath ); I say, that I might ask him this question, which of us rejoiced most in the well-being of the departed Constans? Who prayed for him most earnestly? The facts of the foregoing charge prove this; indeed it is plain to every one how the case stands. But although he himself knows full well, that no one who was so disposed towards the departed Constans, and who truly loved him, could be a friend to his enemy, I fear that being possessed with other feelings towards him than I was, he has falsely attributed to me those sentiments of hatred which were entertained by himself.
9. Athanasius could not write to one who did not even know him.
For myself, I am so surprised at the enormity of the thing, that I am quite uncertain what I ought to say in my defense. I can only declare, that I condemn myself to die ten thousand deaths, if even the least suspicion attaches to me in this matter. And to you, Sire, as a lover of the truth, I confidently make my appeal. I beseech you, as I said before, investigate this affair, and especially with the testimony of those who were once sent by him as ambassadors to you. These are the Bishops Sarvatius and Maximus and the rest, with Clementius and Valens. Enquire of them, I beseech you, whether they brought letters to me. If they did, this would give me occasion to write to him. But if he did not write to me, if he did not even know me, how could I write to one with whom I had no acquaintance? Ask them whether, when I saw Clementius and his fellows, and spoke of your brother of blessed memory, I did not, in the language of Scripture, wet my garments with tears , when I remembered his kindness of disposition and his Christian spirit. Learn of them how anxious I was, on hearing of the cruelty of the beast, and finding that Valens and his company had come by way of Libya, lest he should attempt a passage also, and like a robber murder those who held in love and memory the departed Prince, among whom I account myself second to none.
10. His loyalty towards Constantius and his brother.
How with this apprehension of such a design on their part, was there not an additional probability of my praying for your Grace? Should I feel affection for his murderer, and entertain dislike towards you his brother who avenged his death? Should I remember his crime, and forget that kindness of yours which you vouchsafed to assure me by letter should remain the same towards me after your brother's death of happy memory, as it had been during his lifetime? How could I have borne to look upon the murderer? Must I not have thought that the blessed Prince beheld me, when I prayed for your safety? For brothers are by nature mirrors of each other. Wherefore as seeing you in him, I never should have slandered you before him; and as seeing him in you, never should I have written to his enemy, instead of praying for your safety. Of this my witnesses are, first of all, the Lord who has heard and has given to you entire the kingdom of your forefathers: and next those persons who were present at the time, Felicissimus, who was Duke of Egypt, Rufinus, and Stephanus, the former of whom was Receiver-general, the latter, Master there; Count Asterius, and Palladius Master of the palace, Antiochus and Evagrius Official Agents. I had only to say, 'Let us pray for the safety of the most religious Emperor, Constantius Augustus,' and all the people immediately cried out with one voice, 'O Christ send help to Constantius;' and they continued praying thus for some time.
11. Challenge to the accusers as to the alleged letter.
Now I have already called upon God, and His Word, the Only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ, to witness for me, that I have never written to that man, nor received letters from him. And as to my accuser, give me leave to ask him a few short questions concerning this charge also. How did he come to the knowledge of this matter? Will he say that he has got copies of the letter? For this is what the Arians laboured to prove. Now in the first place, even if he can show writing resembling mine, the thing is not yet certain; for there are forgers, who have often imitated the hand even of you who are Emperors. And the resemblance will not prove the genuineness of the letter, unless my customary amanuensis shall testify in its favour. I would then again ask my accusers, Who provided you with these copies? And whence were they obtained? I had my writers , and he his servants, who received his letters from the bearers, and gave them into his hand. My assistants are forthcoming; vouchsafe to summon the others (for they are most probably still living), and enquire concerning these letters. Search into the matter, as though Truth were the partner of your throne. She is the defense of Kings, and especially of Christian Kings; with her you will reign most securely, for holy Scripture says, 'Mercy and truth preserve the king, and they will encircle his throne in righteousness Proverbs 20:28.' And the wise Zorobabel gained a victory over the others by setting forth the power of Truth, and all the people cried out, 'Great is the truth, and mighty above all things Ezra 4:41.'
12. Truth the defense of Thrones.
Had I been accused before any other, I should have appealed to your Piety; as once the Apostle appealed unto Cæsar, and put an end to the designs of his enemies against him. But since they have had the boldness to lay their charge before you, to whom shall I appeal from you? To the Father of Him who says, 'I am the Truth John 14:6,' that He may incline your heart into clemency:—
O Lord Almighty, and King of eternity, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who by Your Word hast given this Kingdom to Your servant Constantius; do Thou shine into his heart, that he, knowing the falsehood that is set against me, may both favourably receive this my defense; and may make known unto all men, that his ears are firmly set to hearken unto the Truth, according as it is written, 'Righteous lips alone are acceptable unto the King.' For You have caused it to be said by Solomon, that thus the throne of the kingdom shall be established.
Wherefore at least enquire into this matter, and let the accusers understand that your desire is to learn the truth; and see, whether they will not show their falsehood by their very looks; for the countenance is a test of the conscience as it is written, 'A merry heart makes a cheerful countenance, but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken Proverbs 15:13.' Thus they who had conspired against Joseph were convicted by their own consciences; and the craft of Laban towards Jacob was shown in his countenance. And thus you see the suspicious alarm of these persons, for they fly and hide themselves; but on our part frankness in making our defense. And the question between us is not one regarding worldly wealth, but concerning the honour of the Church. He that has been struck by a stone, applies to a physician; but sharper than a stone are the strokes of calumny; for as Solomon has said, 'A false witness is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow Proverbs 25:18,' and its wounds Truth alone is able to cure; and if Truth be set at nought, they grow worse and worse.
13. This charge rests on forgery.
It is this that has thrown the Churches everywhere into such confusion; for pretences have been devised, and Bishops of great authority, and of advanced age , have been banished for holding communion with me. And if matters had stopped here, our prospect would be favourable through your gracious interposition. But that the evil may not extend itself, let Truth prevail before you; and leave not every Church under suspicion, as though Christian men, nay even Bishops, could be guilty of plotting and writing in this manner. Or if you are unwilling to investigate the matter, it is but right that we who offer our defense, should be believed, rather than our calumniators. They, like enemies, are occupied in wickedness; we, as earnestly contending for our cause, present to you our proofs. And truly I wonder how it comes to pass, that while we address you with fear and reverence, they are possessed of such an impudent spirit, that they dare even to lie before the Emperor. But I pray you, for the Truth's sake, and as it is written , 'search diligently' in my presence, on what grounds they affirm these things, and whence these letters were obtained. But neither will any of my servants be proved guilty, nor will any of his people be able to tell whence they came; for they are forgeries. And perhaps one had better not enquire further. They do not wish it, lest the writer of the letters should be certain of detection. For the calumniators alone, and none besides, know who he is.
14. The third charge, of using an undedicated Church.
But forasmuch as they have informed against me in the matter of the great Church , that a communion was holden there before it was completed, I will answer to your Piety on this charge also; for the parties who are hostile towards me constrain me to do so. I confess this did so happen; for, as in what I have hitherto said, I have spoken no lie, I will not now deny this. But the facts are far otherwise than they have represented them. Allow me to declare to you, most religious Augustus, that we kept no day of dedication (it would certainly have been unlawful to do so, before receiving orders from you), nor were we led to act as we did through premeditation. No Bishop or other Clergyman was invited to join in our proceedings; for much was yet wanting to complete the building. Nay the congregation was not held on a previous notice, which might give them a reason for informing against us. Every one knows how it happened; hear me, however, with your accustomed equity and patience. It was the feast of Easter , and the multitude assembled together was exceeding great, such as Christian kings would desire to see in all their cities. Now when the Churches were found to be too few to contain them, there was no little stir among the people, who desired that they might be allowed to meet together in the great Church, where they could all offer up their prayers for your safety. And this they did; for although I exhorted them to wait awhile, and to hold service in the other Churches, with whatever inconvenience to themselves, they would not listen to me; but were ready to go out of the city, and meet in desert places in the open air, thinking it better to endure the fatigue of the journey, than to keep the feast in such a state of discomfort.
15. Want of room the cause, precedent the justification.
Believe me, Sire, and let Truth be my witness in this also, when I declare that in the congregations held during the season of Lent, in consequence of the narrow limits of the places, and the vast multitude of people assembled, a great number of children, not a few of the younger and very many of the older women, besides several young men, suffered so much from the pressure of the crowd, that they were obliged to be carried home; though by the Providence of God, no one is dead. All however murmured, and demanded the use of the great Church. And if the pressure was so great during the days which preceded the feast, what would have been the case during the feast itself? Of course matters would have been far worse. It did not therefore become me to change the people's joy into grief, their cheerfulness into sorrow, and to make the festival a season of lamentation.
And that the more, because I had a precedent in the conduct of our Fathers. For the blessed Alexander, when the other places were too small, and he was engaged in the erection of what was then considered a very large one, the Church of Theonas , held his congregations there on account of the number of the people, while at the same time he proceeded with the building. I have seen the same thing done at Treveri and at Aquileia, in both which places, while the building was proceeding, they assembled there during the feasts, on account of the number of the people and they never found any one to accuse them in this manner. Nay, your brother of blessed memory was present, when a communion was held under these circumstances at Aquileia. I also followed this course. There was no dedication, but only a service of prayer. You, at least I am sure, as a lover of God will approve of the people's zeal, and will pardon me for being unwilling to hinder the prayers of so great a multitude.
16. Better to pray together than separately.
But here again I would ask my accuser, where was it right that the people should pray? In the deserts, or in a place which was in course of building for the purpose of prayer? Where was it becoming and pious that the people should answer, Amen ? In the deserts, or in what was already called the Lord's house? Where would you, most religious Prince, have wished your people to stretch forth their hands, and to pray for you? Where Greeks, as they passed by, might stop and listen, or in a place named after yourself, which all men have long called the Lord's house, even since the foundations of it were laid? I am sure that you prefer your own place; for you smile, and that tells me so. 'But,' says the accuser, 'it ought to have been in the Churches. They were all, as I said before, too small and confined to admit the multitude. Then again, in which way was it most becoming that their prayers should be made? Should they meet together in parts and separate companies, with danger from the crowded state of the congregation? Or, when there was now a place that would contain them all, should they assemble in it, and speak as with one and the same voice in perfect harmony? This was the better course, for this showed the unanimity of the multitude: in this way God will readily hear prayer. For if, according to the promise of our Saviour Himself Matthew 18:19, where two shall agree together as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them, how shall it be when so great an assembly of people with one voice utter their Amen to God? Who indeed was there that did not marvel at the sight? Who but pronounced you happy when they saw so great a multitude met together in one place? How did the people themselves rejoice to see each other, having been accustomed heretofore to assemble in separate places! The circumstance was a source of pleasure to all; of vexation to the calumniator alone.
17. Better to pray in a building than in the desert.
Now then, I would also meet the other and only remaining objection of my accuser. He says, the building was not completed, and prayer ought not to have been made there. But the Lord said, 'But you, when you pray, enter into your closet, and shut the door Matthew 6:6.' What then will the accuser answer? Or rather what will all prudent and true Christians say? Let your Majesty ask the opinion of such: for it is written of the other, 'The foolish person will speak foolishness ;' but of these, 'Ask counsel of all that are wise Tobit 4:18.' When the Churches were too small, and the people so numerous as they were, and desirous to go forth into the deserts, what ought I to have done? The desert has no doors, and all who choose may pass through it, but the Lord's house is enclosed with walls and doors, and marks the difference between the pious and the profane. Will not every wise person then, as well as your Piety, Sire, give the preference to the latter place? For they know that here prayer is lawfully offered, while a suspicion of irregularity attaches to it there. Unless indeed no place proper for it existed, and the worshippers dwelt only in the desert, as was the case with Israel; although after the tabernacle was built, they also had thenceforth a place set apart for prayer. O Christ, Lord and true King of kings, Only-begotten Son of God, Word and Wisdom of the Father, I am accused because the people prayed Your gracious favour, and through You besought Your Father, who is God over all, to save Your servant, the most religious Constantius. But thanks be to Your goodness, that it is for this that I am blamed, and for the keeping of Your laws. Heavier had been the blame, and more true had been the charge, had we passed by the place which the Emperor was building, and gone forth into the desert to pray. How would the accuser then have vented his folly! With what apparent reason would he have said, 'He despised the place which you are building; he does not approve of your undertaking; he passed it by in derision; he pointed to the desert to supply the want of room; he prevented the people when they wished to offer up their prayers.' This is what he wished to say, and sought an occasion of saying it; and finding none he is vexed, and so immediately invents a charge against me. Had he been able to say this, he would have confounded me with shame; as now he injures me, copying the accuser's ways, and watching for an occasion against those that pray. Thus has he perverted to a wicked purpose his knowledge of Daniel's Daniel 6:11 history. But he has been deceived; for he ignorantly imagined, that Babylonian practices were in fashion with you, and knew not that you are a friend of the blessed Daniel, and worship the same God, and do not forbid, but wish all men to pray, knowing that the prayer of all is, that you may continue to reign in perpetual peace and safety.
18. Prayers first do not interfere with dedication afterwards.
This is what I have to complain of on the part of my accuser. But may you, most religious Augustus, live through the course of many years to come, and celebrate the dedication of the Church. Surely the prayers which have been offered for your safety by all men, are no hindrance to this celebration. Let these unlearned persons cease such misrepresentations, but let them learn from the example of the Fathers; and let them read the Scriptures. Or rather let them learn of you, who are so well instructed in such histories, how that Joshua the son of Josedek the priest, and his brethren, and Zorobabel the wise, the son of Salathiel, and Ezra the priest and scribe of the law, when the temple was in course of building after the captivity, the feast of tabernacles being at hand (which was a great feast and time of assembly and prayer in Israel), gathered the people together with one accord in the great court within the first gate, which is toward the East, and prepared the altar to God, and there offered their gifts, and kept the feast. And so afterwards they brought hither their sacrifices, on the sabbaths and the new moons, and the people offered up their prayers. And yet the Scripture says expressly, that when these things were done, the temple of God was not yet built; but rather while they thus prayed, the building of the house was advancing. So that neither were their prayers deferred in expectation of the dedication, nor was the dedication prevented by the assemblies held for the sake of prayer. But the people thus continued to pray; and when the house was entirely finished, they celebrated the dedication, and brought their gifts for that purpose, and all kept the feast for the completion of the work. And thus also have the blessed Alexander, and the other Fathers done. They continued to assemble their people, and when they had completed the work they gave thanks unto the Lord, and celebrated the dedication. This also it befits you to do, O Prince, most careful in your inquiries. The place is ready, having been already sanctified by the prayers which have been offered in it, and requires only the presence of your Piety. This only is wanting to its perfect beauty. Do you then supply this deficiency, and there make your prayers unto the Lord, for whom you have built this house. That you may do so is the prayer of all men.
19. Fourth charge, of having disobeyed an Imperial order.
And now, if it please you, let us consider the remaining accusation, and permit me to answer it likewise. They have dared to charge me with resisting your commands, and refusing to leave my Church. Truly I wonder they are not weary of uttering their calumnies; I however am not yet weary of answering them, I rather rejoice to do so; for the more abundant my defense is, the more entirely must they be condemned. I did not resist the commands of your Piety, God forbid; I am not a man that would resist even the Quæstor of the city, much less so great a Prince. On this matter I need not many words, for the whole city will bear witness for me. Nevertheless, permit me again to relate the circumstances from the beginning; for when you hear them, I am sure you will be astonished at the presumption of my enemies. Montanus, the officer of the Palace , came and brought me a letter, which purported to be an answer to one from me, requesting that I might go into Italy, for the purpose of obtaining a supply of the deficiencies which I thought existed in the condition of our Churches. Now I desire to thank your Piety, which condescended to assent to my request, on the supposition that I had written to you, and has made provision for me to undertake the journey, and to accomplish it without trouble. But here again I am astonished at those who have spoken falsehood in your ears, that they were not afraid, seeing that lying belongs to the Devil, and that liars are alien from Him who says, 'I am the Truth John 14:6.' For I never wrote to you, nor will my accuser be able to find any such letter; and though I ought to have written every day, if I might thereby behold your gracious countenance, yet it would neither have been pious to desert the Churches, nor right to be troublesome to your Piety, especially since you are willing to grant our requests in behalf of the Church, although we are not present to make them. Now may it please you to order me to read what Montanus commanded me to do. This is as follows. ***
20. History of his disobeying it.
Now I ask again, whence have my accusers obtained this letter also? I would learn of them who it was that put it into their hands? Do you cause them to answer. By this you may perceive that they have forged this, as they spread abroad also the former letter, which they published against me, with reference to the ill-named Magnentius. And being convicted in this instance also, on what pretence next will they bring me to make my defense? Their only concern is, to throw everything into disorder and confusion; and for this end I perceive they exercise their zeal. Perhaps they think that by frequent repetition of their charges, they will at last exasperate you against me. But you ought to turn away from such persons, and to hate them; for such as themselves are, such also they imagine those to be who listen to them; and they think that their calumnies will prevail even before you. The accusation of Doeg 1 Samuel 22:9 prevailed of old against the priests of God: but it was the unrighteous Saul, who hearkened unto him. And Jezebel was able to injure the most religious Naboth 1 Kings 21:10 by her false accusations; but then it was the wicked and apostate Ahab who hearkened unto her. But the most holy David, whose example it becomes you to follow, as all pray that you may, favours not such men, but was wont to turn away from them and avoid them, as raging dogs. He says, 'Whoever privily slanders his neighbour, him will I destroy.' For he kept the commandment which says, 'You shall not receive a false report Exodus 23:1.' And false are the reports of these men in your sight. You, like Solomon, have required of the Lord (and you ought to believe yourself to have obtained your desire), that it would seem good unto Him to remove far from you vain and lying words Proverbs 30:8 .
21. Forasmuch then as the letter owed its origin to a false story, and contained no order that I should come to you, I concluded that it was not the wish of your Piety that I should come. For in that you gave me no absolute command, but merely wrote as in answer to a letter from me, requesting that I might be permitted to set in order the things which seemed to be wanting, it was manifest to me (although no one told me this) that the letter which I had received did not express the sentiments of your Clemency. All knew, and I also stated in writing, as Montanus is aware, that I did not refuse to come, but only that I thought it unbecoming to take advantage of the supposition that I had written to you to request this favour, fearing also lest the false accusers should find in this a pretence for saying that I made myself troublesome to your Piety. Nevertheless, I made preparations, as Montanus also knows, in order that, should you condescend to write to me, I might immediately leave home, and readily answer your commands; for I was not so mad as to resist such an order from you. When then in fact your Piety did not write to me, how could I resist a command which I never received? Or how can they say that I refused to obey, when no orders were given me? Is not this again the mere fabrication of enemies, pretending that which never took place? I fear that even now, while I am engaged in this defense of myself, they may allege against me that I am doing that which I have never obtained your permission to do. So easily is my conduct made matter of accusation by them, and so ready are they to vent their calumnies in despite of that Scripture, which says, 'Love not to slander another, lest you be cut off. '
22. Arrivals of Diogenes and of Syrianus.
After a period of six and twenty months, when Montanus had gone away, there came Diogenes the Notary ; but he brought me no letter, nor did we see each other, nor did he charge me with any commands as from you. Moreover when the General Syrianus entered Alexandria , seeing that certain reports were spread abroad by the Arians, who declared that matters would now be as they wished, I enquired whether he had brought any letters on the subject of these statements of theirs. I confess that I asked for letters containing your commands. And when he said that he had brought none, I requested that Syrianus himself, or Maximus the Prefect of Egypt, would write to me concerning this matter. Which request I made, because your Grace has written to me, desiring that I would not suffer myself to be alarmed by any one, nor attend to those who wished to frighten me, but that I would continue to reside in the Churches without fear. It was Palladius, the Master of the Palace, and Asterius, formerly Duke of Armenia, who brought me this letter. Permit me to read a copy of it. It is as follows:
23. A copy of the letter as follows:
Constantius Victor Augustus to Athanasius. It is not unknown to your Prudence, how constantly I prayed that success might attend my late brother Constans in all his undertakings, and your wisdom will easily judge how greatly I was afflicted, when I learned that he had been cut off by the treachery of villains. Now forasmuch as certain persons are endeavouring at this time to alarm you, by setting before your eyes that lamentable tragedy, I have thought good to address to your Reverence this present letter, to exhort you, that, as becomes a Bishop, you would teach the people to conform to the established religion, and, according to your custom, give yourself up to prayer together with them. For this is agreeable to our wishes; and our desire is, that you should at every season be a Bishop in your own place.
And in another hand:— May divine Providence preserve you, beloved Father, many years.
24. Why Athanasius did not obey the Imperial Order.
On the subject of this letter, my opponents conferred with the magistrates. And was it not reasonable that I, having received it, should demand their letters, and refuse to give heed to mere pretences? And were they not acting in direct contradiction to the tenor of your instructions to me, while they failed to show me the commands of your Piety? I therefore, seeing they produced no letters from you, considered it improbable that a mere verbal communication should be made to them, especially as the letter of your Grace had charged me not to give ear to such persons. I acted rightly then, most religious Augustus, that as I had returned to my country under the authority of your letters, so I should only leave it by your command; and might not render myself liable hereafter to a charge of having deserted the Church, but as receiving your order might have a reason for my retiring. This was demanded for me by all my people, who went to Syrianus together with the Presbyters, and the greatest part, to say the least, of the city with them. Maximus, the Prefect of Egypt, was also there: and their request was that either he would send me a declaration of your wishes in writing, or would forbear to disturb the Churches, while the people themselves were sending a deputation to you respecting the matter. When they persisted in their demand, Syrianus at last perceived the reasonableness of it, and consented, protesting by your safety (Hilary was present and witnessed this) that he would put an end to the disturbance, and refer the case to your Piety. The guards of the Duke, as well as those of the Prefect of Egypt, know that this is true; the Prytanis of the city also remembers the words; so that you will perceive that neither I, nor any one else, resisted your commands.
25. The irruption of Syrianus.
All demanded that the letters of your Piety should be exhibited. For although the bare word of a King is of equal weight and authority with his written command, especially if he who reports it, boldly affirms in writing that it has been given him; yet when they neither openly declared that they had received any command, nor, as they were requested to do, gave me assurance of it in writing, but acted altogether as by their own authority; I confess, I say it boldly, I was suspicious of them. For there were many Arians about them, who were their companions at table, and their counsellors; and while they attempted nothing openly, they were preparing to assail me by stratagem and treachery. Nor did they act at all as under the authority of a royal command, but, as their conduct betrayed, at the solicitation of enemies. This made me demand more urgently that they should produce letters from you, seeing that all their undertakings and designs were of a suspicious nature; and because it was unseemly that after I had entered the Church, under the authority of so many letters from you, I should retire from it without such a sanction. When however Syrianus gave his promise, all the people assembled together in the Churches with feelings of joyfulness and security. But three and twenty days after , he burst into the Church with his soldiers, while we were engaged in our usual services, as those who entered in there witnessed; for it was a vigil, preparatory to a communion on the morrow. And such things were done that night as the Arians desired and had beforehand denounced against us. For the General brought them with him; and they were the instigators and advisers of the attack. This is no incredible story of mine, most religious Augustus; for it was not done in secret, but was reported abroad everywhere. When therefore I saw the assault begun, I first exhorted the people to retire, and then withdrew myself after them, God hiding and guiding me, as those who were with me at the time witness. Since then, I have remained by myself, though I have all confidence to answer for my conduct, in the first place before God, and also before your Piety, for that I did not flee and desert my people, but can point to the attack of the General upon us, as a proof of persecution. His proceedings have caused the greatest astonishment among all men; for either he ought not to have made a promise, or not to have broken it after he had made it.
26. How Athanasius acted when this took place.
Now why did they form this plot against me, and treacherously lay an ambush to take me, when it was in their power to enforce the order by a written declaration? The command of an Emperor is wont to give great boldness to those entrusted with it; but their desire to act secretly made the suspicion stronger that they had received no command. And did I require anything so very absurd? Let your Majesty's candour decide. Will not every one say, that such a demand was reasonable for a Bishop to make? You know, for you have read the Scriptures, how great an offense it is for a Bishop to desert his Church, and to neglect the flocks of God. For the absence of the Shepherd gives the wolves an opportunity to attack the sheep. And this was what the Arians and all the other heretics desired, that during my absence they might find an opportunity to entrap the people into impiety. If then I had fled, what defense could I have made before the true Bishops? Or rather before Him Who has committed to me His flock? He it is Who judges the whole earth, the true King of all, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Would not every one have rightly charged me with neglect of my people? Would not your Piety have blamed me, and have justly asked, 'After you had returned under the authority of our letters, why did you withdraw without such authority, and desert your people?' Would not the people themselves at the day of judgment have reasonably imputed to me this neglect of them, and have said, 'He that had the oversight of us fled, and we were neglected, there being no one to put us in mind of our duty.' When they said this, what could I have answered? Such a complaint was made by Ezekiel against the Pastors of old ; and the blessed Apostle Paul, knowing this, has charged every one of us through his disciple, saying, 'Neglect not the gift that is in you, which was given you, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery 1 Timothy 4:14.' Fearing this, I wished not to flee, but to receive your commands, if indeed such was the will of your Piety. But I never obtained what I so reasonably requested, and now I am falsely accused before you; for I resisted no commands of your Piety; nor will I now attempt to return to Alexandria, until your Grace shall desire it. This I say beforehand, lest the slanderers should again make this a pretence for accusing me.
27. Athanasius leaves Alexandria to go to Constantius, but is stopped by the news of the banishment of the Bishops.
Observing these things, I did not give sentence against myself, but hastened to come to your Piety, with this my defense, knowing your goodness, and remembering your faithful promises, and being confident that, as it is written in the divine Proverbs, 'Just speeches are acceptable to a gracious king.' But when I had already entered upon my journey, and had passed through the desert , a report suddenly reached me , which at first I thought to be incredible, but which afterwards proved to be true. It was rumoured everywhere that Liberius, Bishop of Rome, the great Hosius of Spain, Paulinus of Gaul, Dionysius and Eusebius of Italy, Lucifer of Sardinia, and certain other Bishops and Presbyters and Deacons, had been banished because they refused to subscribe to my condemnation. These had been banished: and Vincentius of Capua, Fortunatian of Aquileia, Heremius of Thessalonica, and all the Bishops of the West, were treated with no ordinary force, nay were suffering extreme violence and grievous injuries, until they could be induced to promise that they would not communicate with me. While I was astonished and perplexed at these tidings, behold another report overtook me, respecting them of Egypt and Libya, that nearly ninety Bishops had been under persecution, and that their Churches were given up to the professors of Arianism; that sixteen had been banished, and of the rest, some had fled, and others were constrained to dissemble. For the persecution was said to be so violent in those parts, that at Alexandria, while the brethren were praying during Easter and on the Lord's days in a desert place near the cemetery, the General came upon them with a force of soldiery, more than three thousand in number, with arms, drawn swords, and spears; whereupon outrages, such as might be expected to follow so unprovoked an attack, were committed against women and children, who were doing nothing more than praying to God. It would perhaps be unseasonable to give an account of them now, lest the mere mention of such enormities should move us all to tears. But such was their cruelty, that virgins were stripped, and even the bodies of those who died from the blows they received were not immediately given up for burial, but were cast out to the dogs, until their relatives, with great risk to themselves, came secretly and stole them away, and much effort was necessary, that no one might know it.
28. The news of the intrusion of George.
The rest of their proceedings will perhaps be thought incredible, and will fill all men with astonishment, by reason of their extreme atrocity. It is necessary however to speak of them, in order that your Christian zeal and piety may perceive that their slanders and calumnies against us are framed for no other end, than that they may drive us out of the Churches, and introduce their own impiety in our place. For when the lawful Bishops, men of advanced age, had some of them been banished, and others forced to fly, heathens and catechumens, those who hold the first places in the senate and men who are notorious for their wealth, were straightway commissioned by the Arians to preach the holy faith instead of Christians. And enquiry was no longer made, as the Apostle enjoined, 'if any be blameless Titus 1:8:' but according to the practice of the impious Jeroboam, he who could give most money was named Bishop; and it made no difference to them, even if the man happened to be a heathen, so long as he furnished them with money. Those who had been Bishops from the time of Alexander, monks and ascetics, were banished: and men practised only in calumny corrupted, as far as in them lay, the Apostolic rule, and polluted the Churches. Truly their false accusations against us have gained them much, that they should be able to commit iniquity, and to do such things as these in your time; so that the words of Scripture may be applied to them, 'Woe unto those through whom My name is blasphemed among the Gentiles Romans 2:24.'
29. Athanasius has heard of his own proscription.
Such were the rumours that were reported abroad; and although everything was thus turned upside down, I still did not relinquish my earnest desire of coming to your Piety, but was again setting forward on my journey. And I did so the more eagerly, being confident that these proceedings were contrary to your wishes, and that if your Grace should be informed of what was done, you would prevent it for the time to come. For I could not think that a righteous king could wish Bishops to be banished, and virgins to be stripped, or the Churches to be in any way disturbed. While I thus reasoned and hastened on my journey, behold a third report reached me, to the effect that letters had been written to the Princes of Auxumis, desiring that Frumentius , Bishop of Auxumis, should be brought from thence, and that search should be made for me even as far as the country of the Barbarians, that I might be handed over to the Commentaries (as they are called) of the Prefects, and that all the laity and clergy should be compelled to communicate with the Arian heresy, and that such as would not comply with this order should be put to death. To show that these were not merely idle rumours, but that they were confirmed by facts, since your Grace has given me leave, I produce the letter. My enemies were constantly reading it, and threatening each one with death.
30. A copy of the letter of Constantius against Athanasius.
Victor Constantius Maximus Augustus to the Alexandrians.
Your city, preserving its national character, and remembering the virtue of its founders, has habitually shown itself obedient unto us, as it does at this day; and we on our part should consider ourselves greatly wanting in our duty, did not our good will eclipse even that of Alexander himself. For as it belongs to a temperate mind, to behave itself orderly in all respects, so it is the part of royalty, on account of virtue, permit me to say, such as yours, to embrace you above all others; you, who rose up as the first teachers of wisdom who were the first to acknowledge God; who moreover have chosen for yourselves the most consummate masters; and have cordially acquiesced in our opinion, justly abominating that impostor and cheat, and dutifully uniting yourselves to those venerable men who are beyond all admiration. And yet, who is ignorant, even among those who live in the ends of the earth, what violent party spirit was displayed in the late proceedings? With which we know not anything that has ever happened, worthy to be compared. The majority of the citizens had their eyes blinded, and a man who had come forth from the lowest dens of infamy obtained authority among them, entrapping into falsehood, as under cover of darkness, those who were desirous to know the truth — one who never provided for them any fruitful and edifying discourse, but corrupted their minds with unprofitable subtleties. His flatterers shouted and applauded him; they were astonished at his powers, and they still probably murmur secretly; while the majority of the more simple sort took their cue from them. And thus all went with the stream, as if a flood had broken in, while everything was entirely neglected. One of the multitude was in power — how can I describe him more truly than by saying, that he was superior in nothing to the meanest of the people, and that the only kindness which he showed to the city was, that he did not thrust her citizens down into the pit. This noble-minded and illustrious person did not wait for judgment to proceed against him, but sentenced himself to banishment, as he deserved. So that now it is for the interest of the Barbarians to remove him out of the way, lest he lead some of them into impiety, for he will make his complaint, like distressed characters in a play, to those who first fall in with him. To him however we will now bid a long farewell. For yourselves there are few with whom I can compare you: I am bound rather to honour you separately above all others, for the great virtue and wisdom which your actions, that are celebrated almost through the whole world, proclaim you to possess. Go on in this sober course. I would gladly have repeated to me a description of your conduct in such terms of praise as it deserves; O you who have eclipsed your predecessors in the race of glory, and will be a noble example both to those who are now alive, and to all who shall come after, and alone have chosen for yourselves the most perfect of beings as guide for your conduct, both in word and deed, and hesitated not a moment, but manfully transferred your affections, and gave yourselves up to the other side, leaving those grovelling and earthly teachers, and stretching forth towards heavenly things, under the guidance of the most venerable George , than whom no man is more perfectly instructed therein. Under him you will continue to have a good hope respecting the future life, and will pass your time in this present world, in rest and quietness. Would that all the citizens together would lay hold on his words, as a sacred anchor, so that we might need neither knife nor cautery for those whose souls are diseased! Such persons we most earnestly advise to renounce their zeal in favour of Athanasius, and not even to remember the foolish things which he spoke so plentifully among them. Otherwise they will bring themselves before they are aware into extreme peril, from which we know not any one who will be skilful enough to deliver such factious persons. For while that pestilent fellow Athanasius is driven from place to place, being convicted of the basest crimes, for which he would only suffer the punishment he deserves, if one were to kill him ten times over, it would be inconsistent in us to suffer those flatterers and juggling ministers of his to exult against us; men of such a character as it is a shame even to speak of, respecting whom orders have long ago been given to the magistrates, that they should be put to death. But even now perhaps they shall not die, if they desist from their former offenses, and repent at last. For that most pestilent fellow Athanasius led them on, and corrupted the whole state, and laid his impious and polluted hands upon the most holy things.
31. Letter of Constantius to the Ethiopians against Frumentius.
The following is the letter which was written to the Princes of Auxumis respecting Frumentius, Bishop of that place.
Constantius Victor Maximus Augustus, to Æzanes and Sazanes.
It is altogether a matter of the greatest care and concern to us, to extend the knowledge of the supreme God ; and I think that the whole race of mankind claims from us equal regard in this respect, in order that they may pass their lives in hope, being brought to a proper knowledge of God, and having no differences with each other in their enquiries concerning justice and truth. Wherefore considering that you are deserving of the same provident care as the Romans, and desiring to show equal regard for your welfare, we command that the same doctrine be professed in your Churches as in theirs. Send therefore speedily into Egypt the Bishop Frumentius to the most venerable Bishop George, and the rest who are there, who have special authority to appoint to these offices, and to decide questions concerning them. For of course you know and remember (unless you alone pretend to be ignorant of that which all men are well aware of) that this Frumentius was advanced to his present rank by Athanasius, a man who is guilty of ten thousand crimes; for he has not been able fairly to clear himself of any of the charges brought against him, but was at once deprived of his see, and now wanders about destitute of any fixed abode, and passes from one country to another, as if by this means he could escape his own wickedness. Now if Frumentius shall readily obey our commands, and shall submit to an enquiry into all the circumstances of his appointment, he will show plainly to all men, that he is in no respect opposed to the laws of the Church and the established faith. And being brought to trial, when he shall have given proof of his general good conduct, and submitted an account of his life to those who are to judge of these things, he shall receive his appointment from them, if it shall indeed appear that he has any right to be a Bishop. But if he shall delay and avoid the trial, it will surely be very evident, that he has been induced by the persuasions of the wicked Athanasius, thus to indulge impiety against God, choosing to follow the course of him whose wickedness has been made manifest. And our fear is lest he should pass over into Auxumis and corrupt your people, by setting before them accursed and impious statements, and not only unsettle and disturb the Churches, and blaspheme the supreme God, but also thereby cause utter overthrow and destruction to the several nations whom he visits. But I am sure that Frumentius will return home, perfectly acquainted with all matters that concern the Church, having derived much instruction, which will be of great and general utility, from the conversation of the most venerable George, and such other of the Bishops, as are excellently qualified to communicate such knowledge. May God continually preserve you, most honoured brethren.
32. He defends his Flight.
Hearing, nay almost seeing, these things, through the mournful representations of the messengers, I confess I turned back again into the desert, justly concluding, as your Piety will perceive, that if I was sought after, that I might be sent as soon as I was discovered to the Prefects , I should be prevented from ever coming to your Grace; and that if those who would not subscribe against me, suffered so severely as they did, and the laity who refused to communicate with the Arians were ordered for death, there was no doubt at all but that ten thousand new modes of destruction would be devised by the calumniators against me; and that after my death, they would employ against whomsoever they wished to injure, whatever means they chose, venting their lies against us the more boldly, for that then there would no longer be any one left who could expose them. I fled, not because I feared your Piety (for I know your long-suffering and goodness), but because from what had taken place, I perceived the spirit of my enemies, and considered that they would make use of all possible means to accomplish my destruction, from fear that they would be brought to answer for what they had done contrary to the intentions of your Excellency. For observe, your Grace commanded that the Bishops should be expelled only out of the cities and the province. But these worthy persons presumed to exceed your commands, and banished aged men and Bishops venerable for their years into desert and unfrequented and frightful places, beyond the boundaries of three provinces. Some of them were sent off from Libya to the great Oasis; others from the Thebais to Ammoniaca in Libya. Neither was it from fear of death that I fled; let none of them condemn me as guilty of cowardice; but because it is the injunction of our Saviour that we should flee when we are persecuted, and hide ourselves when we are sought after, and not expose ourselves to certain dangers, nor by appearing before our persecutors inflame still more their rage against us. For to give one's self up to one's enemies to be murdered, is the same thing as to murder one's self; but to flee, as our Saviour has enjoined, is to know our time, and to manifest a real concern for our persecutors, lest if they proceed to the shedding of blood, they become guilty of the transgression of the law, 'Thou shall not kill Exodus 20:13.' And yet these men by their calumnies against me, earnestly wish that I should suffer death. What they have again lately done proves that this is their desire and murderous intention. You will be astonished, I am sure, Augustus, most beloved of God, when you hear it; it is indeed an outrage worthy of amazement. What it is, I pray you briefly to hear.
33. Conduct of the Arians towards the consecrated Virgins.
The Son of God, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, having become man for our sakes, and having destroyed death, and delivered our race from the bondage of corruption , in addition to all His other benefits bestowed this also upon us, that we should possess upon earth, in the state of virginity , a picture of the holiness of Angels. Accordingly such as have attained this virtue, the Catholic Church has been accustomed to call the brides of Christ. And the heathen who see them express their admiration of them as the temples of the Word. For indeed this holy and heavenly profession is nowhere established, but only among us Christians, and it is a very strong argument that with us is to be found the genuine and true religion. Your most religious father Constantine Augustus, of blessed memory, honoured the Virgins above all the rest, and your Piety in several letters has given them the titles of the honourable and holy women. But now these worthy Arians who have slandered me, and by whom conspiracies have been formed against most of the Bishops, having obtained the consent and cooperation of the magistrates, first stripped them, and then caused them to be suspended upon what are called the Hermetaries , and scourged them on the ribs so severely three several times, that not even real malefactors have ever suffered the like. Pilate, to gratify the Jews of old, pierced one of our Saviour's sides with a spear. These men have exceeded the madness of Pilate, for they have scourged not one but both His sides; for the limbs of the Virgins are in a special manner the Saviour's own. All men shudder at hearing the bare recital of deeds like these. These men alone not only did not fear to strip and to scourge those undefiled limbs, which the Virgins had dedicated solely to our Saviour Christ; but, what is worse than all, when they were reproached by every one for such extreme cruelty, instead of manifesting any shame, they pretended that it was commanded by your Piety. So utterly presumptuous are they and full of wicked thoughts and purposes. Such a deed as this was never heard of in past persecutions : or supposing that it ever occurred before, yet surely it was not befitting either that Virginity should suffer such outrage and dishonour, in the time of your Majesty, a Christian, or that these men should impute to your Piety their own cruelty. Such wickedness belongs only to heretics, to blaspheme the Son of God, and to do violence to His holy Virgins.
34. He expostulates with Constantius.
Now when such enormities as these were again perpetrated by the Arians, I surely was not wrong in complying with the direction of Holy Scripture, which says, 'Hide yourself for a little moment, until the wrath of the Lord be overpast.' This was another reason for my withdrawing myself, Augustus, most beloved of God; and I refused not, either to depart into the desert, or, if need were, to be let down from a wall in a basket. 2 Corinthians 11:33 I endured everything, I even dwelt among wild beasts, that your favour might return to me, waiting for an opportunity to offer to you this my defense, confident as I am that they will be condemned, and your goodness manifested unto me. O, Augustus, blessed and most beloved of God, what would you have had me to do? To come to you while my calumniators were inflamed with rage against me, and were seeking to kill me; or, as it is written, to hide myself a little, that in the mean time they might be condemned as heretics, and your goodness might be manifested unto me? Or would you have had me, Sire, to appear before your magistrates, in order that though you had written merely in the way of threatening, they not understanding your intention, but being exasperated against me by the Arians, might kill me on the authority of your letters, and on that ground ascribe the murder to you? It would neither have been becoming in me to surrender, and give myself up that my blood might be shed, nor in you, as a Christian King, to have the murder of Christians, and those too Bishops, imputed unto you.
35. It was therefore better for me to hide myself, and to wait for this opportunity. Yes, I am sure that from your knowledge of the sacred Scriptures you will assent and approve of my conduct in this respect. For you will perceive that, now those who exasperated you against us have been silenced, your righteous clemency is apparent, and it is proved to all men that you never persecuted the Christians at all, but that it was they who made the Churches desolate, that they might sow the seeds of their own impiety everywhere; on account of which I also, had I not fled, should long ago have suffered from their treachery. For it is very evident that they who scrupled not to utter such calumnies against me, before the great Augustus, and who so violently assailed Bishops and Virgins, sought also to compass my death. But thanks be to the Lord who has given you the kingdom. All men are confirmed in their opinion of your goodness, and of their wickedness, from which I fled at the first, that I might now make this appeal unto you, and that you might find some one towards whom you may show kindness. I beseech you, therefore, forasmuch as it written, 'A soft answer turns away wrath,' and 'righteous thoughts are acceptable unto the King ;' receive this my defense, and restore all the Bishops and the rest of the Clergy to their countries and their Churches; so that the wickedness of my accusers may be made manifest, and that you, both now and in the day of judgment, may have boldness to say to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the King of all, 'None of Yours have I lost John 18:9, but these are they who designed the ruin of all, while I was grieved for those who perished, and for the Virgins who were scourged, and for all other things that were committed against the Christians; and I brought back them that were banished, and restored them to their own Churches.'
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| Food Shortages In Six Months – The Globalists Are Telling Us What Happens Next |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-02-2022, 05:30 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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Food Shortages In Six Months – The Globalists Are Telling Us What Happens Next
ZH [emphasis mine] | MAY 01, 2022
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,
In mid 2007 the Bank for International Settlements (The central bank of central banks) released a statement predicting an impending “Great Depression” caused by a credit market implosion. That same year the International Monetary Fund also published warnings of “subprime woes” leading to wider economic strife. I started writing alternative economic analysis only a year earlier in 2006 and I immediately thought it was strange that these massive globalist institutions with far reaching influence on the financial world were suddenly starting to sound a lot like those of us in the liberty movement.
This was 16 years ago, so many people reading this might not even remember, but in 2007 the alternative media had already been warning about an impending deflationary crash in US markets and housing for some time. And, not surprisingly, the mainstream media was always there to deny all of our concerns as “doom mongering” and “conspiracy theory.” Less than a year later the first companies awash in derivatives began to announce they were on the verge of bankruptcy and everything tanked.
The media response? They made two very bizarre claims simultaneously: “No one could have seen it coming” and “We saw this coming a mile away.” Mainstream journalists scrambled to position themselves as the soothsayers of the day as if they said all along that the crash was imminent, yet, there were only a handful of people who actually did call it and none of them were in the MSM. Also ignored was the fact that the BIS and IMF had published their own “predictions” well before the crash; the media pretended as if they did not exist.
In the alternative media we watch the statements and open admissions of the globalists VERY carefully because they are not in the business of threat analysis; rather, they are in the business of threat synthesis. That is to say, if something goes very wrong in the world economically, central bankers and money elites with aspirations of a single centralized economic authority for the world are ALWAYS found to have a hand in that disaster.
For some reason, they like to tell us what they are about to do before they do it.
The idea that globalists artificially create economic collapse events will of course be criticized as “conspiracy theory,” but it is a FACT. For more information on the reality of deliberate financial sabotage and the “order out of chaos” ideology of globalists please read my articles ‘Fed One Meeting Away From Creating A Doomsday Sinkhole’ and ‘What Is The Great Reset And What Do The Globalists Actually Want?’
The Great Reset agenda proposed by WEF head Klaus Schwab is just one example of the many discussions hidden in plain sight by globalists concerning their plans to use economic and social decline as an “opportunity” to quickly establish a new one world system based on socialism and technocracy.
The primary problem with discerning what the globalists are planning is not in uncovering secret agendas – They tend to openly discuss their agendas if you know where to look. No, the problem is in separating the admissions from the disinformation, the lies from the truth. This requires matching up globalist white papers and statements to the facts and evidence at hand in the real world.
Let’s look specifically at the food shortage problem in detail…
Food Shortages In Six Months
A week ago there was a torrent of press releases from global institutions all mentioning the same exact same concern: Food shortages within the next 3 to 6 months. These statements line up very closely with my own estimates, as I have been warning regularly about impending dangers of inflation leading to food rationing and supply chain disruptions.
The IMF, the BIS, World Bank, The UN, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Economic Forum, Bank of America and even Biden himself are all predicting a major food crisis in the near term, and it is not a coincidence that the policies of these very institutions and the actions of puppet politicians that work with them are causing the crisis they are now predicting. That is to say, it’s easy to predict a disaster when you created the disaster.
The claim is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the primary cause, but this is a distraction from the real issue. Yes, sanctions against Russia will eventually lead to less food supply, but the globalists and the media are purposely ignoring the bigger threat, which is currency devaluation and price inflation created by central banks pumping out tens of trillions of dollars in stimulus packages to prop up “too big to fail” corporate partners.
In 2020 alone, the Fed created over $6 trillion from nothing and air dropped it into the economy through covid welfare programs. Add that to the many trillions of dollars that the Fed has printed since the credit crash in 2008 – It has been a nonstop dollar destruction party and now the public is starting to feel the consequences. Lucky for the central bankers that covid struck and Russia invaded Ukraine, because now they can deflect all the blame for the inflationary calamity they have engineered onto the pandemic and onto Putin.
Inflation hit 40 year highs in the US well before Russia invaded Ukraine, but let’s consider the ramifications of that war and how it affects the food supply.
The Russian invasion certainly disrupts Ukrainian grain production, which makes up around 11% of the total world wheat market. Russia also maintains a 17% share and together these two nations feed a large swath of third world nations and parts of Europe with 30% of wheat and barley exports, 19% of corn exports, 23% of canola exports, and 78% of sunflower exports.
It is the sanctions on Russia that are a problem well beyond Ukraine, however, as Russia also produces around 20% of global ammonia and 20% of global potash supplies. These are key ingredients to fertilizers used in large scale industrial farming. Farmers are estimating an overall price spike of around 10% in food markets, but I believe this is very conservative. I am already seeing overall price increases of at least 20% from six months ago, and I expect there to be another 30% in price hikes before this year is over. In other words, we are looking at 50% in average increases in 2022.
Official government inflation data and CPI cannot be trusted. Double whatever numbers they give and you will be much closer to the truth. The inflation rate used by Shadowstats.com, calculated using methods once applied by the US government in the 1980s before they “adjusted” their models to hide the data, supports my position so far.
The expectation among US agricultural experts is that China will fill the void where Russian supplies disappear, but it’s a mistake to make this assumption.
Something Weird Is Going On In China
China’s crackdown on covid infections has reached levels so bizarre I have to ask the question: Are their lockdowns really about covid, or are they hiding something else?
The death rate of covid in China is impossible to calculate accurately because they have never released proper data that can be confirmed. However, almost everywhere else in the world we see a median infection fatality rate of 0.27% for covid; meaning, over 99.7% of people in the world on average have nothing to fear in terms of dying from the virus. But in China, the CCP is acting as if they are dealing with the Black Plague. Why?
Lockdowns have resulted in food shortages across the country as supply chains become strained and manufacturing remains shut in many cases. The story many westerners are not hearing much about, though, is the fact that Chinese exports have essentially been frozen. This is very important so I think it needs emphasis – Over 1 IN 5 container ships IN THE WORLD are now backed up in Chinese ports due to their covid lockdowns. This is incredible.
Why would China do this over a virus we all know is not dangerous to the vast majority of people? Why institute the worst lockdown in the country so far and starve their own people when the majority of Western governments have now given up on their pandemic fear mongering and the forced vaccination agenda?
I would suggest the possibility that China might already be engaging in an economic war that many Americans and Europeans don’t even realize is going on. This may be a beta test for a shut down of exports to the US and Europe, or it is an incremental shutdown that is meant to become permanent. The bottleneck on trade may also be a precursor to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Taiwan is actually more dependent and intertwined with China’s economy than many people know. China is the biggest buyer of Taiwan’s exports and those exports account for 10% of Taiwan’s GDP. Taiwan has hundreds of thousands of workers and businessmen that travel regularly to China to work, another economic factor that is now strained by lockdowns. Furthermore, Taiwan has multiple corporations that operate their factories on mainland China, all of which could be closed due to covid lockdowns.
All I’m saying is, if I was China planning on invading Taiwan in the near future, I might consider using covid as a cover for damaging their economy first and disrupting their export model. Communists see the population as a utility that can be sacrificed if necessary, and China is perfectly willing to cause short term suffering to their people if it means long term gains for the party. Beyond that, if I was going to engage in economic warfare with the west covertly, what better way than to tie up 20% of the world’s cargo ships and disrupt supply chains in the name of protecting the country form a “pandemic?”
The bottom line? Don’t rely on China to fill export needs for fertilizer ingredients or anything else as sanctions on Russia continue.
Inflation vs. Supply vs. Control
It’s not just globalist organizations talking about incoming food shortages; the CEO of international food corporation Goya has also recently warned we are on the precipice of a food crisis. As I have noted in the past, inflation leads to government price controls, price controls lead to lack of production incentives (profits), lack of profits leads to loss of production, loss of production leads to shortages, and shortages lead to government rationing (control over all large food sources).
As we have seen with almost every authoritarian regime in modern history, control over the food supply is key to controlling the population. It is only surpassed as a strategic concern by control over energy (which we will also see shortages of soon as Europe sanctions Russian oil and gas and starts eating up supplies from other exporters). The food issue hits closest to home because we can see the effects immediately on our wallets and on our families. There is nothing worse for many parents than the prospect of their children going hungry.
The mainstream media is once again ignoring any potential economic threat, specifically they are denying the notion of food shortages as something to be worried about. I say, why listen to a group of people that are always wrong on these types of events? If anything, I would at least take the words of the globalists seriously when it comes to economic collapse; they benefit the most from such disasters after all, and they also have the most influence when it comes to triggering crisis.
Preparedness today costs nothing tomorrow. Lack of preparedness today costs EVERYTHING tomorrow. The choice for anyone with a brain is simple – Get prepared for the end of affordable and easily available food before this year is out.
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| The Oath Against Modernism Betrayed by Benedict XVI & JPII [J. Vennari 2005] |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-01-2022, 05:30 AM - Forum: In Defense of Tradition
- Replies (1)
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The Oath Against Modernism Betrayed by Benedict XVI & JPII
from John Vennari's talk given in 2005 with short intro
NB: This channel supports both sedevacantism and Fr. Hewko's apostolate [who is clearly not sedevacantist]. The reposting of videos from this channel is in no way a support for their erroneous sedevacantist stance. Sharing of videos are only to highlight the aspects of Tradition that are brought to the forefront in most of the videos.
In essence, personal opinion is disregarded and only what the Church teaches is highlighted.
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| Rediscovering Archbishop Lefebvre’s Intolerance for Error Before There’s No Tolerance for Truth |
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Posted by: Stone - 04-30-2022, 06:09 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
- No Replies
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Rediscovering Archbishop Lefebvre’s Intolerance for Error Before There’s No Tolerance for Truth
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Robert Morrison | April 22, 2022
Quote:“Nothing is done in the world that does not relate to our Lord; it is either for Him or against Him, with Him or without Him. Our Lord is the key to the solution of all the problems. There are none here below that are indifferent to our Lord. Men try in vain to work without reference to our Lord, but it is impossible because our Lord is everywhere. He created everything; therefore everything is in His hands. Everything belongs to Him, nothing is outside of Him. Men seek to evade Him, but they cannot because everything is His.”
With these words taken from his seminary conferences from the late 1970s (compiled in The Mystery of Jesus), Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre gave Catholics a simple and reliable way to evaluate the problems facing the Church and world. Indeed, we can see that the greatest problems in the Church and world today have resulted from the the guardians of these truths having discarded them, treating them as vestiges of a medieval world which no longer has relevance to our own.
We do not need to be theologians to understand the immense practical importance of the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ is God:
Quote:“To meditate upon the mystery of our Lord Jesus Christ and make it the object of our reflections may seem a little abstract and theoretical. And yet, upon closer examination, it is altogether pertinent and practical. . . For what is in jeopardy in the world in which we live is faith in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. If our Lord is God, He is consequently the Master of all things, the elements, individuals, families and society. He is the Creator and the end of all things.”
If Jesus is not God, then of course the Catholic Faith is nonsense and unworthy of belief. But if He is God, then this fact must be the starting point and constant guide for all else. If He is God, then “He is consequently the Master of all things, the elements, individuals, families and society.”
As guardian of the truths entrusted to it by Christ, the Church has always understood the mission our Lord gave it, even though it appears that the modernists occupying Rome have never heard of the mission:
“Going therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).
The concept is simple: God wants the Church to spread the truths which all people need to save their souls; thus the Church has the responsibility to teach souls that they must “observe all things whatsoever” Christ commanded. Many of the Church’s greatest saints have dedicated their lives to bringing these truths to people who were not initially inclined to welcome them. Others have given their lives to defend these truths. All have lived by them.
As a matter of common sense and historical fact, an essential component of the Church’s mission of faithfully transmitting the truths entrusted to it by Christ is combatting the errors opposed to the Faith. Because Jesus Christ is Truth, His Church cannot reconcile itself with errors that oppose truth. However, as Archbishop Lefebvre knew so well, Vatican II attempted to convince the world that the Church had made peace with errors opposed to Catholic truth:
Quote:“Because of religious liberty, which was affirmed in the texts of the Second Vatican Council and which is entirely opposed to the social reign of our Lord Jesus Christ because it places all religions on a par and accords to error the same rights as truth has, our Lord is no longer considered to be the one Truth and source of Truth.”
The progressives insisted that the Church could no longer be intolerant of error because such a position was inconsistent both with “human dignity” and the efforts to reunite all Christians through ecumenical outreach. Fr. Dominique Bourmaud wrote of the Vatican II battle on this issue in his One Hundred Years of Modernism:
Quote:“Religious liberty, treated in the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, was the object of heated debate even before the opening of the Council. Cardinal Ottaviani, bulldog of the Faith, defended the freedom of the Catholic religion, which in certain circumstances may lead to the toleration of error. Cardinal Bea, on the contrary, spoke of the freedom of religions and granted freedom in principle to all faiths, as exercised in public as well as in private. Such a theory amounted to granting rights to error and vice, according to the American dream of Fr. John Courtney Murray, condemned by the Holy Office prior to his victory at the Council.”
As Fr. Bourmaud observed, the future John Paul II fought in favor of granting rights to anti-Catholic error:
Quote:“The absurd character of such a ‘right' is flagrant in the intervention of Archbishop Wojtyla: ‘It is necessary to accept the danger of error. One cannot embrace the truth without having a certain experience of error. It is therefore necessary to speak of the right to seek error and to err. I call out for liberty for the conquest of the truth.’”
It is stunning that progressives such as the future John Paul II were able to make such ludicrous statements at the Council with a straight face. And yet they did, and now the world (erroneously) thinks the Church accepts “the danger of error.” Even worse, because John Paul II believed that souls needed to have “a certain experience of error,” millions of Catholics have had a “certain experience” of losing their Faith; God knows how many of the false shepherd’s sheep now have a “certain experience" of hell.
Simply surveying the errors that proliferated throughout the Church since Vatican II, we can identify great harms that have resulted from “granting rights” to error:
- Many Catholics now believe the errors that the pre-Vatican II popes vigorously opposed.
- Accordingly, many Catholics believe that truth can change to become something that contradicts what it once was.
- Many others have concluded that any institution that teaches such nonsense must not be a truth-teller and they have therefore left the Church.
- Throughout the world, this state of contradiction has seriously impaired the Church’s moral authority and ability to fulfill its God-given mission.
- And now we find ourselves in a situation in which the Church apparently supports the anti-Catholic errors of the Great Reset.
In reality, the actual Church can never teach these errors, but thanks to men like John Paul II most people in the world now think otherwise.
Given such a grave situation, it is worth recalling Archbishop Lefebvre’s healthy intolerance for error:
Quote:“Make no mistake. It is completely erroneous to think that if someone thinks otherwise than I do, if he has another religion than mine, he is free to do so. No, he is not free, and we must tell him, however sorry we may be, that he is wrong, that he is not in possession of the truth. One day you will be judged on your thoughts, your behavior, and your attitude: you had better convert. And this holds, not only for ideas, but also for morals, for everything.”
Francis and his collaborators would presumably blast this attitude as hateful and destructive but the archbishop’s intolerance for error was the logical consequence of his great love for God and souls. As Archbishop Lefebvre saw it, we should tolerate error that cannot be changed, but we must always do all we can to spread the unadulterated truth, which honors God and saves souls:
“Yes, we seem to be intolerant! Let’s be clear: We tolerate error that cannot be suppressed, but truth cannot tolerate error. By its very nature, the truth casts out error as the light dispels darkness. We cannot help it. Truth does not tolerate error; good does not tolerate vice. This does not mean, in practice, that one does not tolerate what is impossible to change, or what cannot be converted. But we should strive to bring an end to darkness, and to eliminate vice and error. And this is done by converting people by the grace of God.”
Despite the lies of the progressives, the notion that “error has no rights” never meant that the Catholic Church (as distinct from individual Catholics) taught that “people who are in error” have no rights — at most it led to the practical step of forbidding the public profession of anti-Catholic errors in Catholic societies. This is simply a logical extension of the idea that we must do all we can to promote the salvific truths of the Faith without which souls will be condemned. Those who are ultimately damned will have little gratitude for those who encouraged them to persist in their anti-Catholic errors.
Moreover, the failure of individuals and societies to acknowledge a particular truth does not render such truth any less true or important. Those who wish to “liberate themselves” from truth and its implications will face consequences that grow more dire in proportion to the importance of the truth in question; and no truths can be more important than those relating to our Lord and what He expects of us:
Quote:“This idea of liberty — which is really licentiousness and not true liberty — which is to be given to all the ideologies results in slow self-destruction and in the corruption of truth. And this truth is in fact our Lord Jesus Christ. Either one acknowledges it or not. If one refuses to acknowledge that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Truth, by the very fact there is no more law and no more morality. Everything gives way little by little. Of course, it takes time. Christian civilization cannot be destroyed in the course of just a few years. But once the principle of liberty is granted, then slowly but surely the corruption advances.”
One might have argued against Archbishop Lefebvre’s prognosis a few decades ago but it is now painfully obvious that he was correct. We see this collapse today, both within the Church and throughout society.
Perhaps worst of all, it is now apparent that we quickly approach a point at which error will have such sway over society that truth will not be tolerated. Is this not what we see in the Church when Francis rails against rigid Catholics?
Even the preparatory document for Francis’s Synod on Synodality explicitly rejects those Catholics who promote “religious rigor” and “moral injunction.” Tragically, the spirit of the Synod is one that Archbishop Lefebvre recognized in Protestants, although the promoters of the Synod have even less respect for actual Catholics:
Quote:“For the Protestants, liberty is first: everyone does and thinks what he likes. Having fought against the Catholics and having tried to suppress Catholicism, they know very well that Catholics hold that they possess the truth. Jesus Christ whom we possess in the Catholic Church is the Truth. There is no other. This is what the Protestants cannot bear, knowing quite well that that is indeed what Catholics believe. . . [T]hey are afraid, for they know that we are intolerant. ‘You are intolerant,’ they accuse us.”
This liberty of thought now espoused by Francis and his collaborators is of course anti-Catholic and therefore repugnant to God, so who benefits from it? It is mere coincidence that Francis’s Synod on Synodality offends God but pleases Satan and the globalists?
While we still have time, we must reclaim the Catholic fidelity to truth that excludes the acceptance of error. It is not enough to beg the “Catholic” modernists in Rome to grant truth just a little more rights, or to allow God’s Church to have just a little more prominence than the false religions. No, as Archbishop Lefebvre wrote, we must insist on the reign of Christ the King in our own lives, in the Church, and, insofar as possible, throughout society:
Quote:“The only remedy is to reflect, meditate, and be convinced of the necessity of the social reign of our Lord Jesus Christ, of His reign over us not only as persons, but also in society[emphasis - The Catacombs]. Be assured that if you tell yourself that you want to live according to the law and the morality that our Lord taught us, and by His grace, love and sacraments, but that out in the world you must accept the freedom of morals and free-thinking, then sooner or later you will be contaminated. The mere fact of conceding that it is a human right to be able to think whatever you like, as is done in the declaration on religious liberty, leads to the abandonment of the missionary spirit.”
Ultimately God’s truth will triumph over the errors we see today, but we need to seriously consider that He may not intervene to spare us the hellish consequences of our failure to reject the errors opposed to His reign. Now is the time to rediscover Archbishop Lefebvre’s intolerance for error before there is no tolerance for truth, or for those who love it. May the Blessed Virgin Mary, destroyer of all heresies, help us resist all those who seek to attack our immutable Catholic Faith!
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in praelio![/b]
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