Today is also the optional memorial of Saints Peter and Marcellinus, martyrs of the last great Roman persecution.

Marcellinus was a priest, and Peter an exorcist, both of the clergy of Rome, and eminent for their zeal and piety. In the persecution of Dioclesian, about the year 304, they were condemned to die for their faith.

You’ll find the rest of their story at EWTN.

UPDATE: Jeff Ziegler of the Ziegler A List also provides this link:
— The Catacomb of SS. Marcellinus and Peter.

The emperor Marcus Aurelius was a disciplined and ascetic man, moderate in all things. He is counted the last of the “five good emperors” and usually anthologized with the great Stoic philosophers. His “meditations” sometimes seem almost Christian: “Take pleasure in one thing and rest in it, in passing from one act to another, thinking of God.” Yet his “God” was most certainly not the God of Christians and Jews. The deity, for Marcus, was more an impersonal principle that pervaded the universe, probably unconcerned with human events, like the Force in “Star Wars.” Marcus found Christianity distasteful, rife as it was with prayer of supplication, talk of divine Love, and unseemly zeal for martyrdom. This Oriental cult was hardly the stuff of good Roman Stoics.

But, again, Marcus was a moderate man, and so he didn’t initiate any new persecutions against the Christians. What he did instead was to ease up the restrictions on informers, making it more expedient for people to denounce their neighbors and rivals as Christians: no longer need they fear of counter-suits or consequences if their accusations didn’t hold up. So it became open hunting season.

In the year 177, the nobles of provincial Gaul — who customarily funded public entertainment for the local rabble — decided to take advantage of the situation. Rather than paying serious money for gladiators, they’d round up Christians and pit the poor saps against wild beasts and trained soldiers in the ring. It would be great fun, and at a low, low price. The local yokels liked the idea and lent their labors to the anti-Christian cause, forming mobs as needed.

These circumstances have left us with some of the most stirring examples of heroism we possess from the early Church. Perhaps the finest are in the Acts of the Martyrs of Vienna and Lyons. Today, June 2, is the memorial of those great saints. The most prominent Christian to go in that purge was Bishop Pothinus of Lyons. Here’s the account from a letter sent by the churches of Vienna and Lyons to the churches of Asia and Phrygia:

Now the blessed Pothinus, who had been entrusted with the bishopric of Lyons, was dragged before the judgment-seat. He was over ninety years of age and very infirm. Though he breathed with difficulty on account of the feebleness of the body, yet he was strengthened by spiritual zeal through his earnest desire to bear his testimony. His body, indeed, was already worn out by old age and disease, yet his life was preserved that Christ might triumph through him. When he was brought by the soldiers to the judgment-seat, accompanied by the civil magistrates and a multitude who shouted against him in every manner, as if he himself were the Christ, he gave the good testimony. When the governor asked who was the God of the Christians, he said, “If thou art worthy, thou shalt know.” Then he was unmercifully dragged away and endured many blows. Those near him struck him with their hands and feet, showing no respect for his age. Those at a distance hurled against him whatever they could seize. All of them thought they would sin greatly if they omitted any abuse in their insulting treatment of him. For they thought that in this way they would avenge their gods. And Pothinus, breathing with difficulty, was cast into prison, and died two days later.

Tradition tells us that Pothinus was the man who had invited the great St. Irenaeus to be a priest of Lyons. He may have been the one who ordained him. Irenaeus would soon succeed the old man in the office of bishop.

By far the most famous of the martyrs we celebrate today was a young girl named Blandina, a Christian slave who belonged to a Christian family. Blandina was frail in appearance, but she proved to be hardy in spirit, persevering in faith through days of torture. The eyewitness accounts were recorded and treasured in the early Church. The modern critical scholar Herbert Musurillo, S.J., places a high value on their historical content. The ancient acts are well summarized in the old Catholic Encyclopedia:

Her companions greatly feared that on account of her bodily frailty she might not remain steadfast under torture. But although the legate caused her to be tortured in a horrible manner, so that even the executioners became exhausted “as they did not know what more they could do to her”, still she remained faithful and repeated to every question “I am a Christian and we commit no wrongdoing.” … Blandina was … bound to a stake and wild beasts were set on her. They did not, however touch her. After this for a number of days she was led into the arena to see the sufferings of her companions. Finally, as the last of the martyrs, she was scourged, placed on a red-hot grate, enclosed in a net and thrown before a wild steer who tossed her into the air with his horns, and at last killed with a dagger.

The blood of the martyrs is seed, said Tertullian. It is the seed of succeeding generations, including our own. We are privileged to be the offspring of the young virgin-martyr Blandina and the wise old Bishop Pothinus. They continue to give us good example, and they intercede for us before the throne of almighty God. So make the most of their day.

It’s a pity I can’t send you to buy Herbert Musurillo’s anthology The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Unfortunately, it’s out of print; and used copies are frightfully expensive. But it’s in most good libraries, so read it if you can lay hands on it.

And I beg and implore you to read In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity by Robin Darling Young. Read it at least twice. It will blow your mind.

The Vatican Museums house many art treasures — and also simple material artifacts — of Christian antiquity. When I’m old, I hope to have an occasion to take the galleries at a leisurely pace. When I’m on a tight schedule, the exhibits can just overwhelm me: one sarcophagus after another, inscriptions aplenty, row upon row of bald and bearded marble busts, cases stocked with small but exquisite household items … And time’s winged chariot beating near. Still, I wouldn’t trade a minute I’ve spent there for a day in my favorite stateside galleries.

The Museums are marking their 500th birthday this week, and Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the occasion with a special audience. The Vatican’s holdings “are not simply impressive monuments of a distant past,” he said, but represent the Church’s unwavering faith in the beauty of God. According to a Catholic News Service report, the pope

said that … the artistic treasures housed there “stand as a perennial witness to the Church’s unchanging faith in the triune God,” who, according to St. Augustine, is “beauty ever ancient, ever new” …

“In every age Christians have sought to give expression to faith’s vision of the beauty and order of God’s creation, the nobility of our vocation as men and women made in his image and likeness, and the promise of a cosmos redeemed and transfigured by the grace of Christ.”

Get the rest of the story at CNS.

If you think you might be interested in touring the Vatican Museums with me and my colleagues at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, do let me know. With my friends Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Rob Corzine, and others, I’ll be making a pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi in May of 2007. We’ll have guided tours, classes and talks, daily liturgy, and lots of good meals and conversation. Scott’s Roman classes and tours are moments you’ll never forget. Again, if this interests you, drop me a note with your contact information, and I’ll get back to you as soon as the ink is dry on our reservations.

Well, it’s old text really, and it’s really old, but you know what I mean.

Kevin at Biblicalia has now posted chapters 16-19 of his fresh translation of First Clement.

And Maria Lectrix tells us that she’s fixed the bum links on her free audio books of the Fathers.

At the beginning of the 100s, the Church was still just emerging in the Roman world, and Christianity was often the subject of wild rumors in the Roman world: Christians were ritual murderers who consumed the flesh of infants; they were treasonous rebels; they practiced terrible perversions in their closed-door sessions on Sundays. Some of these rumors inflamed magistrates and mobs, with fatal consequences for the Church. From Athens to Rome, the local authorities were hardly inclined to show sympathy or mercy to members of an upstart foreign cult.

In this time of calumny and confusion, a movement of Christian teachers arose to set the record straight. They are known as the “apologists.” Perhaps the greatest of their first generation was St. Justin, who was born about the year 100 and whose memorial the Church marks today.

The apologists set out to give reasoned explanations of Christian doctrines. (An “apology” in this sense is not the admission of a fault, but a speech or writing that defends some idea.) They were not so much preachers as debaters. Amid a hostile and confused culture, they methodically explained and defended all that Christians really believed.

Justin was well prepared for this task. As a young man, a pagan of Samaria, he was an intense seeker looking for wisdom in all the usual places in the ancient world — among the Stoics, Pythagoreans, Peripatetics, and Platonists. He studied philosophy, rhetoric, history, and poetry. And he pushed his inquiries to ultimate questions, to first principles, but no master in any of the philosophy schools was able to satisfy him. (Justin abandoned one philosopher who demanded cash in advance from his disciples, and another who insisted that his students must master music, astronomy, and geometry before approaching divine matters.)

One day Justin was walking along a beach, where he met an old man. Soon the two were deep in a discussion of the ultimate questions. Justin identified himself as a philosopher.

“Does philosophy, then, make happiness?” asked the old man.

“Surely,” said Justin, “and only philosophy.”

“What, then, is philosophy?” the man asked. “And what is happiness?”

“Philosophy,” replied Justin, “is the knowledge of what really exists, and a clear perception of the truth; and happiness is the reward of such knowledge and wisdom.”

“But what do you call God?” said the old man.

From there, the old man led Justin to see that, if he sincerely sought truth and sought the God who really exists, he needed to consult the prophets of ancient Israel. “They alone,” said the mysterious stranger, “both saw and announced the truth…not influenced by a desire for glory, but filled with the Holy Spirit. Their writings still exist, and whoever reads them gains much in his knowledge of…all a philosopher ought to know.”

Justin went off at once to find these books, and on reading he found much more: “Immediately a flame was kindled in my soul; and I was possessed by a love of the prophets, and of those who are friends of Christ … I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.” Tradition says he was baptized in Ephesus.

Studying Christian doctrine, he discovered that much of what he had learned about Christianity from the pagans was utterly false. He was further distressed that these rumor campaigns were leading to the persecution of Christians. So he dedicated himself to the refutation of these errors, explaining and defending his adopted faith before pagans and Jews. Two of his “apologies” are addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius and the Roman Senate. A third apologetic work — directed toward Jews — he cast in the form of a dialogue with a rabbi named Trypho.

St. Justin still identified himself as a philosopher, and he still wore the traditional philosopher’s cloak. He saw everything that was good and true in pagan philosophy as a glimpse of the truth and goodness of God revealed in Jesus Christ. “Whatever things were rightly said among all men,” Justin wrote, “are the property of us Christians.”

Eventually St. Justin traveled to Rome, where he established a school of Christian philosophy. A Christian couldn’t make such a public spectacle of himself and get away with it. In about the year 165, he was charged with impiety toward the gods and, with six companions, was scourged and beheaded. Thus he earned the title by which the Church has always known him: St. Justin Martyr.

St. Justin’s First Apology gives us one of the clearest descriptions we have of what the Mass was like in the early and middle 100s, a little more than a century after Christ’s resurrection. As you’ll see, it looks very familiar. Already, the Mass looked very much like the Mass we know today. (In fact, Justin’s description has been incorporated verbatim into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, numbers 1345 and 1355.)

On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we said before, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succors the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need.

Already we can see that Sunday celebrations were very much like our liturgy today. The congregation heard readings from the Gospels and the Prophets, and then there was a sermon. Then they celebrated the Eucharist. There was an offering for the poor. A modern Catholic who suddenly fell back through time to the year 150 or so would know exactly what was going on in church on Sunday.

St. Justin appears as a character in two page-turner novels published in the last five years, Junia and Marcus. Both are by Father Michael Giesler, and both are far more exciting than The Da Vinci Code. At half the price of that monstrosity, you get nail-biting suspense, characters you actually care about, and historical accuracy to boot.

UPDATE: Jeff Ziegler of the Ziegler A List provides these links:
— Justin in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
— Justin’s Apologies.
— Dialogue with Trypho.

St. Athanasius on today’s Marian feast, the Visitation:

[Mary] greets Elizabeth: the Mother of the Master greets [the mother] of the servant; the Mother of the king greets the mother of the soldier; the Mother of God greets the mother of the man; the Virgin greets the married woman. She greets Elizabeth with an outward greeting, and when the two greet each other in a visible manner, the Holy Spirit, who dwelt in Mary’s womb, incites him who is in Elizabeth’s womb, as one who urges on his friend, “Hurry, get up!”

A great and timely Holy Spirit connection. The great Father goes on to praise Mary in so many of the terms we use today: the New Eve, the Ark of the Covenant, Queen of Angels, and Blessed Virgin. I could quote pages. But you really should read the book — Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought by Luigi Gambero.

St. Augustine (via Father John Zuhlsdorf) helps us to prepare for Pentecost.

For Augustine, the search and contemplation of the Trinity conforms us to the image of God by thinking of him and loving him. For Augustine, there are stages of this search and conversion

1) credere Deo … to believe by means of God
2) credere Deum … to believe God
3) credere in Deum … to believe in God
4) credendo in Deum ire … to go on by believing in God

Augustine was deeply, passionately, fiercely interested in love. Often and appropriately he is depicted with a burning heart. For Augustine, belief and love were intertwined. He described love as a gravitational force pulling us to where we by nature belong. Some people think the old man was a terrible pessimist about the human condition, especially as he got older, was worn down by constant theological battles and pastoral burdens and deteriorating health. If he saw the negative side of the human condition, he knew with absolute conviction that love was its solution. This conviction grew as the years passed. The great Augustinian scholar A.-M. La Bonnardiere found that between 387-429, Augustine (+430) quoted Romans 5:5 at least 201 times. Augustine rarely used Romans 5:5 before 411 (the year Rome was sacked by Alaric). Romans 5:5 is found more frequently between 411-421 when he was fighting with Pelagians about grace. Many references continue from 421 until his death while he was engaged in his bitter fight with the bête noir of his old age Julian of Eclanum.

Read the rest.

Biblicalia has posted chapters 7-15 of St. Clement of Rome’s First Letter to the Corinthians. And the critics smirk at stories of the rapid translation of the Septuagint. Imagine seventy Kevins working full-time at the project.

Rod Bennett’s always onto something big, so you should be reading Tremendous Trifles, his blog, every day. And if you haven’t read his book on the early Fathers, Four Witnesses, you should. If you have read it, you should read it again. The book’s remarkable — a novelistic treatment, almost cinematic in the way it unfolds the lives of Clement, Ignatius, Justin, and Irenaeus. Yet it’s always utterly faithful to the historical record. Rod uses the words of the Fathers themselves rather than imagined dialogue. Today Rod posted some moving thoughts on the Fathers’ role in Christian unity. Here’s a snippet that you can take to your prayer:

… the Church Fathers are going to save Christianity one more time in the years to come. Already Evangelical journals like Christianity Today have started directing their readers to the Fathers on a regular basis and IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture is finding its way into Protestant parsonages everywhere. Nothing — I repeat nothing — could possibly do more to rebuild the lost unity of Christendom than for all Christians everywhere to start rediscovering (and putting into practice) the towering primitive oneness of early Christian doctrine preserved in the pages of the Fathers!

Wow — audio books of the Fathers — absolutely free! Holy iPod, Batman! Get your Batmobile to the blog of Maria Lectrix.

Next time you find yourself trapped indoors on a rainy day with nothing else to do, ease into your chair and explore the multicultural links of the North American Patristics Society. You can get lost in those glorious corridors — Greek and Latin, Coptic and Armenian, Syriac and Georgian and Ethiopic — and you won’t want to be found.

Close upon the heels of its excellent review of the Gospel of Judas, The New Yorker has published a hilarious review of The Da Vinci Code movie. It’s by Anthony Lane, who admits that he has recited the Nicene Creed throughout his adult life. He has an excellent grasp of history, to match his virtuoso command of the language. Lane compares Ron Howard’s rendering of the Council of Nicea to a Beastie Boys concert. Can The New Yorker really be emerging as a useful source of Christian apologetics? (Ssshhh. Don’t let the editors find out.) Hat tip: JPN.

Eric at The Daily Eudemon cites Gabriel Bunge’s The Practice of Personal Prayer, According to the Patristic Tradition as an authority in the recent liturgical-posture controversies. I haven’t read the book, though it’s been highly recommended by folks I respect — and now I add The Daily Eudemon to that list.