Year: 2008

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Jordan Backlash

Thanks to David Meadows for bringing our attention to the first broadside against the recent discovery in Jordan. My favorite line from his post: “it’s interesting that the ThaiIndian piece originated at National Geographic … an organization which, of course, NEVER sensationalizes any discoveries and certainly has no archaeologists-in-residence who regularly do such.” Anybody remember the Gospel of Judas?

Critics dub worlds oldest church discovery ridiculous

Washington, June 14 (ANI): The recent discovery of the world’s first Christian church by a Jordanian archaeologist has been dismissed by critics as ridiculous.

A team of archaeologists in Jordan led by Abdel-Qader al-Housan, director of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies had announced the discovery of the worlds oldest church dating from 33 AD to 70 AD.

The church was found underneath the ancient Saint Georgeous Church, which itself dates back to 230 AD, in Rihab, northern Jordan near the Syrian border.

Al-Housan also said that the cave showed evidence of early Christian rituals.

However, Ghazi Bisheh, former director general of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities dubbed the claims as “ridiculous,” saying the archaeologist behind them “has a tendency to sensationalize discoveries” and offered no evidence to back his recent assertion.

The team had found a mosaic in church that described these Christians as “the 70 beloved by God and Divine”.

According to Al-Housan it referred to 70 disciples who fled Roman persecution in Jerusalem during the first century A.D., after the death of Jesus Christ.

But Bisheh says the identity of the disciples mentioned in the mosaic is not clear.

The experts widely believe that organized churches didn’t exist until at least the third century A.D.

After the death of Jesus Christ, Christian worship used to be in homes and other domestic buildings or, less commonly, by rivers outside city walls during the first century A.D. The organized churches did not emerge until the Byzantine period, in the fifth century A.D.

“It sounds rather anachronistic,” National Geographic quoted Biblical scholar Stephen Pfann, president of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, as saying.

He said that during the first century, the term “church” or “ekklesia” was used for the assembled body of believers and not the building or catacombs where they were assembling.

“If they are talking about a cave, it could have been a hiding place. In timeif there were martyrs there or something significant that took place there or a well-known individual who was among the disciples of Jesusthen you would have had reason to commemorate the site, which could later be used by the church’s monks, he said.

“But the cave that’s there is one that doesn’t necessarily commemorate anything I don’t know how you can take an underground cave and say it could present itself as a first-century church,” he added.

“The experts widely believe that organized churches didn’t exist until at least the third century A.D … The organized churches did not emerge until the Byzantine period, in the fifth century A.D.”

Well, which is it — the third or the fifth? In any event, the statement is a gross over-simplification.

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Getting His Irish Up

What a pope! He’s moved on to St. Columban (or Columbanus, not to be confused with Columba, his near contemporary, or Columbus, which is in Ohio).

And Teresa Benedetta translated:

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today, I wish to speak about the sainted abbot Columban, the most famous Irishman of the Middle Ages. With good reason, he may be called a ‘European’ saint, because as monk, missionary and writer, he worked in different countries of western Europe.

Together with the Irish of this time, he was aware of the cultural unity of Europe. In a letter of his written around 600 to Pope Gregory the Great, one finds for the first time the expression ‘totius Europae – of all Europe – referring to the presence of the Church on the continent (cfr Epistula I,1).

Columban was born around 545 in the province of Leinster, southeast Ireland. Educated in his own home by the best teachers, who started him on liberal arts studies, he was later entrusted to the guidance of Abbot Sinell of the Cluain-Inis community in northern Ireland, where he was able to deepen his studies of Sacred Scriptures.

At almost twenty years of age, he entered Bangor monastery in the northeastern part of the island, under Abbot Comgall, a monk famous for his virtue and rigorous asceticism.

In full harmony with his abbot, Columban zealously practised the severe discipline of the monastery, leading a life of prayer, asceticism, and study. He was ordained a priest there.

The life in Bangor and the example of the abbot influenced the concept of monasticism that Columban matured with time and spread in the course of his life.

When he was almost 50, following the typically Irish ascetic ideal of ‘peregrinatio pro Christo’ – to be a pilgrim for Christ – Columban left Ireland with 12 companions to undertake missionary work on the European continent.

We should remeember that at that time, migrations of peoples from the north and the east had caused entire Christianized regions to fall back into paganism.

Around 590, this small missionary team landed on the Breton coast [western France]. Welcomed benevolently by the King of the Franks of Austrasia [present-day France], they asked him simply for a piece of untilled land. They were given the ancient Roman fort of Annegray, which was in ruins and abandoned, and by now, overgrown by forest.

Used to a life of extreme renunciation, the monks succeeded within a few months to build their first hermitage on the ruins. Thus, their work of re-evangelization started through the testimony of their own life. With their cultivation of the soil, they also started the cultivation of souls.

The fame of these foreign religious people who, living on prayer and in great austerity, built homes and tilled the land, quickly spread, attracting pilgrims and penitents.

Above all, many young people asked to be welcomed into their monastic community to live, as they did, this exemplary life which revived cultivation of the earth as well as of souls.

Soon, it became necessary to establish a seocnd monastery. It was built a few kilometers away on the ruins of an old thermal resort, Luxeuil. It would become the center for radiating out the monastic and missionary tradition of Ireland towards the European continent. A third monastery was erected in Fobntaine, an hour’s walk to the north.

Columban lived in Luxeuil for almost 20 years. here, the saint wrote for his followers the Regola monachorum – monastic rules – which were for some time more widespread in Europe than the Rule of St. Benedict, in which he outlined the ideal image of the monk. It is the only ancient Irish monastic rule that we now have.

Integral to it, he also elaborated the Regula coenobialis, a kind of penal code that is surprising for its modern senisbility, and which can only be explained by the mentality and cultural climate of the time.

With another famous work entitled De poenitentiarum misura taxanda, also written at Luxeuil, Columban introduced confession, with private and repeated penitence, to the continent. It was called a ‘penitence by tariff’ because of the proportion established between the gravity of the sin and the type of penitence imposed by the confessor.

This novelty aroused the suspicions of the bishops of the region, a mistrust that changed to hostility when Columban had the courage to reproach them openly for some of their practices.

An occasion for the manifestation of such a confrontation was the dispute over the date of Easter: Ireland had been following the Oriental tradition rather than the Roman. Columban was summoned in 693 to Châlon-sur-Saôn to answer to a synod about his practices regarding penitence and Easter.

Instead of presenting himself to the Synod, he sent a letter in which he minimized the issue and invited the Synod fathers to discuss not only the date for Easter, a minor problem in his view, “but also – something more serious – all the necessary canonical norms which many have not complied with” (cfr Epistula II,1).

At the same time, he wrote Pope Boniface IV – as he had written several years earlier to Pope Gregory the Great (cfr Epistula i) – to defend the Irish tradition (cfr Epistula III).

Intransigent as he was on every moral question, Columban also came into conflict with the royal house because he had sharply reproached King Theodoric for his adulterous relations.

This led to a network of intrigues and maneuvers on a personal, religious and political level which, in the year 610, resulted in a decree of expulsion from Luxeuil of Columban and all monks of Irish origin, condemning them to exile. They were escorted out to sea to be shipped back to Ireland at the expense of the court.

But the ship ran aground not far from the beach; and the captain, seeing in this a sign from heaven, gave up the undertaking, and for fear of being cursed by God, he brought back the monks to safe ground. But instead of returning to Luxeuil, they decided to start a new phase of evangelization.

They headed to the Rhine and sailed upstream. After a first stop at Tuggen near Lake Zurich, they proceeded to the Bregenz region near Lake Constance to evangelize the Germanic tribes.

Soon after, however, Columbna, because of political events which were not favorable to his work, decided to cross the Alps with most of his disciples. The only one left behind was a monk called Gallus. His hermitage eventually developed into the famous Abbey of Sankt Gallen in Switzerland.

Arriving in Italy, Columban found a benevolent welcome at the royal Lombard court, but he soon had to face remarkable difficulties: the life of the Church was being torn by the Arian heresy which was still prevalent among the Lombards, and by a shcism that had detached the greater part of the churches in northern Italy from communion with the Bishop of Rome.

Columban entered the dispute authoritatively, writing a pamphlet against Arianism and a letter to Boniface IV to convince him to take decisive steps in order to re-establish unity (cfr Epistula V).

When the king of the Lombards, in 612 o3 613, assigned him some land in Bobbio, in the valley of the Trebbia, Columban founded a new monastery whoch would later become a center of culture comparable to the famous one at Montecassino. Here he reached the end of his days. He died on November 23, 615, the day on which he is commemorated in the Roman rite up to our time.

The message of St. Columban is focused on a firm call for conversion and for detachment from earthly goods in the light of the eternal heritage. With his ascetic life and his uncompromising behavior in the face of corruption among the powerful, he evokes the severe figure of John the Baptist.

But his asceticism was never an end in itself – only the means to open himself freely to the the love of God and to respond with all his being to the gifts he received, thus reconstructing in himself the image of God while tilling the soil and renewing human society.

I cite from his Instructiones: “If man correctly uses the faculties that God has granted his spirit, then he will be similar to God. Let us remember that we must give back to him all the gifts which he endowed us with when we were in our original condition. He has taught us the way with his commandments. The first of those is to love the Lord with all our heart, because it was he who loved us first, from the beginning of time, before we even came to this world”
(cfr Instr. XI).

The Irish saint truly embodied these words in his own life. A man of great culture – he wrote poems in Latin and a book of grammar – he showed himself to be rich in gifts of grace. He was a tireless builder of monasteries as well as an intransigent preacher of penitence, spending all his energies to nourish the Christian roots of the Europe which was being born.

With his spiritual energy, his faith, his love of God and neighbor, he was truly one of the Fathers of Europe. He shows us even today the roots from which our Europe can be reborn.

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Fruit of the Vine, Work of Human Hands

Al Ahram reports on several recent archeological finds, including a Byzantine-era wine factory near St. Catherine’s in Sinai. I can’t help but love the presses that made the wine for the Masses of the saints.

The third discovery was made during routine excavation in the area of Sayl Al-Tuhfah, west of Saint Catherine’s Monastery in South Sinai, where an SCA team discovered the well-preserved remains of a limestone wine factory dating to the Byzantine era (sixth century AD).

Farag Fada, head of the SCA’s Islamic and Coptic Department, says the factory consists of two parts. The first is a square basin with a pump at one end; the bottom of the basin is covered with plaster, and some sections still bear traces of red colour. The northern wall of this basin is decorated with a cross-shaped pattern inside a circle, under which is a clay pump. “This type of pump was used to make the wine flow after treading the raisins and dates,” Hawass said.

Fada says the second part of the factory is a circle- shaped basin that looks like a well with a hole. On two sides were limestone slabs which may have been used by the factory workers to stand on.

Tarek El-Naggar, head of South Sinai Antiquities, said the area connecting the clay pump to the second basin had a hole in order to place the jars used to hold the wine. Early studies have shown that the area of Sayl Al-Tuhfah was an industrial region for the production of wine, as there were many vines and date palms.

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Craig’s Take on Take 5

Craig Maier, Ph.D., wrote a kind review of my new book, Take 5: On the Job Meditations With St. Ignatius, for the Pittsburgh Catholic. Here’s a slice:

For those of us who work in the real world of office politics, bitter competition, and muddy ethical waters, Mike Aquilina and Fr. Kris Stubna’s Take Five offers both inspiration and guidance. Drawn from the spirituality of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, it offers 74 daily meditations connecting the rich heritage of Ignatian spirituality to working life.

At first blush, Saint Ignatius, whose life spanned the turbulent beginnings of the Reformation, can seem a distant figure, whose exploits and faith would have little to do with our bustling lives. But his spirituality isn’t for hermits sealed off in contemplative prayer but for people, like Ignatius himself, who are involved in the active life of the world.

“Most Christians spend a large part of their waking hours in activity related to their professional work,” say Aquilina, a prominent local Catholic writer, and Fr. Stubna, who works as the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s secretary for education. “Yet so many sermons and books on the spiritual life seem to pass over these matters that are important—methods of mediation, volunteer work, almsgiving—but that hold a marginal place of the ordinary lives of ordinary people.”

For Aquilina and Stubna, Saint Ignatius isn’t just a spiritual teacher but also a model of someone who was able to bring Christ into his working life in real, profound—and often highly effective—ways. His success as a spiritual teacher and an organizational leader was not accidental. In fact, he saw the Society of Jesus as filling what he believed to be a desperate need in the church: A community of priests who would work in the world at the service of Christ, helping laity to fulfill their role in Christ’s plan of redemption.

Saint Ignatius’s vision required a prodigious amount of work, and he threw himself into his task. During his lifetime, Aquilina and Stubna write, the saint oversaw the formation and ordination of thousands of priests, the establishment of what would become the “Jesuit tradition” of higher education, and the development of missions worldwide.

During this immensely productive time, he wrote almost seven thousand letters giving advice, making plans, and providing spiritual direction. “He found very practical ways to bring Christ into the workday, and he shared his methods with others,” Aquilina and Stubna observe.

“He wrote letters full of good advice about getting work done, and doing it with care, yet not wearying yourself; about getting along with co-workers; about dealing with office politics; and about the challenge of keeping your eye on the goal, which is not worldly success but godly glory.”

These letters form the backbone of the book’s meditations, which include a passage from Saint Ignatius, questions to ponder, a verse of scripture, and a thought to memorize and take with you throughout the day. For those who don’t currently have a daily devotional practice, the exercises, which can be read over breakfast, can be the beginning of a deepening encounter with God.

For those accustomed to seeing spirituality as something disconnected with the world or as a set of impractical platitudes, Aquilina and Stubna show how faith can flow into even the most mundane things: setting goals, meeting deadlines, dealing with office gossip, putting people before paychecks, and even asking for a raise.

Throughout, the meditations cultivate a way of seeing working life through Christian eyes, offering both encouragement and, at times, correction. Yet, as Saint Ignatius urged, we should not fear loving correction but should in fact encourage it as an act of charity. “It is with this solid love and honest desire that I speak, write, and advise you just as I should honestly wish and desire you to advise, urge, and correct me,” he wrote his brother Martin.

In a business world where looking out for “Number One” has become the mantra, Saint Ignatius offers solid spiritual footing. Across the centuries, he gives us the inspiration to live the faith in the working world and the courage to “blow the whistle”—on ourselves.

Order copies for all your co-workers: Take Five: On the Job Meditations With St. Ignatius.

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“Oldest Church” Discovered in Jordan?

Some of the interpretation seems to be wishful thinking, but this could nevertheless be an important discovery.

AMMAN, June 9 (Xinhua) — Jordan has discovered a cave underneath the Saint Georgeous Church in Rihab, Mafraq, in northern Jordan, which is described as the oldest Christian church, local daily Jordan Times reported on Monday.

“We have uncovered what we believe to be the first church in the world, dating from AD 33 to AD 70,” said Archaeologist Abdul Qader Hussan, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies.

The discovery was “amazing,” said the scholar, adding that “we have evidence to believe this church sheltered the early Christians: the 70 disciples of Jesus Christ.”

The early Christians, described in the mosaic inscription on St. Georgeous floor as “the 70 beloved by God and Divine,” are said to flee from Jerusalem during the persecution of Christians to the northern part of Jordan, particularly to Rihab, he added.

Bishop Deputy of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Archimandrite Nektarious described the discovery of the cave as an “important milestone for Christians all around the world.”

“The only other cave in the world similar in shape and purpose is in Thessalonika, Greece,” the bishop said in an interview in Amman.

Citing historical sources, Hussan said the 70 lived and practiced their rituals in secrecy in this underground church.

“We believe that they did not leave the cave and lived until the Christian religion was embraced by Roman rulers. It was then when St. Georgeous was built,” said the expert.

Saint Georgeous is believed to be the oldest “proper” church in the world, built in AD 230. This status is only challenged by a church unearthed in Aqaba, Jordan, in 1998, also dating back to the 3rd century.

The findings in the graveyard near the cave offer valuable clues, according to Hussan. “We found pottery items that date back from the 3rd to 7th century.”

The findings show that the first Christians and their offshoot continued living in the area till the late Roman rule, he said.

The cave also embraces the living place of the first Christians. There is also a deep tunnel, which is believed to have led the 70 Christians to their source of water, the archaeologist added.

Rihab is rich in unique archaeological sites and so far 30 churches have been discovered.

Hat tip: Rogue Classicism.

UPDATES: More details here and here.

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Cell with a View … of Sand

Reuters gives us a bit of history in Modernity Meets Monasticism in Egypt’s Desert, a visit to St. Anthony’s Monastery, “considered by many to be the world’s oldest active Christian monastery.” Founded in 356 A.D., St. Anthony’s “has survived Bedouin raids, the Islamic conquest of Egypt, and wars between Egypt and Israel that turned the area into a combat zone. It welcomes those seeking God in silence.”

Described as the earliest Christian monk, St. Anthony set off into the desert around the year 280 A.D. and settled in the mountain caves around this desert oasis.

He is considered to be one of the first Christians to withdraw completely from society, living in the desert with only animals for company.

… At the monastery, bearded monks in black robes lead visitors through narrow paths between stone churches, monk cells, an ancient refectory monks say was built by the Roman emperor, Justinian, and a library containing over 1,700 manuscripts.