When I was a kid, my parents had an old, battered and tattered Family Bible, in the back of which was a long list of saints. I was fascinated by the entry for St. Aquilina. It was nothing but her name, of course — but her name was my name, and I was not accustomed to seeing my last name in lights. At nine years old, I couldn’t imagine a time or a place where people observed naming conventions that were different from my own. (Even Jesus had a last name, right? Jesus Christ.) What’s more, I could hardly imagine a Church where all the important people didn’t have names like McCormick and O’Brien.

Yet here was this little-girl saint, who apparently went by her last name, which happened to be my last name — a last name that ended in a vowel.

My distant cousin, my paesan, St. Aquilina had made it to the back pages of a Catholic Bible — and from an Irish publisher, no doubt, like P.J. Kenedy & Sons. I don’t recall whether I fantasized about a Da Vinci Code-style bloodline transmitting fortitude across the centuries, but I might have.

Fast-forward many years, to the advent of the World Wide Web. When my son first taught me how to surf, he plugged in our surname, to impress me with a vanity search. And who should we find but my long-lost cuz, St. Aquilina, the child martyr of Byblos, Lebanon. The Maronite Research Institute had built up an impressive virtual shrine of scholarship in her honor, all sumptuously illustrated.

She’s not a Father. She never even reached the age to be a mother! But she lived in the patristic era, and so she lives within the purview of this blog, and she’s worth getting to know.

Aquilina was born in Byblos in 281 … She received her catechism from Evthalios, Bishop of Byblos. Her heart was inflamed with the love of Christ; hence her faith and fervor radiated like the sun in Byblos and its surroundings. At the age of twelve, Aquilina began an endeavor to spread Christianity among her compatriots. That was done through her example and teachings driven by the zeal of apostles and the innocence of children. Due to her preaching, many of the pagans were baptized, especially young lads and maidens. She was reported to and brought before Magistrate Volusian during the reign of Emperor Diocletian, and, according to ancient tradition, this dialogue took place:

“I am Christian,” she answered, when Volusian questioned her.

The Magistrate said, “You are leading your friends and comrades away from the religion of our gods to the belief in Christ, the Crucified. Don’t you know that our kings condemn this Christ and sentence to death those who worship Him? Leave this error and offer oblation to the gods and you shall live. If you refuse, you shall undergo the most atrocious sufferings.”

You can guess where this story is going. I’m told that Aquilina is to the eastern churches what Agnes is to the west: an icon of Christian innocence crushed under the heel of Diocletian, in the Roman Empire’s last, worst, and most systematic persecution.

Read the rest of Aquilina’s story at the website of the Maronite Research Institute, an organization that has sponsored great work on the eastern Fathers, but is struggling now for want of funds.

In some online discussions of the Syriac Fathers, scholars actually refer to the Aramaic translation of the New Testament as the “Pe****ta,” in order to foil filtering software. The crosses we must bear…

I’m convinced that what made Irenaeus such a great saint is that he had the stamina and the stomach to suffer through all the gnostic works. We don’t know for sure how the man died, or whether he was a martyr, as some late biographies aver. But there is perhaps a greater martyrdom in reading apocryphal gospels cover to cover, one after another, shelf after shelf. Irenaeus read enough, after all, and read closely enough, to provide definitive analysis of all the polymorphous varieties of gnosticism concocted up till his time.

All that is mere prelude to my praise for Amy Welborn’s book De-Coding Mary Magdalene — because, gosh, she not only read the ancient gnostics, she read the neo-gnostics as well. I’ve been patting myself on the back for finishing The Da Vinci Code (on the third try). But Amy’s actually read Margaret Starbird, Baigent and Leigh, and other modern heirs of Valentinus and his dreary ilk.

The genius of De-Coding Mary Magdalene is the author’s patient and charitable effort to disentangle orthodox tradition from many strains of fanciful legends, heretical fictions, and artistic conventions. The Fathers are everywhere in this book, especially Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Gregory the Great. But so are the better modern exegetes, such as N.T. Wright, and critics of gnosticism old and new, such as Philip Jenkins. In the end, we see that the Mary of the canonical gospels — the historical Mary — shines brighter than any of the made-up (and now made-for-Hollywood) versions.

Amy’s chapter analyzing gnosticism as a wider cultural current includes helpful summaries of the most infamous gnostic writings. So you won’t have to suffer through them as Irenaeus did — or Amy herself did!

On the homepage of her blog, Amy applies a Flannery O’Connor line to herself: “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.” Don’t believe her. Enduring page upon page of gnostics old and gnew is a species of martyrdom. And it’s hardly the quick kind.

De-Coding Mary Magdalene deserves to outlive the fifteen minutes of fame we’ve given Dan Brown. It stands on its own.

The New Testament bears ample testimony to the ancient faith of the Roman Christians. Rome marks the final destination of the Acts of the Apostles. Rome was the postal address of the first of St. Paul’s canonical letters.

And the ancient Romans treasured their heritage. They knew, with unerring Christian instinct, what the African Tertullian would say so eloquently in the third century: The blood of the martyrs is seed. If that is so, the Romans were blessed indeed to count among their martyrs the apostles Peter and Paul.

There is no legal document — not even a forged one — that names the successors of St. Peter as title-holders to the Church, bearers of the keys. But the ancient Christians required no other proof than the Scriptures and the apostolic tradition.

Writing probably in 69 A.D. (and surely no later than 96), St. Clement of Rome, the third successor of Peter, remonstrated the faraway congregation in Corinth, in Greece. Clement could do this because he spoke with Peter’s authority, which was granted by Christ Himself. As he concluded his letter, he urged the Corinthians to “render obedience unto the things written by us through the Holy Spirit.” And they did. A century later, the Greek church still hallowed Clement’s letter, as did other churches that counted it among the canonical scriptures and proclaimed its words in the liturgy.

Obedience to Christ in the person of His vicar: This is the common testimony of the Fathers. When the saints of East and West saw danger, they appealed to the pope. We find such pleas in the letters of St. Irenaeus (second century), St. Basil the Great (fourth century), St. John Chrysostom (early fifth century), and St. Cyril of Alexandria (mid-fifth century).

One and all, these were men with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Scriptures. So when they wished for an action that bore the authority of Jesus Christ, they knew where to send their petition. Sometimes they were disappointed by the papal response, but they maintained their faith in the papal office.

In the year 376, the greatest Scripture scholar in the ancient world, St. Jerome, addressed Pope St. Damasus I with a torrent of biblical seals of the papacy: “I speak with the successor of the fisherman and disciple of the cross. Following none but Christ as my primate, I am united in communion with Your Beatitude — that is, with the chair of Peter. Upon that Rock I know the Church is built. Whosoever eats a lamb outside this house is profane. Whoever is not in Noah’s ark will perish when the flood prevails.”

To be a Christian was — then as now — to obey Jesus Christ in the holy Scriptures. Thus, to be a Christian was to obey Jesus Christ in his vicar, the pope.

This was not just the teaching of churchmen who had a vested interested in papal power. It was the faith of the congregations.

The Roman people passed down many traditions of Peter’s ministry in their city. According to one story, during his imprisonment, the apostle preached to his jailers, who begged him for baptism. Finding insufficient water, Peter prayed and a pure spring bubbled up into the cell. Today we may see a most ancient testimony to this story on the walls of the Catacomb of Commodilla. There, the early Christians portrayed Peter as a new Moses, striking a rock wall and drawing forth water.

But, again, reverence for the papacy wasn’t just a Roman thing. A plate found in Montenegro depicts the prison baptism. A coffin in Arles, France, made around the same time, shows Christ handing on the Law to Peter.

Christ gave His Law to Peter with the grace of state. Peter passed it on to Linus, Linus to Cletus, Cletus to Clement, as John Paul passed it on to Benedict last year, while the whole world was watching.

I’m mourning the imminent departure of a dear bishop, Donal Wuerl, whom Pope Benedict has just named as archbishop-designate of Washington, D.C. Bishop Wuerl has been a great father to me, my family, and my neighbors. He’s been my bishop for most of my adult life.

Our nation’s capital, though, has gained a capital patrologist. Something in my memory tells me that young Donald Wuerl studied under Johannes Quasten at Catholic University of America. In the early 1980s, as Msgr. Wuerl, he wrote a lovely introduction to patristics, aptly titled Fathers of the Church. His catechism, The Teaching of Christ, co-authored with the great patrologist Thomas Comerford Lawler, is a model for integration of the Fathers in modern catechesis. A few years ago, in an interview in Pittsburgh’s diocesan paper, Bishop Wuerl let slip that the Church Fathers remain his favored spiritual reading.

May he prosper in his new home. Rejoice, all you lands of the Beltway.

A few weeks back I posted notice of the Maltz Jewish Museum’s exhibit titled “Cradle of Christianity: Treasures from the Holy Land,” which includes authentic artifacts from the lives of Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.

Now I see that Cleveland also recently played host to Prof. Lawrence Schiffman, a leading authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Schiffman is author of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran. His ventures in Ohio were reported by the Cleveland Jewish News.

According to Schiffman, the Scrolls, which were discovered in caves in Israel in 1947, have given us “a picture of Judaism that was practiced at that time that we simply didn’t have before … We’re talking about people who were all Sabbath observers and who followed the commandments … They had very strict purity laws and acted as if they were living as priests in the (Jerusalem) Temple.” Members of the Qumran sect observed ritual bathing and wrote of a ritual banquet at which a messianic priest offered bread and wine. Some men of Qumran practiced celibacy.

For Christians, the Dead Sea Scrolls have provided a glimpse of the Church’s deep roots in Judaism. They also may help us to understand a bit about the religious life of the Holy Family, the apostles, and their contemporaries. Prof. Schiffman, an Orthodox Jew, has been a critic of common Christian interpretations of the Scrolls. But his own scholarship has itself illuminated the religious life of that long-ago time and place.

A small portion of the Temple Scroll from Qumran is currently on display at the Maltz Museum as part of “The Cradle of Christianity” exhibit.

If you would like to see a great Christian scholar’s (very early) analysis of the Scrolls, grab yourself a copy of Cardinal Jean Danielou’s The Dead Sea Scrolls and Primitive Christianity. A more integrated (and recent) approach to Christianity’s Jewish origins is Oskar Skarsaune’s In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity.

Archeologists in Jerusalem announced the discovery of hiding places of the Jews who revolted against Roman rule in A.D. 66-70.

JERUSALEM Mar 13, 2006 (AP)— Underground chambers and tunnels used during a Jewish revolt against the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago have been uncovered in northern Israel, archaeologists said Monday. The Jews laid in supplies and were preparing to hide from the Romans during their revolt … “It definitely was not spontaneous,” said Yardenna Alexandre of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “The Jews of that time certainly did prepare for it, with underground hideaways here and in other sites we have found.”

An early Church Father, St. Epiphanius, records that the Christians of the city received a prophecy of the coming destruction. So they fled to the city of Pella. When they returned after the devastation, they found Jerusalem reduced to rubble, except for the building that housed their “little church of God,” the upper room, which had been miraculously preserved.

ABC provides the rest of the story on the more recent news.

In a feeble attempt to justify her addiction, my beautiful wife informed me today that sudoku puzzles are a remote descendant of the ancient “magical squares,” which may be Christian (or maybe not).

Magical squares are ancient puzzles that have been found in inscriptions from late antiquity. They feature rows of letters whose sequence yields a meaning — or several meanings — once you’ve figured it all out. The oldest known examples were discovered in the ruins of Pompeii. In that city, sealed by a vocanic eruption in 79 A.D., were two identical instances of a square made up of the Latin words: Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas. If this puzzle indeed yields a Christian interpretation, as many scholars believe it does, then that would mean Christianity had spread to Pompeii at a very early date. It’s certainly plausible, as “Sator Arepo” squares have turned up near the sites of other ancient Christian congregations. In Dura Europos, in Syria, archeologists found four of them, all identical to one another and identical to the squares in Pompeii.

Here’s the square.

S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S

It presents palindromes in every direction. And if it is a sentence, a rough translation might be: “The sower in his field controls the workings of his tools.” If we read it as a Christian allegory, the sower would represent God, and His “field” the earth. His tools are His faithful people, who do His will.

An alternative translation might be: “The sower [named] Arepo holds the wheels with care.” If the sower is God, then the wheels could represent the great cosmic vision of the Prophet Ezekiel. The bottom line is the same: God’s in charge here.

Read as anagrams, the lines can yield a horizontal and a vertical “Pater Noster” (Latin for “Our Father”). The two intersecting Pater Nosters, then, would form a Greek cross, with each beam capped by an A and an O, Alpha and Omega.

Wikipedia spells out these details fairly well — alongside a highly improbable satanic interpretation of the square, and a Petrine possibility, and still another Christian reading:

There are also several other possible combinations of the letters in a square form. One of them is as follows. If we take the letter o as the basis and then move on the grid as one would move the knight in a game of chess, we get twice the Latin words “Oro Te, Pater” (“I beg You, Father”). The unused letters are s, a, n, a, s, which form the word “sanas” (“You heal”).

The problem, of course, is that the puzzlers of antiquity were not wusses. So they didn’t post the answers whenever they posted a puzzle. Thus, they’ve left us with the enigma of this particular puzzle’s meaning.

As for me (and my house): I’ll lean, with the best and brightest, on “Our Father.”

Someone wrote last night to ask about the mosaic atop my blog. It’s from Ravenna, the Italian city whose art was the subject of a previous post. The question led me to more surfing, which led me to discover plenty more free images of the patristic era, in the Byzantine Art category at Wikimedia. There’s also new material in the Paleo-Christian category. Dazzling. Perfect for your screen-saver. And it’s all free.

I make much, in these pages, of the chains of teaching that lead us from the Apostles, through the Fathers, to our own day. A classic example is Polycarp’s discipleship to John, and Irenaeus’s to Polycarp, and Hippolytus’s to Irenaeus … And suddenly we’re in the middle of the third century! Kevin at Biblicalia makes another important connection tracing the famous “Two Ways” teaching from the earliest texts (Didache and Barnabas) all the way to Irenaeus. Check it out.

All of us who love the Fathers feel diminished by the passing of the great Jaroslav Pelikan — though we could spend a large chunk of our remaining years just catching up with the books he left behind on his way to heaven.

Pelikan was a Lutheran theologian through most of his career. He entered the Orthodox Church in 1998. May he rest in peace.

See Mark Noll’s 1990 interview with him in Christianity Today. Visit Pelikan’s web page at Yale, too.

And do read him, especially his The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600 A.D.) and his Gifford Lectures.

Hat tip: Biblicalia.

I have nothing against contemporary worship music. You can check the endorsement of Mark Shuttleworth’s CD that I posted earlier this week. And I’m a real fan of John Michael Talbot, who is himself a perceptive reader of the Church Fathers.

But I had to laugh when my son Michael presented me with the following, from the ancient “Canons of St. Basil”:

If a lector learns to play the guitar, he shall also be instructed to confess it. If he does not return to it, he shall suffer his penance for seven weeks. If he keeps at it, he shall be excommunicated and put out of the Church.

My son plays the guitar, but he favors old-fashioned hymns at Mass. Nevertheless, he insisted that, if I should post the bit from Basil, I must also post (as a sort of bronze serpent?) a link for readers to gaze upon a Gibson Les Paul with proper veneration.

Just a few months ago, the Washington Post ran an astonishing opinion column, written by one of its own, Patricia E. Bauer, a former Post bureau chief. Patricia has a grown daughter with Down syndrome, and she writes about the rudeness she has had to endure through the years. People ask her whether she had undergone prenatal testing. The unspoken assumption is that, if she had, her daughter Margaret would never have been born. One Ivy League ethicist said in her presence that mothers whose unborn children test positive for Down syndrome have a “moral obligation” to terminate the pregnancy.

We’ve come a long way, baby. And we’ve ended up back where we started before the rise of Christianity. In the Church’s infancy, the age of the Fathers, abortion and infanticide were commonplace events, requiring little deliberation. Archeology has yielded us a rare glimpse at the inner life of ordinary people in this time. We have a letter from a pagan businessman in which he wrote home to his pregnant wife, amid the usual endearments: “If you are delivered of a child [before I come home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl discard it.”

Indeed, most pagan cultures considered it a duty to place “defective” newborns on the dunghills at the edge of town, where birds of prey could pick them apart. Most families interpreted the word “defective” broadly, to include female children as well as those with disabilities or disfigurement. Plato and Aristotle commended the practice, and the Roman historian Tacitus said it was “sinister and revolting” for Jews to forbid infanticide.

Yet these practices created a crisis for pagans. Abortion and infanticide led to low fertility rates, high maternal mortality, a shortage of marriageable women, and an absence of familial care for the elderly. Over generations, the dwindling native population of Rome grew increasingly dependent on foreign mercenaries to fill the ranks of the army, and immigrants to do the servile jobs that no Roman citizen wanted to do. That makes for an unstable infrastructure. Various emperors tried to legislate fertility, but the law isn’t much of an aphrodisiac. And abortion kills a couple’s love every bit as much as it kills their baby. Besides, people had grown accustomed to an unmoored, leisurely life, drifting from pleasure to pleasure, without the encumbrance of children.

We face a similar crisis today. Christianity’s critics say they want to promote a tolerant, welcoming, inclusive society. What they usually mean is a society that gives free rein to every vice, every cruel lust, and every sin. But a growing number of people are dissatisfied with the societal consequences of those sins. What’s a culture to do?

We Christians have answers. Around 155 A.D., St. Justin Martyr wrote to the emperor: “We have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly born children . . . For we would then be murderers.” In the same century, Athenagoras said: “Women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder.” These testimonies appear late in the game, a half-century after the earliest recorded Christian condemnation of abortion.

We, too, are living rather late in the game, but not too late to speak up and speak plainly. No society can grow if it snuffs out life in the seed or in the bud. No society can be inclusive if it refuses to welcome the most vulnerable persons. It was Christians who created the first truly tolerant, welcoming, and all-inclusive society — with a remarkable social-welfare system. They did this because they, unlike their rulers, not only tolerated the poor and weak, nor merely loved them with a human affection. They saw the least of the human family as the image of God, as Christ who must be welcomed, as angels requiring hospitality.

I’ve quoted the Didascalia Apostolorum here before, but that’s OK. We need to memorize this line as if it were the first catechism lesson: “Widows and orphans are to be revered like the altar.”

From such reverence for life came true social security, true stability and prosperity. From such reverence came many beloved and loving children like Margaret.

Do you teach? Homeschool? Would you be interested in adding Latin to your lineup — or as an extracurricular activity?

About a year ago, while browsing at the local Barnes and Noble, my kids and I discovered the coolest program. A goup of students from a local Catholic school were putting on a Roman pageant — lots of comedy, singing, etc., and much of it in Latin. And their teacher raffled off some real ancient objects. On the other side of the store, the group had arranged for a “traveling ancient-coin museum” to visit. Its curator made the trip from the far reaches of the midwest.

I found out that the sponsoring Catholic school did not actually offer Latin classes. All they do is sponsor a Latin club. But the club’s moderator is a true zealot named Zee, who knows how to keep kids spellbound.

Zee Poerio is not alone in her work. In fact, she’s very active in several national organizations that welcome members from public, private or home schools.

If you teach you might be interested in checking out Excellence Through Classics, which sponsors and administers the National Mythology Exam. (Zee is vice-chair.) Homeschoolers, too, can take the exam.

Zee is also director of Ancient Coins for Education, which is the program that most fascinated my kids.

She’s also a member of the Education and Youth Programs Task Force of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild

Membership in the American Classical League gets you a discount on books from the organization’s Teacher Materials Resource Center.

Granted, these groups are dealing almost exclusively with classical antiquity, not Christian antiquity. But none of them, to my knowledge, forbids its members to substitute the writings of the Fathers for the best of Cicero. Others may ask, with Tertullian, what has Athens (or Rome) to do with Jerusalem? But that question was best answered by other Fathers, like St. Basil the Great, in his “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.”