It is often stated that history repeats itself. Under certain circumstances it certainly does. Around two thousand years ago, the followers of Jesus Christ, who they claimed was both Man and God and who had risen from the dead after enduring an ignominious death, left the narrow confines of their country and spread out all over the Roman empire. Here, they must have felt overwhelmed by what a pagan society was all about – bestial violence, moral depravity, wide-spread corruption and, above all, a total disregard for the dignity of human life.
They must have asked themselves how they could possibly present Christ’s teachings to a society which was so alien to the Lord’s message. However, armed with the strength that came from their faith in Jesus, especially his injunction to “Go and teach all nations” and his promise, “I will be with you always”, they embarked on a seemingly impossible task – the conversion of the ‘whole world’ to the Gospel. They succeeded, after much suffering, but most importantly, never offering any compromise to the society they lived in or in any manner presenting a diluted version of Christ’s teachings in order to make them more acceptable. Thus it happened that, as Latin language students are often told, “Christianity took Rome by storm”. By the time of Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 allowing the Christian religion to be tolerated all over the empire, large swathes of society were already practising Christians.
Our society in the developed world, so similar in certain circumstances to the ancient pagan Roman world, differs completely from it in one respect. The Romans were extremely religious; they had a whole pantheon of gods to worship, gradually adding to it the gods of the nations they conquered.
On the other hand, in our society God and his divine laws have been evicted from practically everywhere. Under the pretext of so-called ‘freedom’, various laws are passed that degrade man, taking away the dignity that comes from being made in the ‘image of God’ and ruthlessly trampling on the weak and the vulnerable. As Fyodor Dostoevsky said, “Once belief in God ceases to exist, everything becomes possible.” One can only remember the horrors perpetrated by the atheistic regimes of the 20th century – Nazism, Communism, Maoism and the millions killed as a result of the ‘freedom’ offered by their ideologies.
However, Christians are not disheartened. In a way, they have been there before. The pagan world of 2000 years ago and today’s secularist society also have another aspect in common. It is the total absence of that one virtue without which man’s life on earth becomes barren and meaningless – hope. Ours indeed is an affluent society, made up of many who are, in the inimitable words of the late Cardinal Biffi of Bologna, “Sazi e disperati”.
No matter how helpless Christians might feel, confronted as they are by what secularists are proposing and imposing on society, they know that ultimately evil always ends up turning upon itself, indeed by devouring itself. The French Revolution and Communism are the primary examples. The Christian message on the other hand never ages and is not subject to angst or ennui. It is unequalled.
Jacqueline Calleja