Diane Moczar - The Church Ascending: How Saints and Sinners Brought About the Triumph of Christianity in the West

Other books by Diane Moczar
from Sophia Institute Press:

The Church Under Attack

Ten Dates Every Catholic Should Know

Islam at the Gates

Diane Moczar

The Church Ascending

How Saints and Sinners Brought About
the Triumph of Christianity in the West

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS

Manchester, New Hampshire

The Church Ascending was originally published in 2006 by Our Sunday Visitor, Huntington, Indiana, under the title What Every Catholic Wants to Know: Catholic History from the Catacombs to the Reformation .

Copyright 2006, 2014 Diane Moczar

The Scripture citations used in this work are taken from the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV), copyright 1965 and 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moczar, Diane. [What every Catholic wants to know] The church ascending : how saints and sinners brought about the triumph of Christianity in the west / Diane Moczar. pages cm Originally published under title: What every Catholic wants to know : Catholic history from the catacombs to the Reformation : Huntington, Indiana : Our Sunday Visitor, 2006. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-62282-202-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) eBook ISBN 978-1-622822-03-4 1. Catholic Church History. I. Title. BX945.3.M62 2014 282.09 dc23 2014002629

To all my history teachers , living and dead , in San Francisco , Paris , New York , Washington , D . C ., and Fairfax , Virginia . They labored valiantly to make a historian of me , and this is their book .

Contents

Introduction

What This Book Is and What It Is Not

First of all, this book is not a textbook, with all essential facts about a given period tidily arranged and neatly summarized so you can memorize them for the next test. It is also not a scholarly book with extensive footnotes (in tiny print) for every statement, although it is based on extensive scholarship. Another thing it is not, I hope, is boring.

What it is, then, is a collection of evocative glimpses of the history of the Church, from its emergence in the Roman Empire, through its medieval springtime and high summer, to the bitter autumn that followed those glorious ages. Each pair of chapters, one on the history of a time period and the second on its culture, will include a few suggestions for further reading, as well as larger questions to think about.

By the end of the book, the reader will have made the acquaintance of a number of interesting characters, both heroes and villains, and have a general idea of how Christian civilization came about, spread, and developed cracks that would become great fissures. In short, he will know something, instead of nothing, about Catholic history.

Such an introduction to a great civilization may be just what many readers are looking for in a book like this. There will be others, however, who will thirst for more. They will wonder: What happened to So-and-so? Exactly when did such-and-such occur? What was the relationship between what was going on in Spain and what was happening in Byzantium at such-and-such a time? Such readers may be students (encountering Catholic history for the first time), teachers, homeschoolers, or amateur historians. The last sections of this little work cannot answer all their questions, but it can point them in the right direction.

Appendix A addresses the issue of making sense of it all. Here the reader will find hints on organizing historical material so that facts and chronology are clear, with the most significant ones stressed, and so that relationships among the happenings of a given century with what preceded and followed it are made apparent. Appendix B discusses What next? Further reading suggestions are what the serious student requires, but lengthy bibliographies while useful in scholarly books can be both overwhelming and too rapidly outdated. This section will instead list only a few seminal works on various topics with which the student might begin. It will also, however, give suggestions on how to evaluate the tide of books that are currently being published in every field. How can one avoid getting stuck with a pricey, well-publicized tome that turns out to be either useless for ones purposes or downright lousy history? Appendix B cant prevent that from happening to you, but it can greatly reduce the possibility.

May this book increase your knowledge and understanding of Catholic history and your love for God, who is the source of all truth.

O NE

The Church in the Roman World

The world suffers nothing from Christians but hates them because they reject its pleasures .

St. Justin Martyr

What do you think the following passage describes?

Once upon a time, there was a country. After a revolution in which it overthrew the rule of a foreign king, it became a small republic. Its religion was simple, emphasizing republican virtues such as piety, discipline, patriotism, and simplicity of life; most citizens were small landowners. The people had a talent for practical rather than theoretical accomplishments; they were fine builders, engineers, and administrators. The country began to expand, at the expense of its neighbors, and conquer native peoples. It developed cities and an urban culture and began to use slave labor to an increasing degree. It became very wealthy. And as it came into contact with other cultures, it took in ideas and influences from all over the world. People began to say it was losing its own identity. The early religion declined, and many people took up exotic cults from the East, while intellectuals tended toward atheism. The old republican virtues broke down, and civil war broke out. Birth control, abortion, infanticide, divorce, and homosexuality became common. There was a womens liberation movement. People stopped reading, except for digests and popular science, and the language became debased. There was a craze for spectator entertainment: sports of all kinds, but also other spectacles, which grew more obscene and violent as time went on, and the jaded popular taste demanded new thrills. Pollution was widespread, and many people died of a mysterious new disease. Economic problems, such as inflation and high unemployment, developed. But what many citizens feared most of all was terrorism and war from ruthless barbarian powers to the East.

This is, of course, a word picture of ancient Rome, from its origins to its decline. But it also bears an eerie resemblance to the history and current state of our own country. Other nations particularly England have also viewed Roman history as a mirror of their own world. Certainly it holds many lessons and warnings for those who would understand the growth and decline of civilizations, the overextension of superpowers, and the role of moral decay in political collapse.

The Christian Community of Rome

Readers will recall that St. Peter had become the head of the Church, the first pope, when our Lord had said those solemn words to him: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church (Matt. 16:18). When Peter arrived in Rome in the first century, the city thereupon became the seat of the papacy. This did not end with Peter.

His successors in the papal office became so identified with Rome that an expression was used: Roma locuta est, causa finita est (Rome has spoken, the cause is finished). It was the pope who decided, by virtue of his infallible authority; numerous documents from the end of the first century attest both to the primacy of the pope in the Church and to Rome as the seat of the pope.

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