Get to Know St. Athanasius, Defender of Christ's Divinity, on his Feast Day!

St. Athanasius is definitely a saint for our time when orthodoxy is so often persecuted and heterodoxy occupies the highest levels of the Church. 

Let me offer today a letter from Bishop Athanasius to the flock to encourage them at a time when the Arians ran the Church. Today, our churches are being run, not by a group of heretics (Well...on second thought....), but by a virus and its manipulators -- the CDC, the WHO, and government bureaucrats. Will things ever return to "normal" (whatever that is)? Maybe not for awhile...even a long while. St. Athanasius knew all about that!

If you want to learn about faithfulness and patience under trial study the life of St. Athanasius. There's a great short biography by Frances Alice Forbes. You can read it free online. I heartily recommend it. My plan for the day is to re-read at least part of it. St. Athanasius towers over us as a giant of the faith. Get to know him and you can't help but absorb some of his courage and perseverance under trial. And now -- an excerpt from one of his letters:

May God console you!...A thing which also saddens you is that others have occupied the churches through violence, and that you, at the present time are outside. 

They have, indeed, possession of the buildings; but you possess the apostolic faith. They may occupy our churches, but they are outside the true faith. But you, though you are outside the places of worship, in you resides the faith. Let us but reflect: which is more important, a place, or the faith? Obviously the true faith. In this struggle, who has lost and who has won; he who holds a place, or he who keeps the faith?

Places are good, certainly, when the apostolic faith is preached there; they are holy, if everything done therein is done in a holy manner.... 

You are fortunate, you have remained in the Church through your faith, you who hold fast to the foundations of that faith which has come down to you from apostolic Tradition, even though a detestable envy has sought many times to shake it, but has not succeeded. In the present crisis, it is they who have broken away from it. 

No one, my beloved brethren, will ever prevail against your faith. And we are confident that God will one return our churches to us. 

Thus, then, the more obstinately they persist in occupying places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim to represent the Church, but in reality they expel themselves from it and go astray.
Catholics who remain faithful to Tradition, even if they are reduced to but a handful, they are the true Church of Jesus Christ.
                      St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria                         (Born 296 A.D., died 373 A.D.)

St. Athanasius, pray for us.