A Monday Metaphor: Dealing with Liberal Provocateurs

I recently had a contentious exchange with a provocateur who is an unregenerate liberal and fallen-
away Catholic. She seems to delight in stirring people up. Like many who reject the faith, she is antagonistic toward the Church of the apostles. If anyone speaks to her about something religious, she presumes they are trying to convert her or are making a judgment about the state of her soul. (As my mom used to say, "A guilty conscience needs no accuser.") However, she will speak about her own ethical and political beliefs and take offense at disagreement. When disagreements she often believes it's the other person's fault.


Reflecting on this, I keep thinking of a little boy who goes past a fenced yard where a dog is innocently playing with his toy. The little boy starts teasing the dog and poking a stick through the fence getting a charge out of the dog's increasingly agitated reaction. That is how I feel about my friend, the provocateur. Are her provocative statements and below the belt punches subconscious or are they deliberate? Whichever they are, they damage her relationships.

Guest Post: The Warnings In St. Augustine’s City Of God Are Relevant To America Today - Part II

By Gary Morella

See Part I here.

This is Augustine’s own account, in the Retractationes, of the writing of the City of God.

Meanwhile Rome was overthrown by a raid of Goths, led by King Alaric, a most destructive invasion.  The polytheistic worshippers of false gods, whom we commonly call pagans, endeavored to bring this overthrow home to the Christian religion, and began to blaspheme the true God with unusual sharpness and bitterness.  This set me on fire with zeal for the house of God, and I commenced to write the books Of the City of God against their blasphemies or errors.  This work occupied me for a number of years, owing to numerous interruptions of businesses that would not brook delay and had a prior claim on me.  At last this large work Of the City of God was brought to a conclusion in twenty-two books.  The first five of them are a refutation of their position who maintain that the worship of many gods, according to the custom of paganism, is essential to the prosperity of human society, and that the prohibition of it is the source and origin of calamities such as the fall of Rome.  The next five books are against those who, while allowing that such calamities are never wanting, and never will be wanting, to the page of mortal history, and are now great, now small, under varying conditions of place, time, and person, yet argue that polytheistic worship, and sacrifice to many gods, is profitable for the life that follows after death.  These first ten books, then, are a refutation of these two vain opinions adverse to the Christian religion.   But not to expose ourselves to the reproach of merely having refuted the other side, establishing our own position is the object of the second part of this work, which comprises twelve books; though, to be sure, in the former ten, where needful, we vindicate our own, and in the latter twelve we confute the opposite party.  Of the twelve following books, four contain the origin of the two cities, the one of God, the other of this world.  The next four contain the course of their history; the third and last four their several due ends.  Thus, the whole twenty–two books, though written of two cities, yet take their title from the better of the two, and are entitled by preference Of the City of God.

Guest Post: The Warnings In St. Augustine’s City Of God Are Relevant To America Today - Part I

St. Augustine of Hippo

By Gary L. Morella

By common consent St. Augustine is one of the giants of the Latin Church.  His life is an inspiration to all those in danger of succumbing to the grave sin of despair because his example is one of going from despair, the work of the devil, to ecstasy, the work of the God.  Nowhere is this transformation better manifested than in his monumental work, the City of God, wherein he contrasts the struggle for our souls being waged by the forces of Perfect Good, God Almighty, against the forces of consummate evil, in particular, the “evil one.”

Greek philosophy as it spread out influenced the early generations of Christians. In fact, Plato was the dominant philosophical figure for much of the Middle Ages. Augustine was a Christian Platonist.  He was enamored with Plato to the extent that he recognized that Plato arrived at some Christian truths unaided by grace or revelation.  St. Thomas Aquinas had this to say about Augustine as a Platonist.

Sunday Meditation: Take Refuge in Church

I just started reading St. Augustine's City of God. I'm hooked. In the first chapter St. Augustine describes how the barbarians invading the Roman Empire spared those who took refuge in the churches. Imagine...the marauding barbarians were Christians who stopped at the church doors. Even pagans who took refuge there were spared. So how did they say thank you? They blamed the Christians for the invasion.

Augustine isn't too happy about it and here's what he says:

Contrary to the custom of war, these bloodthirsty barbarians spared them, and spared them for Christ's sake...in those places specially dedicated to Christ's name,and of which the very largest were selected as sanctuaries,...Therefore, ought they to give God thanks, and with sincere confession flee for refuge to His name, that so they may escape the punishment of eternal fire -- they who with lying lips took upon them this name, that they might escape the punishment of present destruction. For of those whom you see insolently and shamelessly insulting the servants of Christ, there are numbers who would not have escaped that destruction and slaughter had they not pretended that they themselves were Christ's servants. Yet now, in ungrateful pride and most impious madness, and at the risk of being punished in everlasting darkness, they perversely oppose that name under which they fraudulently protected themselves for the sake of enjoying the light of this brief life.

Gosh things haven't changed much since the fourth century. People will take all the gifts God gives them and then blame Him when things go wrong. Some things never seem to change.

I'm saying thank you to God today for every breath I take, every mouthful I eat, every thread on my back, and every person in my life who brings me joy (and even those who don't). And the next time you need refuge from the barbarians in our society, go to Church. "O God, you are my refuge and my strength."