Aprehendite disciplinam

This author recommends the reading of the City of God by St. Augustine. A Roman, he witnessed the days of the unthinkable – the plunder of Rome. I often am reminded of how our history books do great injustice to those events and depict those citizens as primitive and superstitious when in fact their civilization rivals our own in greatness in the annals in history. Not until the invention of steam engines did civilization rise to the heights of Roman standards and that is something not understood by the appalling forgetfulness of American history.

We live in the closed parenthesis of a time of which Augustine was the open, a span of years, some two millenia, in which Christendom ruled. Prior times were of persecution and martyrdom, and now, after the expulsion and marginalization of the Church and its splintered ecclesial communities, it may very well be agai; witness te storming of Churches by pro-abortion and gay activists, the refusal to allow for professionals to act according to their conscience, how right and wrong have been obscured by the sophistries of colleges and their academicians, some of these even being Catholic ones.

Here is some of what Augustine had to say to the Catholics of his times:

Book 1, Ch. 9;

Accordingly this seems to me to be one principal reason why the good are chastised along with the wicked, when God is pleased to visit with temporal punishments the profligate manners of a community. They are punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap, that the wicked, being admonished and reformed by their example, might lay hold of life eternal. And if they will not be the companions of the good in seeking life everlasting, they should be loved as enemies, and be dealt with patiently. For so long as they live, it remains uncertain whether they may not come to a better mind. These selfish persons have more cause to fear than those to whom it was said through the prophet, He is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand. Ezekiel 33:6 For watchmen or overseers of the people are appointed in churches, that they may unsparingly rebuke sin.

These overseers are our Bishops who hold the singular and distinct mandate from heaven to rebuke sin and call to righteousness. If these overseers, episcopon, have failed in this task it is they who will be called to account for every soul lost through negligence and false teaching or say says the Saint and the Prophets. We likewise must live lives exemplary of the Blood which has redeemed us and distinguish ourselves from the customs and manners of our contemporaries and serve not their idols.

Let us then think on our citizenship in the City of God, as missionaries in the City of Caesar, colonists sent to Babylon, and to understand that the goods of this world can be taken from us as quickly as those of our Roman ancestors when their city was sacked by the barbarians of which Augustine writes.

Let us then pray for Christian fortitude; Ave Maria…Pater Noster…Gloria Patri…Amen.