A different persecution

It is often said, rather simplistically perhaps, that history tends to repeat itself over a period of time. Presently, there is much that is happening in the Western world, especially about Christianity, that can be compared quite correctly to what happened in Roman times after the death and resurrection of Christ.

It has to be remembered that the Romans, who were polytheists, were quite tolerant with regard to the religions of the countries they conquered. They simply added to their pantheon, which included dozens of gods, foreign cults from the countries they dominated.

Soon though, the emperor came to be worshipped as a god and, except for the Jews who, being monotheistic, were dispensed from the imperial cult, all had to submit to this rule.

When Christianity burst on the scene of Roman society, it was first regarded simply as some sort of Jewish sect and thus Christians enjoyed the same privileges as the Jews did about the worship of one God. However, as time went by, they were increasingly seen as a religious community in its own right and this is where first suspicion and then persecution began.

Over 300 years Christians were persecuted in the most terrible and cruel of manners, although there were certainly periods when they enjoyed relative peace. Why was this so? Why did this group of peaceful, law-abiding people who preached and practised love and charity and had high moral standards, was so brutality hounded all over the empire? The reasons are multiple, one of them surely being their refusal to partake in the worship of the emperor and the Roman deities.

There was, however, another major reason why this was so and this is where the analogy with the times we are living in is most evident. Here were Roman and non-Roman citizens whose ethics and morality and whose view of life were entirely different from those prevailing at the time. They did not conform to what was generally accepted and practised, especially where sexual morality was concerned.

They did not expose their babies if these were weak and not pleasing to the father, they did not believe in divorce, women and their bodies were not abused and treated as objects to be used for satisfying unbridled passions, they abhorred abortion and homosexual behaviour and incredibly enough, given the licentiousness of the time, they believed in the virtue of chastity.

This was unacceptable and so the fate of Christians was sealed. Today, two millennia later, something quite similar is happening - minus the blood, of course - although it seems that more Christians of all denominations have been put to death for their faith during the last century under the various totalitarian regimes that existed than all the Christians put together of the former 19 centuries.

Ours is an increasingly secularised world which seems to have as one of its primary aims the banishing of all vestiges pertaining to Christ and His Gospel. It will indeed tolerate Christianity provided it is dumb, private and invisible. This, nevertheless, would go against the teachings of Christ who insisted that His followers would go to the ends of the world to proclaim His teachings, even from the rooftops if necessary. Our secularised world cannot tolerate a Church, especially the Catholic Church which is bearing the brunt of this hostility, which teaches that premarital sex, divorce, abortion, homosexual behaviour, same-sex marriages and euthanasia are wrong, offend an all-loving God and will eventually prove destructive to that same society.

Our developed world, which promises so much and delivers so little in terms of hope, peace and serenity of heart, can never tolerate a Church which raises its often lone voice in favour of the unborn, the weak, the terminally ill, the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman, and declares that these are non-negotiable issues.

Thus, the parallelism with the manner with which the Roman world and our own society view Christianity could not be more obvious. Christians today are not, of course, fed to the lions or burnt on fiery crosses but are increasingly marginalised even publicly (the Rocco Buttiglione case) besides being continually derided in the media and labelled as fundamentalists, bigots or obscurantists. What chance, for example, has a doctor or a nurse to advance in his or her career in a state hospital of a country where abortion is legalised? Hardly any.

Yet, faced with the ever-advancing black tide of secularism and in a society which, as Pope Benedict has rightly called is more and more 'pleasure-loving and desperate' (gaudente e disperata) Christians are neither down-hearted nor hapless. They believe together with St Paul who, in his letter to the Romans, said that: "The sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us" and that Christ's promise, "Do not afraid, I have overcome the world" is still as valid today as it was for their forebears in the faith during their tribulations under Roman persecution.