Ronald Reagan's Veteran's Day Prayer

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On the Atomic Bombings

Today is the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I guess this is the time to address something that I’ve been considering for a while; it’s a point where I disagree with many other Catholics and even the general opinion of the Church itself.

I support the atomic bombings of Japan at the end of WWII.

My main reason for doing so, and the reason I find arguments that this is ‘utilitarianism’ or such like unconvincing is that I have never once heard anyone present a viable alternative that wouldn’t have clearly resulted in many more deaths and much greater suffering. Yes, atomic bombs are horrible things, but I wonder if we’re so awed by their terrible power that we forget that there are many things that are, in their way, worse.

From what I understand, there were four options available to the US at the end of WWII to deal with Japan:

1.     Drop the Atomic Bombs to try to force a surrender

2.     Increase conventional bombing to try to force a surrender

3.     Blockade the islands until the Japanese had to surrender

4.     A full-scale invasion of mainland Japan using conventional forces.

Let’s set the first one aside for the moment and consider the second. Something we forget is that many, many more Japanese civilians died in conventional bombing raids than in the atomic bombs. I won’t comment on the morality of this, but the fact is that, when the Americans firebombed Tokyo in Operation Meetinghouse, months before Hiroshima, more people died than in either atomic bombing. And Tokyo, together with other Japanese cities, had been enduring this sort of thing for years (estimates of the death toll from air raids over Japan range as high as 900,000). Now, since Japan had weathered that firestorm, was there any reason to believe that continuous bombings would be any more successful? And even if they were, this would have to mean increasing the scale of the bombings, meaning more nights like Operation Meetinghouse, and one after another after another. However justified or unjustified killing 250,000 people with two bombs may have been, I don’t think killing twice that number with a million bombs would be any better.

Now regarding the third option. I think that sounds, to our ears, like the most humane; just blockade the islands and starve them out.

Starve. Them. Out.

Think of what that means. The Islands of Japan all starving. And while you consider that, remember that Japan – especially Imperial Japan – was a very militaristic culture, where suicide had long been regarded as an honorable thing (even today, Japan is the suicide capital of the world). And you know what a common method of suicide was? Self starvation. Faced with the choice between surrender and national suicide by starvation, I honestly think that, at best, it would have taken the Japanese a long time to decide on the former. In meantime, millions of people all around the island starve to death. Again, I don’t see how that would be any morally superior to the atomic bombings.

Oh, and let’s not forget that, while both these options were going on, Japanese forces are still fighting in Manchuria, and thousands of people – soldiers and civilians – are dying every day. China, remember, had the worst civilian casualties of the whole war, and that was due almost entirely to the Japanese. So not only are the Japanese dying by the thousand while we bomb them or starve them out (or, more likely, both), but so are the Chinese.

Both these options would have dragged on the war and cost far more lives than the atomic bombings. And, we must remember, there’s really no guarantee that either would have worked. It isn’t at all outside the range of possibilities that that Japanese, even with their cities burning and their people starving to death, would have sat down and let themselves be slaughtered piecemeal rather than surrender. Even after the atomic bombings the military commanders still wanted to fight on, and even attempted to kidnap the Emperor on the way to his announcement of Japan’s surrender. I don’t think either firebombs (which they had endured for years already) nor starvation (which they would have viewed as honorable) would have been any more convincing.

That leaves two options: the atomic bombs and the invasion.

The invasion option, I trust, doesn’t need much explanation to see why it was undesirable. Casualty estimates famously ranged into the millions for the Allies, and God alone knows how many Japanese would have been killed. Moreover, we’re talking about a nation that was arming civilians with broomsticks and training children to pack on explosives and dive under tanks. Would there have been a Japan at all after such an invasion? I doubt it. Even if there were, let’s not forget that hundreds of thousands of our grandfathers would have gone down on Japanese soil rather than coming home after their long years at war. I remember someone, I can’t remember who, imagining President Truman telling hundreds of thousands of grieving mothers and widows that the war could have been ended a year earlier without invading Japan, but they decided it wouldn’t be morally right to do so.

That thought puts things a little into perspective, doesn’t it? As horrible as the bombings were, is it at all likely that an invasion, or a blockade, or what have you would have been any less horrible? Isn’t it more likely that, dragged on for months or even years, they would have been far, far worse?

Essentially, the issue was this; America was at war with Japan and had been for nearly four years. America had a very powerful new weapon, one so powerful that it thought might end the war immediately and with less loss of life on either side than could be reasonably expected from any other method. America used that weapon against two military targets (and yes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets; they had barracks, steel-mills, and so on used to fuel the Japanese war machine). In the process, many thousands of civilians were killed along with the military personnel. Tragic? Yes. Horrific? Yes. Unjustified and evil? I have to say no. Dropping the atomic bomb was simply the best option available, both tactically and morally speaking. That certainly doesn’t make it a “good thing” in and of itself, but it does, I think, justify it.

In any case, let’s take a moment today to pray for the souls of both the victims of the bombings and those who committed it. They are both in God’s hands now, and He knows best. 

Vive Christus Rex! 

Famous Catholic Friday: Gen. James Longstreet

Since we did a Union General last time, this week we turn to the Southern side.

Catholic Credentials: Devout Catholic covert; man of deep integrity.

Nerd Credentials: One of Robert E. Lee’s most trusted and effective commanders; diplomat and civil servant.

                Robert E. Lee may be the most iconic Southern General, but perhaps no Confederate Commander embodied the tragedy and contradictions of the Civil War like James Longstreet.           
                 Longstreet was born in what is now North Augusta, South Carolina, on January 8^th, 1821. He spent his boyhood working on his father’s farm, where his tough, ‘rocklike’ character inspired his father to nickname him ‘Pete,’ a name his friends would call him for the rest of his life. His father early on decided on a military career for his boy and to prepare him academically sent him to live with his editor/minister uncle, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. When his father died in 1833, twelve year old Pete remained with his uncle.

                At West Point, Longstreet failed to distinguish himself much. He was a poor student and frequently in trouble, but he at least managed to make a large number of friends, including his roommate, William S. Rosecrans, George H. Thomas, George Pickett, and Ulysses S. Grant. He graduated 54^th out of his class of 56 and was commissioned a second lieutenant and stationed in Missouri alongside Grant. During their time in Missouri, both men met and courted their respective wives. Longstreet wooed Maria Louisa Garland, the daughter of their regimental commander, while Grant fell passionately in love with Longstreet’s fourth cousin, Julia Dent. 

                But before love came war. Conflict over the border of Texas had sparked the Mexican War, and both Grant and Longstreet were called to the front. Longstreet served with distinction, rising to the rank of Major while commanding part of the 8^th US Infantry during the battles of Veracruz, Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec. During the latter battle, he was wounded in the leg while carrying the regimental colors up a fortified hill, which he passed on to his friend, George Pickett, who carried them to the top.

                While he recuperated following the war, Longstreet married Maria and served as a groomsman at Grant’s wedding to Julia. Unlike his friend, Longstreet chose to remain in the Army following the war and served on the Texas frontier, running scouting missions and drilling the 8^th Infantry.

                His life, like so many others, was irrevocably changed on April 12^th, 1861 when Confederate guns opened fire on Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Though he personally was unenthusiastic about the prospect of succession, Longstreet had been taught by his uncle to believe in States’ Rights, so he resigned his commission and cast his lot with the Confederacy. He was quickly commissioned a brigadier general by President Jefferson Davis and was assigned to Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard.  In this capacity, Longstreet played a minor role during the First Battle of Bull Run, where he endured nine hours of artillery fire and was refused permission to pursue the fleeing Union Army, an action that may have changed the course of the entire war.

                As the Confederate Army solidified itself, Longstreet began to prove himself one of its stars. He put in a strong showing during the Peninsula Campaign, harassing and delaying the hapless Gen. McClellan on his march towards Richmond, and nearly destroyed the Union Army in the Battle of Seven Days with his aggressive assaults. By the end of the campaign, he had become Lee’s most trusted lieutenant, the “staff in my right hand” as Lee put it.

With its imposing trio of commanders at its head – Lee, Longstreet, and Stonewall Jackson – the Confederate Army seemed nearly invincible. Again and again it inflicted humiliating loses on the Army of the Potomac. The Second Battle of Bull Run proved even worse for the Federals than the first, while the winter battle at Fredericksburg was nothing short of a nightmare for the Union. Longstreet played key roles in both battles, including organizing the brutal defenses at Fredericksburg which led to the Union taking eight times as many casualties as the Confederates. The only time they were stopped was at Antietem, where Lee’s initial plan to take the fight to Union territory was turned back in the bloodiest single day in American history. During the battle, Longstreet held off a Union force twice his size to prevent the collapse of Lee’s army.

One of the keys to Longstreet’s success was that he was one of the few commanders in the war who understood the way improved technology had changed the battlefield. With the old ball-and-flint muskets, the attackers had the advantage over the defenders. But with the huge new rifled firearms that were being used now, the defenders could tear an exposed line of marching men to pieces. Again and again, Longstreet exploited this insight to inflict horrific casualties on the Union lines.

Then, in spring 1863 came the Confederacies greatest and most costly victory: Chancellorsville. Lee almost literally ran circles around Union General Joseph Hooker, defeating a force twice his size with a series of brilliant maneuvers. The South had lost fewer men than the North, but one of them was a man they absolutely could not afford to lose. Stonewall Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops while scouting for a follow-up night attack and died a short time later.

Longstreet was not present at the battle. He had been sent several days earlier to besiege to city of Suffolk, Virginia. Following the battle, he and Lee met to discuss the possibility of once again taking the war to the north in the form of a large scale incursion into Pennsylvania, with the potential of assaulting Washington. Longstreet argued against this idea, proposing instead that he should take a portion of the army to confront Ulysses S. Grant, who, along with Gen. Rosecrans, was scoring victory after victory in Tennessee and was currently approaching Vicksburg, potentially capturing the Mississippi River in the process. Lee responded that General Bragg could handle Grant and Rosecrans in the West and denied Longstreet’s request. And so the Army of Northern Virginia, with Lee and Longstreet at its head, marched north on its fateful journey into Pennsylvania.

A chance encounter over a supply of shoes sent both the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac (now commanded by the lackluster General Meade) racing to the sleepy college town of Gettysburg. The Confederates quickly occupied the town, while the Union took the heights of Cemetery Ridge, Culp’s Hill, and Big and Little Round Top. On the second day of the battle, Lee sent Longstreet to dislodge the Union from the Round Tops and so march along the heights rather than attacking them directly. It took Longstreet most of the day to get into position, and when he did he encountered fierce resistance at the local peach orchard, wheat field, and a rocky area nicknamed ‘the Devil’s Den.’ Longstreet managed to drive the Union back from these positions, almost completely destroying the Union Third Corps in the process, but were unable to take the heights, largely due to the incredible courage of the Union 20^th Maine on Little Round Top, who held the Confederates off with a bayonet charge after their ammo ran out.

With the Union Line intact and stronger than ever, Lee conceived of an uncharacteristically desperate plan: he would mass he forces and send them straight into the Union line, hoping to break through and seize the strategically crucial Cemetery Ridge by sheer force. Longstreet objected that this was suicidal, but Lee again overruled him. Resigned to his duty, Longstreet ordered his men as well as he could and, too choked with emotional turmoil to speak, gave the order to march with a nod. The center of the assault was led by Longstreet’s friend, George Pickett, who was eager for the chance as his unit had largely missed the fighting so far.

Longstreet had been correct; what became known as Pickett’s Charge was suicide. Twelve thousand men marched in line across three-quarters-of-a-mile of open field straight into the teeth of Union guns and artillery. The Confederates reached the Union line in only one place, a bend in the road called ‘the angle’ where they were quickly repulsed, losing their corps commander, Brig. Gen. Armistead in the process. Longstreet later delivered Armistead’s personal bible to his wife, as per the man’s dying wishes.

Half the men who stepped out on Pickett’s Charge never returned. Pickett himself lost seventy percent of his troops. When General Lee ordered Pickett to form up his division in case of a Union counterattack, Pickett gave the agonized response, “General Lee, I have no division!”

The Confederacy would never recover from the blow, and neither Pickett nor Longstreet would ever forgive Lee for his decision. Following their retreat into Virginia, Longstreet again requested permission to go West, even though Vicksburg had fallen the very day after Gettysburg, and just as he had predicted, the Union now controlled the Mississippi, cutting the South in two. The request was granted in September, 1863. Longstreet travelled nearly eight-hundred miles, taking twenty-six cannons and several thousand men with him, to try to reinforce Bragg, arriving just in time to take part in the Battle of Chickamauga. A devastating mistake by Longstreet’s friend, Gen. Rosecrans, allowed him to rip through the Union lines and nearly destroy the army. He was stopped only by the tenacious defense of another West Point friend, George H. Thomas on Snodgrass Hill.

Bragg’s conduct during the battle was inept; he failed to coordinate his men effectively to trap Thomas, allowing the battered Army of the Cumberland to escape. Longstreet was furious and tried to have Bragg removed, joining with a number of other commanders in the effort. Eventually, President Davis had to intercede, and when he did, he sided with Bragg.

In retaliation, Bragg reduced Longstreet’s command to the men that had come with him from Virginia. He also rejected a plan by Longstreet to head off Union reinforcements that were approaching Chattanooga, with result that Chattanooga, the last Confederate stronghold in Tennessee, fell to the Union in November, 1863.

Disgusted by the conduct of the war in the west, Longstreet headed back to Virginia, soon pursued by Gen. William T. Sherman, whom he managed to escape during the winter. In Virginia, Longstreet learned that Grant had taken command of the whole Union Army. “He will fight us every day and every hour until the end of the war,” he warned gloomily. Yet, like Lee, Longstreet was determined to see things through to the end. He struck a devastating blow during the vicious Battle of the Wilderness, causing one of the Union Commanders he fought to later comment “You rolled me up like a wet blanket,” but he was wounded in the process, shot, like Jackson, by his own men by mistake. This prevented him from pressing his attack, allowing the Union to regroup and continue fighting. The wound kept Longstreet out of the war for most of the spring and summer of 1864.

The unbeatable Confederate command team had been shattered, with Jackson dead and Longstreet wounded. Meanwhile the Union now had a spearhead of commanders of its own in the form of Generals Grant, Sherman, and Phil Sheridan. Together, they mauled the Confederacy throughout 1864 in an almost continuous series of vicious encounters. Sherman ravaged Georgia and South Carolina, Sheridan burned the Shenandoah Valley, and Grant held onto Lee like a bulldog as he wrestled his way closer to Richmond, finally ending with the extended Siege of Petersburg.

Longstreet recovered in time to command the defenses at Petersburg, and when Grant finally broke through his lines retreated with Lee to Appomattox Courthouse. There he counseled Lee to accept Grant’s surrender, trusting that his old friend would be fair to the Confederacy. Lee took Longstreet’s advice, and Grant lived up to his expectations.

With the end of the war, Longstreet moved his family (minus three of his ten children, who had died in a Scarlett Fever epidemic in Richmond) to New Orleans, where he became interested in the cotton and railroad businesses. He was initially refused a pardon from President Andrew Johnson, on the grounds that he had “given the Union too much trouble.” “There are three persons of the South who can never receive amnesty,” Johnson told him. “Mr. Davis, General Lee, and yourself.” Nevertheless, with help from Grant, the U.S. Congress went over Johnson’s head and gave Longstreet his citizenship back in 1868.

Longstreet put his citizenship to work by becoming the only major Confederate officer to join the Republican Party. He endorsed Grant for President and attended his inauguration ceremonies. Grant repaid him by appointing Longstreet as customs surveyor in New Orleans. All this, coupled with his criticism of the beloved Lee, earned him the everlasting hatred of the South. He furthered his pariah status by commanding a force of police and Black militia troops against a rioting White League in New Orleans in 1874. He was wounded and captured by the League, who locked him in his own customs house. When they gave the rebel yell, Longstreet shot them a disdainful look and said “I have heard the yell before.” He was rescued three days later when the League was driven from the city by federal troops sent by Grant.

So unpopular was Longstreet with his fellow southerners that even when he attended services at the local Episcopalian Church the congregation would get up and walk out rather than sit with him. When a local priest, Father Abram Ryan (who had been a Confederate chaplain), discovered this, he invited Longstreet to join the Catholic Church, where he assured him that people only came to worship God and didn’t give a hoot about politics. Longstreet converted in 1877 and remained a devout communicant for the rest of his life.

From then on, he remained active. He served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1880-1881, a U.S. Marshall from 1881-1884, and U.S. Railroad Commissioner from 1897-1904 under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt. His wife Maria died in 1889, and Longstreet unexpectedly married again in 1897, to a woman nearly forty years his junior named Helen Dortch. A fire in 1889 unfortunately destroyed most of his Civil War documents, meaning that he was largely unable to defend his legacy during his lifetime. He died in 1904 of pneumonia at the age of 82, having outlived most of his critics. His widow, Helen, outlived him by fifty-eight years, most of which she dedicated to restoring his reputation as one of the great generals of the Confederacy.

Longstreet was a man of immense dignity and principles who understood the war he was fighting better than most of his contemporaries, even, on occasion, his legendary commander. His conduct during the war was mostly a series doing his best in the face of highly adversarial circumstances and receiving little but criticism for reward. Strangely enough, it was that criticism and adversity that drew him into the Church of Christ. His story is a reminder that God uses our adversity to bring us to him.

Vive Christus Rex!

June 6th, 1944

 

If you know one of the few who remain who fought at Normandy, take a moment to say thank you while you still can. We owe so much to them. 

If not, watch President Reagan's tribute to the honor and valor of those men.

Vive Christus Rex!

Easter Reflections

            In lieu of my usual scripture reflections this week, I’d like to present some thoughts on a very odd fact.

            The odd fact is this, succinctly put; Christianity stands and falls entirely upon a single historical event – the resurrection of Jesus. This event is, by all known laws of nature, impossible. Yet no one has satisfactorily explained the existence or rise of Christianity apart from it.

            As to the fact that Christianity depends entirely upon the resurrection, St. Paul says as much in his First Letter to the Corinthians: “If Christ has not risen, our preaching is worthless and your faith is in vain.” (1^st Corinthians 15: 14). The earliest Christians depended heavily upon the resurrection in their preaching, as shown in the Acts of the Apostles. No, there’s really no question that this is the crux upon which the whole system hangs.

            Well, that should be easy enough, right? People don’t come back from the dead, especially not in the strange, superhuman manner that Jesus is described as. But the problem is that it becomes very difficult to explain the events otherwise. First of all, where was Jesus’s body? It obviously wasn’t still in its tomb, since if it were the Romans or Pharisees could simply have taken the people down and showed them. So, one or more of His followers must have stolen it to perpetuate the myth of the resurrection. That and the absurd idea that He actually did rise again from the dead are really the only two options that would explain the fact that Christianity was able to gain any traction at all.

            But now we run into two major problems; first of all, it’s quite a leap from ‘the body is missing’ to ‘He’s risen again!’ The Gospel accounts don’t have the Apostles making the leap until they actually see Him. Indeed, when Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb, her first thought is, quite sensibly, that someone moved the body. It wasn’t until she actually met Jesus face-to-face that she realized what happened.

            People fall into a strange trap here when trying to avoid the resurrection; on the one hand, they seem to say, the Apostles were so fanatical and ignorant that they immediately leapt to the conclusion that an empty tomb = a resurrected Jesus when, as they are eager to point out, there are plenty of other explanations for that particular state of affairs. On the other, the Apostles were shrewd and cunning enough to write the Gospels in such a way as to make themselves look incredulous and doubting so as to lend psychological weight to their evidence. You really can’t have it both ways; someone gullible enough to leap to assuming the resurrection on the sole basis of an empty tomb would not simultaneously be clever and subtle enough to realize how feeble that evidence was and build it up with imagined doubts that were only dispelled by hard evidence. And they certainly wouldn’t keep reemphasizing the existence of eyewitnesses and declaring that this event is the one thing upon which their faith lives or dies on.

            In short, to lay the kind of emphasis upon it that they do, the Apostles and Evangelists would have had to honestly believe in the resurrection, but if they honestly believed in it on the sole evidence of an empty tomb, they wouldn’t have been clever enough to simply make up the other evidence that they present. 

            That’s the first problem. The second is this; let’s assume the Apostles (i.e. a bunch of poor fishermen and tax collectors) actually were just that clever and decided to fake the resurrection somehow, complete with witnesses and stories of initial doubts removed by encounters with the risen Christ. I’m sure that if you really wanted, you could finagle a nice little conspiracy theory that would cover all the bases. The question emerges, though, of why? How do they benefit? Well, you might say, it was a power play! But what power? The Church had no power for the first three hundred years of her existence! Most of the first generation of Christians were executed by the authorities, including all but one of the Apostles themselves. They never got rich or acquired any kind of political or military power. So what was the point? Did the Apostles get together and say “well, it’s entirely possible that several hundred years down the road the Church will grow large enough that some members of the hierarchy will be able to acquire wealth and political power through it, so let’s take our little conspiracy to the grave”?

            So, in summary, in order for the Apostles to have faked the resurrection, they would have had to be extremely cunning and bold men with a deep understanding of human psychology, and who valued the worldly power and prestige of men who might exist several centuries in the future over their own lives and welfare.

            Ah, you might be saying, but what if they did it in order to keep the teachings of Jesus alive? What if they really believed in Christ’s teachings, despite the lack of a resurrection?

            Well, a couple things there. First of all, if they believed that Jesus was the Son of God – was, in fact, God incarnate – the lack of a resurrection would seem to disprove that idea (as, indeed, the Gospels show it to; after Christ’s death, the disciples assumed that He wasn’t the Messiah after all until He appeared to them (e.g. Luke 24: 13-24)). Okay, so throw out the Messianic claims to divinity then; wouldn’t it be worth keeping the ‘spirit’ of Jesus alive for His moral and theological teachings?

            The trouble is, you could do that without the resurrection. Rather than inventing a resurrection account that never occurred and basing the entire faith upon it, wouldn’t it be much easier and safer to simply present Him as a prophet and cut out or provide alternate explanations for His talk of rising from the dead?  Wouldn’t that be the most logical way to ‘keep the teachings of Jesus alive,’ especially for orthodox Jews?

            That is the way with most anti-resurrection accounts: they sound good at first glance, but once you start thinking about them and comparing them with the evidence, you find that they break down (I’m not even going to deal with the ‘Jesus was just a myth’ nonsense here: that’s worth a whole post on its own). There simply is no way to explain why the Apostles made their teachings entirely dependent upon this event except that they honestly believed it actually occurred, and their description of the event is too subtle and rings too true to have simply been concocted by ignorant, gullible peasants to lend credence to their own foolish beliefs. 

            No, judging by the historical record the only rational conclusion is that Jesus actually did rise from the dead on Easter Sunday. Glory to God!

Vive Christus Rex! 

The Real St. Nicholas

St. Nicholas of Myra

Patron of: Children, sailors, the falsely accused.

It’s Advent time! And you know what that means; Christmas is just around the corner! Since we’re going to be hearing a lot about Ol’ St. Nick in the coming weeks (and since today, Dec. 6^th, is his feast day), I thought now would be a good time to give you a primer on the real St. Nick. Oh, yes; Santa Claus is real, don’t let anyone tell you differently (as a matter of fact, there are a number of St. Nicks, including one of the greatest Popes of the Middle Ages, but for some reason only one of them got pop-culture status and an academy award for Edmund Gwenn).

Of course, our image of Santa Claus is much different from the real thing. The real St. Nick never went to the North Pole, for instance; he lived in Turkey. As far as we know, he didn’t own a flying sleigh pulled by eight-or-nine reindeer, and ‘Rudolphus’ was the name of his horse (still had a fluorescent red nose though; that part is historical fact).*

*Haven’t been able to find documentation confirming this.

As a matter of fact, the real St. Nick was less like this:

And more like this:

Yes, I’m serious. St. Nicholas was the 4^th Century Church’s equivalent of that one uncle who was a Marine before coming home and doing a nickel for assault, but who’s a blast when he comes around for Thanksgiving and always sends you the kind of presents that your parents won’t let you play with until you’re older.

When Nicholas was a boy, growing up in Patara (in modern day Turkey), he was first raised by his rich Christian parents, but then when they died by his uncle and namesake, who was bishop. Young Nicholas was exceptionally religious and devout, so Uncle Nick ordained the young man as a priest.

Once that was done, Nicholas determined to go on pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land, which he duly did (he was the kind of guy who typically got his way when he made up his mind to something). Upon returning from his pilgrimage, Nicholas was installed as Bishop of Myra (another city in Asia Minor). Bad timing, though, since this was during the rise of Diocletian, when Catholics were viewed with suspicion, publically ridiculed, and persecuted for their beliefs.

Mutationis Possumus Credere

Nicholas was comparatively lucky; he only got thrown in prison. Many of his fellow bishops and Christians got executed. Of course, prison meant frequent beatings, torture, and (judging by his later actions) probably his fair-share of fights. Prison life is always rough, and Roman jails were no different. We can assume that, when he wasn’t beating or getting beaten, Nicholas spent his time ‘inside’ evangelizing his fellow prisoners, ministering to fellow Christians, and teaching squealers the price of betrayal.

“Ho ho ho!”

But, of course, Diocletian couldn’t live forever. After his death (and a lot of civil war and intrigue that we can’t get into here), Constantine assumed the throne and declared religious freedom throughout the Empire. Nicholas and his fellow bishops walked free again, though whether any of them went south, built a boat, and started a fishing business with their best friend isn’t recorded. Instead, Nicholas found a bunch of pagan shrines messing up his diocese and inviting a bunch of pesky demons to trouble his people. In response, he went on something of a pious rampage; smashing pagan structures, breaking idols, and driving the presumably-terrified demons out of his city.

So, released from jail and purged of demonic influence, Nicholas resumed his ministry, free at last. But all was not well. An old heresy, given new life by the smarmy, ivory-tower intellectual Bishop Arius of Nicomedia, was seeping through the Church like poison. Arianism, as it was called, denied the Divinity of Christ, instead positing that He was an inferior, intermediary ‘god’ created by God to be a kind of buffer to creation (this was based on the neo-platonic system of belief, which is way too complicated to get into here).

This, as you can imagine, was causing problems; bishops were falling away, and there were ‘Orthodox-vs.-Arian’ riots all throughout the empire. The bishops who remained faithful typically found themselves run out of town by angry mobs, or, alternatively, were stirring up angry mobs to run the Arians out of town.

Constantine, of course, found all this most distressing and tried to settle the matter with a ‘cease and desist’ letter, in which he urged the bishops to stop making such a fuss over matters of no real importance.

That worked about as well as you’d expect.

Having failed spectacularly at his first attempt, the emperor decided to try a different approach. With the help of Pope Sylvester I (of whom there is no recorded instance of his attempting to eat Tweety Bird), the emperor invited all the bishops to meet at Nicea so that they could discuss the matter (Sylvester himself didn’t attend; he had enough work to do in Rome. He did, however, send representatives to ensure a papal presence).

Nicholas, who had spent ten years on the inside for his faith, wasn’t going to stand for some jumped-up little college-boy spreading lies about it; no sir! So he saddled up and, together with bishops from all around the world, made his way to Nicea.

At the council, with Constantine presiding, the bishops heard the different arguments for and against the Divinity of Christ, both from experts and from novices (most notably from a young deacon named Athanasius of Alexandria). 

When Arius got up and made his case, with (presumably) many a sneer and snide remark about the intelligence of his opponents, Nicholas sat quietly and listened for as long as he could, but finally had had enough. He got up and offered his counterargument: a sock to the jaw.

“Consubstantial with the Father, punk!”

For this outburst of righteous anger, Constantine had Nicholas stripped of the symbols of his office: his pallium and personal copy of the Gospels, and threw him in the dungeon to cool off. While he was in there, Nicholas had a vision of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin.

"Why are you here?" Jesus asked.

"Because I love you, my Lord and my God," Nicholas replied.

Then Jesus presented Nicholas with his copy of the Gospels, and Mary re-vested him with his pallium.

Needless to say, when Constantine and the other bishops heard of this, they let Nicholas out of the dungeon and allowed him to rejoin the council.

Whether that well-placed blow and subsequent diving intervention had anything to do with it or not the Council rejected Arianism; affirming that Jesus was “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father;” the same faith that we profess today. 

Final vote?  230 to 2.

Of course, life wasn’t all prison riots and debate-floor brawls; he had his flock to manage. Nicholas may have been a tough-old-spit, but he was a tough-old-spit who loved his people; particularly children. For instance, one famous tale involves a poor father who had three daughters, whom he couldn’t afford dowries for. Nicholas, hearing about this, surreptitiously tossed sacks of gold through the man’s window as each girl came of age, thus saving them from falling into destitution and probably becoming prostitutes.

There’s another story about three soldiers, who were stationed near Myra and came into town on leave. A fight broke out around them, and the three were hauled off to be executed for causing a disturbance. Nicholas arrived to help calm things down (guy knew his way around riots, remember) and witnesses swore to him that the three soldiers were innocent and lamented that if only he had come sooner he could have saved them. Nicholas raced to the jail to find the three men bound and just about to be put to death. As the executioner raised his sword, Nicholas charged in, grabbed it out of the man’s hand and threw it away.

I assume that afterwards he had a stern conversation with the guy on the left about wearing pink skirts.

Another miracle happened during the great famine that occurred at Myra from 311-12; a ship loaded with wheat bound for Constantinople and the Emperor’s table was docked at Myra. Nicholas asked that some of the wheat be given out to help the starving people. The sailors were reluctant, since they’d get in big trouble if they didn’t deliver the correct amount of wheat. Nicholas assured them that they wouldn’t suffer any loss, and so they agreed (again, Nicholas typically got his way). After leaving two-years worth of wheat behind, the sailors moved on to Constantinople, presumably wondering how they let that scary bearded priest talk them into this, and oh, god, they were going to get fired and possibly killed…but upon arrival they found that they had the exact same amount of wheat as they had loaded on.

During that same famine, there’s a story of an evil butcher who decided to save his business by luring three children into his shop, murdering them, and hiding their bodies in vat of pickles to be served later as tenderloins. Nicholas got word of it, uncovered the bodies, and miraculously brought the three boys back to life (no word on what he did to the butcher; it probably wasn’t pretty).

St. Nicholas: if you hurt children he will beat you to death and then raise you from the dead to do it again.

So you’d better watch out. You’d better not lie. You’d better not blaspheme, or he’ll make you cry…

He died on the 6^th of December, in either 345 or 352 (we’re a little hazy on how or where exactly), and was buried on the island of Gemile. Most of his relics, however, were removed in the 11^th century in the wake of the invading Turks and today reside in Venice.

Devotion to St. Nicholas includes the practice of giving gifts to children on his feast day. Traditionally, children would leave their shoes outside their doors at night, which their parents would fill with goodies to be discovered when they awoke. Over the years, and thanks to a large commercialization effort, this has morphed into the image of Santa Claus that so dominates the Advent season (though I’m still not clear why we have a fat, jolly-old reindeer-farmer/toy-maker instead of a badass ex-con heresy-and-crime fighter/demon slayer)

As a side note, while I’m not necessarily against Santa Claus, I can’t help thinking that St. Nicholas would have been a bit miffed to discover that a cuddly hallmark version of himself has largely usurped the celebration of Christmas from Jesus. I imagine he would have words for the people and organizations responsible. And by ‘words’ I mean ‘savage beatings.’

Be afraid, Coca-Cola; be very afraid.

St. Nicholas, pray for us that the True Meaning of Christmas may shine through.

Sources:

http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/bishop-of-myra/

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm

Vive Christus Rex!

Famous Catholic Friday: J.R.R. Tolkien

Fridays are Famous Catholics Day!

Every Friday I’m going to do a profile of a famous Catholic to provide a sample of the vast diversity that is found in the Universal Church.

To kick things off, we have one Catholic that every nerd knows about; Prof. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings.

Here seen shortly after his marriage looking dashing in his army uniform

Catholic Credentials: Raised by a priest from the age of 12; lifelong devout Catholic; devoted husband and father of four children; author of the greatest work of Catholic literature of the 20^th century.

Nerd Credentials: Polyglot and first-rate scholar of Philology and Medieval Literature; champion of fairy tales and monsters; made up his own languages and a mythology to match; author of The Lord of the Rings; creator of the modern fantasy novel.  

‘Ronald’ (as he preferred to be called) was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa to English parents. His only souvenir from Africa was arachnophobia brought on by a large spider. When he was three, his father died, necessitating him, his mother, and his younger brother to remain in England (where they were visiting family) without any income. Not long afterwards, his mother converted to Catholicism, earning her the ire of her Baptist family and removing the last financial assistance they had. She died shortly thereafter, when Ronald was twelve, leaving the two boys in the care of Father Francis Morgan.

The two boys would rise early every morning and toddle along to help Fr. Morgan say Mass before going off to school. Ronald had proved himself a bright pupil early on (he could read and write fluently at age four) and soon excelled at studying languages.

As he grew into young adulthood, however, his studies encountered an unexpected distraction in the form of a raven-haired fellow boarder at the lodging house where he lived named Edith Bratt. By Ronald’s seventeenth year, the two were in love, despite the fact that she was a Protestant.

Fr. Morgan was not impressed. Angry that Ronald was falling behind in his studies and worried about his romancing a Protestant girl, he forbade Ronald to see her until his twenty-first birthday. After a few attempts to find a loophole (e.g. by wandering around town for hours until he ‘happened’ to run into her), Ronald settled down and obeyed the order, diligently working to complete his studies under his guardian’s watchful eye. Midnight on his twenty-first birthday, however, Ronald wrote to Edith asking her to marry him.

A few days later, he got his reply: she was engaged to another man.

After Ronald had (presumably) finished wailing in despair, he discovered that things weren’t quite as bleak as they appeared. Edith had admitted that she had only agreed to marry the other guy because she had thought Ronald had forgotten about her, and it was more a match of prudence than of love. They agreed to meet and, after talking it over, renewed their love. Edith gave back her fiancé’s ring, converted to Catholicism (though a little more hastily than she would have liked, at Ronald’s insistence), and the two were married at long last.

Unfortunately, their honeymoon had to be cut short. By the time they were married it was 1916, and Europe was at war. Ronald had resisted pressure to enlist straight away in 1914 (as so many of England’s youth did), opting instead to finish his studies before entering a junior officer program. In June 1916, just two months after his wedding, Ronald shipped out for the killing fields of France, arriving just in time for the Battle of the Somme.

For those who are unfamiliar with the First World War, let me describe it this way; if you took every battle in every war ever fought and tried to make a list of the top ten worst, bloodiest, most nightmarishly horrific battles of all time, the Somme Offensive would be somewhere near the top of the list. 

The battle (which lasted for almost five months) was a nightmare for all involved, junior signal officer Ronald Tolkien no less than anyone else. At the same time, however, Tolkien was always grateful for one aspect of the battle; it taught him a profound respect for the ‘Tommys:’ the enlisted soldier whom, in Ronald’s own words, “was far braver and more noble than I was.” As with many other officers, Tolkien learned to disdain the divisions of class and to revere the common man.

Before the end of the battle, Ronald came down with trench fever, causing him to be shipped back to England to recover. All but one of his closest school friends, however, would never return to England at all.

Ronald spent the rest of the war alternating between guard duty and sick leave, but during his down time he began to write stories; stories based on languages he had developed. You see, Tolkien was a firm believer in the power of languages, and their inseparable connection with culture and folklore. So, having come up with languages, he naturally needed to create a culture for them to exist in.

Meanwhile, the war ended and the impoverished young scholar with his growing family first got a job working on the Oxford English Dictionary, then took a teaching job at the University of Leeds before finally settling down as Professor of Philology (the study of languages, for those who don’t know) at Oxford, a position he held for the rest of his life.

In the course of his scholarly work, he translated Medieval works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into English and convinced the rest of the academic world to take the former seriously for the first time. He also championed the serious study and reading of ‘Fairy Stories,’ wrote on the power and meaning of the storytelling instinct, and helped convert his atheist friend C.S. Lewis to Christianity (though, to his disappointment, Lewis stopped just short of Catholicism).

Oh, and when he was 45 years old he also pounded out a little children’s book that you may have heard of; name of The Hobbit. Then, when his publisher asked for a sequel, he spent the next decade or so composing the greatest literary work of the twentieth century: The Lord of the Rings.

Having achieved a work of artistic genius, sparked a literary revolution (which he was not entirely happy about), and made major contributions to the fields of Philology and Medieval Literature, Tolkien pretty much continued as he ever had; teaching his classes (until he retired in 1959), attending meeting of “The Inklings:” a small society of authors who met at a local pub to share their works and views, raised his family, and set to work compiling his many, many other writings about Middle-Earth into what eventually became The Silmarillion.

 His works and his life reflect his devout Catholic faith. His writings are laced through with Christian philosophy and beliefs: the parasitic nature of evil and the primacy of good, the dangers of pride and greed and the greatness of humility and love, the need for mercy and repentance, the imperfectability of mankind. In life he was a frequent communicant and was especially devoted to the Blessed Virgin (Galadriel, and Gimli’s love for her, was intended as an image of Marian piety). Of course, as a philologist and lover of languages, he didn’t much care for the changes of Vatican II and would continue to loudly use the Latin responses at Mass for the rest of his life.

In 1971, Tolkien’s beloved wife Edith died; a blow that he never recovered from. Twenty-one sad months later, Ronald joined her. On their tombstone, under their respective names are inscribed “Beren” and “Luthien:” the subjects of Tolkien’s romantic masterpiece, The Lay of Lethian, which tells of how Luthien, the most beautiful of all living things, forsook her immortality to marry the mortal, Beren.

Tolkien teaches us that we can and ought to imbue everything we create with our faith, and that we can love the things we are suited to love while still finding God in them.

Vive Christus Rex!

Our Patron and Our Aim

                  There was a young man living in France in the latter half of the sixteenth century named Francis. His father was a rich lawyer and, naturally, expected his eldest son to become one as well, so he sent Francis off to the current equivalent of Harvard law-school. Francis, however, had a Dead Poets Society style experience and decided that he’d much rather become a priest. So he quit his job as a lawyer, rejected the stuffy society chick his dad had picked out for him, and entered the seminary. His father tried to intervene, but fortunately Francis had the very cool (and presumably Robin-Williams-esque) Bishop of Geneva on his side, who managed to convince Francis Sr. to give in.

                  Not content with his cushy office in the Diocese of Geneva, Francis decided to go off and evangelize the region of Le Chablais AKA Huguenot central. Ever see the movie The Warriors? It’s basically like that, except there was only Francis and his cousin, they were unarmed, and they went there on purpose to evangelize (also, the villain here was Calvin, not Luther). 

"Catholics! Come out and plaaaaayyy!"

                  After camping out in the winter, hiding from wolves, and a couple of assassination attempts, Francis’s cousin said “screw this!” and left. Francis himself, meanwhile, was having trouble getting his message across since people kept slamming their doors in his face:

                  “I’d like to talk to you about the Eucharist-” *SLAM*

                  “Historically speaking, the Papacy-“ *SLAM*

                  “Wolves tasted my blood and I think they want more-“ *SLAM*

                  So, unwilling to give up, Francis took to writing out his sermons, copying them by hand, and slipping them under people’s doors. In this way, he slowly evangelized the entire region and, eventually, brought a large chunk of the population (read: a couple thousand) back into the Catholic Church, all while pioneering the first crude form of blogging. That is why today Saint Francis de Sales is the patron saint of writers, journalists, and (presumably) bloggers.

                  He’s also our patron saint here at the Catholic Nerd. See, Francis was famous for more than just an insane determination to evangelize; he also championed the uniqueness of each individual. After his adventures in Huguenot-and-wolf land, he came back and succeeded sixteenth-century Robin Williams as Bishop of Geneva, in which capacity he set about writing books on how anyone from any walk of life could become a saint. He wrote about how you can still have fun and be yourself while serving God. “Be who you are,” he said. “And be that well.”

                  Here at the Catholic Nerd, we seek to become the best possible versions of ourselves. We intend to integrate our particular interests, talents, and experiences into the life of Christ. We constantly seek improvement in our personal, spiritual, and professional lives. We eagerly proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as handed on through the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops. And we seek to baptize the culture around us by our words, works, and examples.

                  St. Francis de Sales, pray for us.

                  Vive Christus Rex!