The Four Last Things And Responding To Persecution Series

Tuesday of the 33rd Week in Course 2019

Saints Severinus, Exuperius, & Felician

The sources tell us that Marcus Aurelius “was Roman emperor from [AD] 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors, and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire.” History calls him a “good” Emperor of Rome, but it appears that Christian persecution flourished in his reign. The saints we celebrate today, Severinus, Exuperius and Felician, were martyred under his rule. More about this later.

In these last days of each liturgical year, we are focused on what we call the “four last things,” death, judgement, hell and heaven. They are the realities that face us on the greatest day of any life, the last day of life. Here in the Second Book of Maccabees we hear the story of one old man, the Jewish scribe Eleazar, and his last day. The evil king Antiochus IV of Syria had decreed that all his subjects would adopt Greek practices, including worship of the Greek gods. The pious Jew could not do this. Pork–as we call it–was forbidden in the Mosaic law, along with other foods. One way to cull the Jews was to tell them to eat the flesh of pigs. Eleazar refused–he even refused to pretend to eat the pork--and made a stirring speech explaining what we all know to be true.

How, he asked, could he, who had kept the law of God all his life, forswear himself in what was certainly the last few years of his life. All he would be doing is setting a bad example for the young–essentially telling them that a couple of years of life on this earth is worth eternal separation from God. We should make his sentiments our own: “even if for the present I should avoid the punishment of men, yet whether I live or die I shall not escape the hands of the Almighty.”

History is written by the winners of conflicts. Marcus Aurelius is known as the last good Emperor of his era for essentially secular reasons. He was a stoic philosopher, and people like philosophies that seem to preach a good life without respect to Christ’s law of self-emptying and heroic love of God and neighbor. He was victorious in battle and kept the Parthians and Germans at bay. But his people murdered Christians for their faith in Christ. And he gave Rome his son and co-emperor, Commodus, who was a rascal of the lowest order, a tyrant murdered a few years later in an act that led to chaos.

Many today, seeing Western culture disintegrate as it abandons Christian living and teaching, tell us that serious Christians need to flee the cities and establish new Christian communities of virtue. This is called the “Benedict option” after the great monk-leader, Benedict of Nursia. But Benedict and his communities did not entirely escape conflict. The culture of the day was not organized around hatred of Christ and Christians, as is happening today. So he was able to retire to a life of simple poverty and rebuild Christian civilization on the ruins of the old Roman society. But there was much opposition, and that restoration took several hundred years.

Life today is more like it was in the early centuries of the Church, or during the French Revolution or fascist persecutions. Society is organizing as anti-Christian and anti-Catholic in its attitudes and even its laws. Public schools in many places are teaching that evil actions are good; the next step is to teach that good actions are evil. I suspect that the activism to combat what is called “climate change” is actually an action to reduce human populations. Some of the radical activists tell us that 90% of humans must be wiped out to “save the planet.” It is a total reversal of God’s command to increase and multiply and fill the earth.

No, the call to us today is, as it always has been, to repent and follow Christ in his humility, poverty, and love for God and neighbor. In some way most of us are like Zacchaeus, needing to renounce anything we don’t need, give to the poor, and embrace a true imitation of Christ.

So saints Severinus, Exuperius and Felician should inspire us. Not much is known about them other than they were martyred under the “good” Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Vienne, France. But their intercession for us who are in a similar, but less bloody, persecution, is certainly effective. And so we pray, saints Severinus, Exuperius and Felician, pray for us.