ROF10 – Defending Human Life – Roots of the Faith with Mike Aquilina – Discerning Hearts Podcast

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DiscerningHearts.com in cooperation with the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology presents

Reads of the Faith from the Church Fathers to you with Mike Aqualina.

Mike Aqualina is the author or editor of more than 40 books on Catholic history, doctrine

and devotion.

He has co-hosted with Dr. Scott Hahn, eight series that air on the Eternal Word Television

Network.

He has co-led pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Italy, Greece and Turkey.

He's a widely sought after Catholic speaker.

Reads of the Faith from the Church Fathers to you with Mike Aqualina.

I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Mike.

Good to be back, Chris.

The value of it, the gift of it, was something that the fathers of the Church of all the

roots of faith wanted us to value in a very, very important, very substantive way.

Absolutely.

They were especially out to care for the most vulnerable.

They spoke up for the poor in society.

They spoke up for oppressed peoples.

You know, those who were enslaved, they really came to the assistance of all people who

were vulnerable, oppressed, victimized by bad laws, by bad people, bad governments,

and they did not hesitate to speak out against the victimization of the most vulnerable members

of society.

And those were the little babies.

Last time we got together, you and I, we were talking about how in the pagan world,

it was very common to dispose of unwanted offspring.

That was done in two different ways.

I mean, it was done by an infanticide after birth.

If the baby wasn't what you wanted it to be, you didn't get your designer, baby, you

didn't get the boy you wanted, well, then you put that baby out on the dung heap to be

eaten by birds of prey or by the dogs.

Literally.

We're not talking figuratively.

No, literally.

No, the babies were abandoned at the edge of town.

They were abandoned out on the dung heap and they would be taken apart by the dogs.

They would be, you know, set upon by vultures out there.

Sometimes they were drowned in advance of that, but sometimes they were just placed out

there crying so that their cries would actually draw the predators out after them.

So this is the kind of place we're talking about.

In fantaside was very common.

There was a sewer dug up in the Near East.

It was an ancient sewer.

It was from the first century, I believe.

The sewer had been rendered useless because it was clogged.

It was clogged with the bones of newborn babies, almost all of them female because a girl

baby had no value.

It wasn't going to grow up and get a job and support you.

It was going to need a dowry.

It was just going to be a drain on the family.

So these were disposed of in the sewer and the sewer got clogged with these bones.

Not too long ago.

Just founded a pit in England and the pit was filled with newborns.

So this was the place where you brought your baby and abandoned your baby if it wasn't

what you wanted.

Well, in fantaside was one way they got rid of an unwanted child, but they also practiced

abortion.

Then they killed pre-born children.

This was very common.

It was approved by the wider culture, the pagan cultures of the time.

It was even approved by the great philosophers of ancient history.

Plato approved abortion, Aristotle approved of abortion.

Very few philosophers spoke against it.

It was just a common practice.

Two groups of people didn't approve of abortion.

Jews and Christians, those two didn't and they really spoke out against it and it's

interesting that in those early generations of Christianity it became a galvanizing issue.

It became a prominent issue.

How about that?

What's old is new again.

That's right.

Because we're living in a repagonized culture, that's a conclusion we've come to many times

over this conversation.

What we find in those first generations of Christianity, the very earliest documents,

is a consistent witness against abortion.

Abortion is condemned in almost all of the early documents of the church that have survived

from those first couple of centuries.

Abortion is mentioned and condemned in the Didaké, which is from the first century, the

Epistle of Barnabas, also from the first century, the apologetic writings of Athanagoras

and Justin in the second century.

It's condemned in the theological writings of origin and Hippolytus.

It's mentioned and condemned in the decrees of the earliest councils of the church in

the fourth century.

After reading these documents, Chris, I'd say that no other moral issue has such a detailed

paper trail as abortion.

It's always condemned.

It's consistently condemned.

It's condemned in the strongest terms.

It's called murder.

It's called murder by the ancient fathers and consistently called murder.

It's funny, though, is there's a difference between the pagan pro-abortion folks and

the modern pro-choice advocates.

The pagan philosophers would have been inclined to agree with today's anti-abortion protesters.

On one point, they called abortion baby killing.

They recognized that the fetus was a baby, that the fetus was human, that it had a

soul.

The only difference is they didn't see anything wrong with killing a baby, whether it was

before birth or after birth.

They just didn't see anything wrong with it.

So you have all these ancient philosophers saying, hey, this is a great thing.

This is a great thing.

Just kill the baby.

Even if it's born, just kill the baby.

And you find these people coming up with the same idea.

It started with abortion.

But now we have people advocating infanticide through the first year.

You have people who are teaching at Ivy League universities.

You have the guy who wrote the ethics article in the Encyclopedia Britannica advocating

infanticide.

We've returned to these horrors, just in case we're ever under the illusion that abortion

is something new.

Again, it is consistently condemned in all those ancient documents.

And almost none of the early Christian writers miss a chance to condemn it.

In the pagan world, it's something that's often spoken of.

We have a letter that a pagan businessman wrote to his wife back home.

And she's pregnant.

He knows that.

And he says, if it's a boy, keep it.

If it's a girl, discard it.

It's a very affectionate letter otherwise.

But very casually, he's just saying, if it's a girl, we don't want it.

It was a cruel world.

It was a cruel world.

We have recovered from the ruins of Pompeii.

We've recovered the very instruments used by the abortionists.

You can look at these now.

And you could see the instruments they used in the abortion.

Because we have descriptions of abortions that were set down by the medical writers of

the time.

And also by the Christian Tertolian.

He wrote a detailed description of abortion.

I included in this book so that people could see how it was practiced and it really wasn't

all that different from what's being done today.

But we call those times pagan times.

I call these times pagan times in many ways.

Because we see a resurgence of many of the same attitudes and the same practices.

Their church fathers did not hesitate to call it what it was and to call an end to it.

They gave voice even to politicians, to leaders, as well as to the people.

Yes.

I said before, Athanagoras, we say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion are

committing murder.

And they will have to give an account to God because they had abortifation drugs.

If you get the history of contraception that was put out by Harvard University Press several

years ago, it's a detailed documentation of how abortion was practiced in the ancient

world.

And it also has a great documentation of how the church fathers spoke out against it.

It's certainly a pro-choice book.

And it certainly gives witness to how Christianity was unified in its opposition to this thing.

This is just a universal fact of Christian history that wherever there was the Christian

church, there was opposition to abortion.

Did Christian women have abortions?

Sure, they did.

Some did.

They committed that sin.

There were Christian men who stole things.

There were Christian men who committed murder.

That's why the councils of the church had to repeatedly condemn it because it still continued

to be practiced in places.

But the church was always very clear that when anyone did this, whenever anyone cooperated

in this action, they were doing something that was intrinsically evil.

They were committing a sin.

Saint Jerome, the great saint in great scripture scholar of the fourth century, said, it's

not just one sin.

It's a trinity of sins.

It's three sins in one because it involves an act of adultery usually or fornication

at the beginning.

That's number one.

Number two, it involves an act of murder killing a child.

And number three, he said, unfortunately, many of these abortions result in infections

and the mother herself dies.

So it's at least an attempted suicide.

And often it is a suicide.

So he said, there are these three sins, fornication, murder, and suicide.

And you take them all on when you commit this act of abortion.

It was universally condemned and condemned in the strongest terms.

And if anybody ever tries to tell you that any church father cut any slack to the abortionists

or even to the people who went and sought an abortion, they're just lying.

Even if that person is the speaker of the house.

Even if that person is the speaker of the house, maybe especially, and especially if they

had been raised to Catholic, because it's an abuse of history.

It's an abuse of the saints.

It's an abuse of the sacred tradition that we've been handed.

But I think both of us are alluding to is the election campaign a few years ago when

we had representative Pelosi invoking St. Augustine and saying that he was pro-choice.

This is insane because Augustine wrote often about abortion and always to condemn it.

What's very interesting is that when she was asked, where do you get that?

And she gave the citations from Augustine.

If you go back and look at those works of Augustine, he's not advocating abortion.

He's wondering aloud what kind of sin and what kind of civil crime abortion should be.

The question he's dealing with is, should someone who gets an abortion face the death

penalty or not?

So he's not asking, is this a sin or is it not a sin?

He's saying, is it a capital crime or a lesser crime?

That's the only question he's asking.

He is not approving abortion in any sense and he certainly saw abortion in all instances

as a mortal sin.

Augustine was also dealing with some very faulty scientific ideas of his age.

You know, he didn't have science the way we have it today.

He didn't have the science of embryology and one of the crazy ideas he had that he had

inherited from medical writers of his time that the male fetus became a person and received

a soul long before a female fetus did.

That was the science of their day.

That was a science of their day, you know, but it saw the inequality of the sex as well.

You know, I'd say to Representative Pelosi, do you want that idea to be revived to?

Since you're invoking Augustine on embryology, do you want us to revive the idea of the inequality

of the sexes?

Do you want us to revive the question of whether someone should receive the death penalty

for participating in an abortion?

I don't think she really wants that.

She doesn't want Augustine to seriously re-enter this conversation.

She wants to exploit him and abuse him and make him say something he never said to invoke

false witness against a saint of the church.

Can you believe that?

Can you believe that?

In a pagan culture?

Yes.

Oh, unfortunately.

But she's a baptized Catholic who by her own testimony came from a devout home.

Goodness.

Her ancestors are crying out to her now.

And so are the souls of all those children.

That's right.

We'll be held accountable to this.

She will.

But we will too, because we vote people like that into office.

And we allow people like that to be voted into office.

And we allow people to continue thinking the thoughts they're thinking about St. Augustine,

about abortion, about marriage, about contraception, about all of these things that lead up to

the decision to abort.

About sexuality, the more we remain silent in this depraved culture, the more we neglect

our obligation to witness to the truth about the gospel, the truth about Catholic teaching

on sexuality and human life, the more we're just aiding and abetting those actions.

And we'll be held accountable not just for every idle word we speak, but for every idle

silence in our lives.

We've got to speak up.

We've got to cast our votes.

We can't stay home on election day.

This isn't church teaching, but I believe that staying home on election day without a good

excuse is a sin.

We all know that staying home from mass on a holy day of obligation is a sin.

While staying home from the polls on election day is a sin, in my view, the church has never

said that, but I believe it must be, especially in times like these, we've got to speak up.

If we can get to Washington, DC on January 22nd, that bitter cold day for that great festival

of love, the march for life, go and witness.

We have an obligation to do things like this.

If we can't get to Washington, DC, where's the nearest abortion mill?

Can we witness against it?

Sure we can.

Even if it's just speaking up at the water cooler at work, don't remain silent when someone

is saying that it's okay to kill a defenseless baby.

Don't enable that kind of culture of death.

Speak up.

That's what we got to do.

We hear the voices of the fathers showing us how to do it.

They're echoing in our ears those ancient Christians.

They never missed an opportunity to speak against abortion.

All of those documents of the first century, they did not miss one opportunity.

Do we miss opportunities today?

We've got to learn from them.

We've got to seize our opportunities.

We've got to speak up.

We've got to witness against that culture of death and that culture of misery and do it

in a joyful way, a loving way, a peaceful way, a reasoned way, a way that makes clear

that this is the attractive way of life.

We'll return to roots of the faith with Mike Aqualina in just a moment.

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Thanks and God Bless.

We now return to the roots of the faith with Mike Aqualina.

What would the church fathers say to that politician, that person who is elected to leadership

within the culture, who will say, I have no business placing my morality, my religion

on others?

I think the church fathers would say, if you believe that, then you have no business in

office because every decision you make in office is a moral decision.

It's a decision.

It's a choice between right and wrong.

When you make a law, and that's what legislators do, when you make a law, you're saying this

is right and that is wrong.

You're advocating something.

You're prohibiting something else.

You're making morality and you're imposing your morality on a lot of people, including

some people who don't agree with you and who don't like your law and who will vote

against you because you voted for that law.

You're always imposing your morality.

If you're faced with that kind of conflict, don't go into office because you're not doing

any good, you're doing harm.

If you're going to advocate, things that are intrinsically evil, stay away from it.

In one of our conversations, Chris, we talked about St. Ambrose of Milan in Italy, and he's

writing and speaking in the 4th century, so he's writing at a time when Christianity was

legalized and the Ampers were Christian, and he called three Ampers to account for their

action.

He says in one of his writings that he fully expected to die for what he was about to

say.

Because the Ampers had that power, they could kill the bishop.

They could make it look like an accident, even, but they could get rid of him if they wanted

to.

They could exile him.

They could silence him in any number of ways, but he had to speak up and he looked them

in the eye figuratively speaking.

He was writing letters to them, although to at least one of them, he did look him in the

eye and he told them, you're going down the wrong road and he would not admit them to

Holy Communion as long as they were on the course they were on.

One of the great examples of this was from the Christian Emperor Theodosius.

Now Theodosius was by his own profession, a devout Christian.

He was a believer.

He's the one who made the practice of paganism illegal in the empire.

Up till then, it had been indulged freely, and he made it illegal.

But he also had a hot temper.

One time when there was a rebellious act in Thessalonica, he told his soldiers, call

all the people into the amphitheater and slaughter them, or at least he gave them the indication

that that's what he wanted.

And they did.

Thousands of people, all the inhabitants of the city, all at once, man, woman, and child.

That's the way he punished the act.

And Ambrose refused to give him communion and wrote him a letter and said, you committed

an act that was a public disgrace.

That was a public scandal.

And you are a public Christian.

And you did something that is contrary to your Christianity.

So now you must do public penance before I will re-admit you to communion.

And so theodosis, the great, the emperor of the Roman world, east and west, did public

penance so that he could be re-admitted to communion by Ambrose.

You exhort us in the last chapter of the roots of our faith to harken the return of the

early Christian.

Essentially, it's called for us to really take the words of the fathers and the teachings

and even more importantly, the gospel into our hearts and into the world.

The early Christians didn't know whether the church was going to end in 40 years or

40,000 years.

They had to act as if this could be the end right now.

And we will be called to account for what we are presenting to our Lord at the end of time.

We have so much to build on because we have these 2,000 years behind us.

We don't know whether we have 40 years ahead of us as a church or 40,000 years ahead of

us.

We just don't know when history will be consummated.

We can learn so much from those early Christians because we can live the way they did.

And what they were able to accomplish is astonishing.

They were able to convert their known world.

They were able to convert their neighborhoods one family at a time and then their towns,

one neighborhood at a time.

And then they were able to convert entire provinces.

It happened one province at a time.

And before you know it, they converted an empire and it's almost like it's snuck up on

the pagan world.

Whoa, how did this happen?

Suddenly there was a majority.

Where did that come from?

It came from love.

It came from love.

It came from this attractive happiness.

But it came also from a desire to speak the truth and not tell lies.

But to speak the truth always and to speak it in season and out of season when it was

convenient and when it was inconvenient and to build a civilization of love and a culture

of life that would overwhelm those deadly, deadly forces that were active in the world

at that time.

They exercised so much that was in the world.

It's like this one long exorcism as you see paganism receding and with it these practices

of abortion and infanticide and euthanasia and epidemic suicide.

It was seen as kind of a reasonable way out of this miserable place.

Epidemic divorce, epidemic adultery, epidemic active, homosexuality, awful things happening

and making people unhappy.

Christianity provided a refuge in a cruel world and we can do it again.

We can learn from them and we can accomplish what they accomplished.

We can win this one.

We can prevail.

We can triumph and we can see our neighbors happy too.

And that's what we should want.

That should be our heart's deepest desire.

We should want that out of love and we should want them to be as happy as we are.

Those leaders, the early church fathers and those who followed them, their flocks, risk

death.

They would stand in the face of a culture that would literally kill them.

Are we capable of bearing such witness today?

No.

They weren't capable of it then.

It's a grace from God.

And they were very clear on that.

St. Cyprian of Carthage, it's the testimony of the martyrdom of Policarp, the earliest

account of a martyrdom that we have outside the Scriptures, that people who present themselves,

who think they can do it, they can't.

People who think that they can face martyrdom, they won't.

They'll run away in fear because their courage is not their own.

It's the gift of the Holy Spirit, fortitude.

So if we think we can do it on our own steam, if we think that we can prevail over the

culture of death on our own steam, we're just going to end up angry and bitter.

Angry with God because it didn't turn out the way we knew he should act.

Well, he knows better.

He's got a better perspective on our history and he wants what's best for all of us and

for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren and he's preparing something great for them,

too.

You know, that's what we have to think.

He's got the long view for us and he wants only our happiness.

We've got to trust him and we've got to know that the strength to endure, to say the

unpopular thing, to risk alienating friends and family members, but to speak the truth.

All of those things are a grace from God and we can't do them unless we're corresponding

to his grace.

If we're taking pride in what we're doing because we got the truth and we've got the better

arguments and I can argue you into a corner and watch you cringe before my intellect.

We're going to fall big time, we'll be victims of our own pride and Satan will laugh and

all the pagans will laugh at us, too.

But if we have faith, if we have trust, if we have humility, we'll be happy and that happiness

will be a magnet for the church and it will draw many to love Jesus as we love him and

it will draw many to be loved by him and to know his love, to experience it in their

own hearts, to live happy lives and to die happy deaths when God calls them home.

That's what we all want, that's what our neighbors want, whether or not they admit it.

To love him, to know him, to serve him, and to be happy with him forever, the amount

of time between us and the fathers of the churches hardly a drop in eternity.

It seems like a long way, but it's nothing.

When nature has not changed in all that time, the fathers witness remains strong, remains

with us and remains valid today, we're still learning from them, Chris.

And from you, Mike Aqualina.

And from you, Chris McGregor, thank you for all you're doing on the radio.

This is what the fathers would be doing if they could.

If they were alive today, they'd be on the radio and they'd be burning up the airwaves

with their preaching.

Well, Mike, you're an inspiration to us and we just praise God for the work that you've

done in the root of our faith.

And all of the great teachings that you have broken open for all of us, that the fathers

of the church have passed down, you're the good son for the fathers of the church.

You've been listening to the roots of the faith, from the church fathers to you, with

Mike Aqualina.

To hear and are to download this conversation, along with hundreds of others, spiritual

formation programs, visit DescerningHearts.com.

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I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

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