(Death, Heaven, Purgatory, Hell)
Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults
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Age of Missionaries (500-1000)
THE CIVILIZED WORLD in which Christianity had been born did not endure, save at Constantinople. Barbarians of the stage of civilization of pre-Columbian American Indians took over most of the Roman Empire from the fifth century onward, and for nearly five hundred years disrupted and retarded its institutions. That anything of Roman culture survived was due chiefly to the Catholic Christian Church which eventually became the bond in fusing civilized Roman subjects with their barbarian Teutonic conquerors into a single commonwealth. The Church's hierarchical structure provided what order did survive, and tutored barbarian warlords into becoming Christian princes. There were not lacking racists, both pagan and Christian, who despised the newcomers, but the Church's leaders insisted that love of souls must come before bodily snobbery. In this sense the whole Christian Church was a cultural missionary of the first order.
National missionaries, however, had to be found and were found among the clergy and monks of the old Roman world. While the Germans poured into Gaul, now France, St. Patrick pressed beyond the ancient imperial frontier to bring Christian faith to Ireland. Here he planted a tradition of learning and apostolic zeal that induced his converts of later generations to re-civilize and re-Christianize the German invaders of Britain and the Continent: such was the work of Sts. Columkil, Columban, and others.
Pope St. Gregory the Great (590-604), last of Roman patricians, generously planned for a Christian Teutonic future. He himself treated with the Lombard invaders of Italy; he assisted the conversion of Visigothic settlers in Spain; and sent his aide St. Austin to re-evangelize England. Subjected to Christian influences from both Rome and Ireland, England became itself a mission center, sending out St. Wilibrord to the Frisians along the North Sea, and St. Winifred alias Boniface to the Germans. When Boniface died a martyr in 754 at the hand of the Saxons, central Europe had been converted or reconverted. His dying words, "Take courage, weapons cannot harm souls," were taken to heart by his disciples: St. Anscar or Oscar went to Denmark and Sweden, and St. Adalbert to Bohemia, Hungary, and Prussia, where he was martyred. All these and many others organized their converts under the Latin or Western Church under the immediate supervision of the Pope, the Bishop of Rome.
The Greek or Eastern Church, not yet separated from Catholic unity, sent out Sts. Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs, and eventually the Slavonic peoples of Russia and the Balkans accepted instruction and liturgy from Constantinople. Unfortunately later they shared in the unhappy schism arising in 1054 from the clash of a Greek patriarch and the Roman Cardinal Humbert.
TO THE VERY ENDS OF THE EARTH
Nor was it to the Roman Empire or Europe that the "worldwide Catholic Church" (Acts of Polycarp's Martyrdom) confined her efforts. St. Gregory the Illuminator was apostle of Armenians; St. Frumentius went to the Ethiopians; the Persians had heard of Christianity by the second century; India had seen missionaries by the third century, if not earlier. Monuments prove Christian arrival in China by the seventh century. In 800 Christians were in Iceland; before 1000 they were in Greenland. During the Middle Ages a Catholic bishop presided over this north country from his see of Gardar in Greenland. Christ's prediction had been verified: "You shall be witnesses for me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the very ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8).
Obstacles to yet further missionary growth were many. There was the rise of the militant religion of Islam founded by Mohammed, which spread an iron curtain around the Mediterranean Sea for centuries. It engulfed ancient Christian lands and the centers of Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch. It barred access to the Holy Land to all but the hardiest of pilgrims, and long delayed missionary expansion into Asia and Africa. Even Europe was not spared: all of Spain and the south of Italy were under Moslem rule for considerable periods, and the Balkans would later fall to the Turks. Other restless peoples threatened Christian civilization: from central Asia erupted periodically untamed Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols. From the north Norsemen raided and invaded the British Isles and sailed up the rivers of the Continent, looting churches and monasteries. No wonder that "Dark Ages" fell upon religious and secular learning, and the help of bishops, clergy, and monks was sought almost as much for social service as for religious instruction. Bishops were chosen as governors, defense attorneys, as landlords and managers of agrarian cooperatives, and even as generals.
Such in fact was the origin of the Papal States. Italians, attacked on the south by Mohammedans and on the north by Teutonic Lombards, implored assistance from the emperors, since 330 habitually resident at Constantinople. But the eastern rulers had their own problems; after the death of Justinian the Great in 565, they gave little but advice. Since imperial representatives in Italy failed to take effective action, the people besought the popes for aid. Even during the fifth century St. Leo the Great went on peace missions for the Roman Senate to Attila the Hun and Genseric the Vandal. Times were far worse in the days of St. Gregory the Great (590-604), yet he did not neglect to do what he could. He saved Rome itself from capture, kept open a corridor across Italy, negotiated with Lombard chiefs, helped manage estates put under his protection.
Under his successors these unsought papal social services increased until in the eighth century pope and Italians, despairing of further help from Constantinople, sought it from the new king of the Franks, Pepin. He proved as good as his word, saved Rome from the Lombards, and placed the city and vicinity under direct papal administration. The grateful Pope Stephen named Pepin patrician or protector of the Papal States.
Pepin's son, Charles the Great (768-814), completed this work. Once he had conquered Boniface's murderers, the Saxons, had turned back Moravians in the east and Moors in the south, he freed the papacy permanently from the Lombard peril. On Christmas, 800, the grateful Pope Leo III with Roman approval crowned Charles emperor. As secular head of the Christian Commonwealth, Charles inaugurated the thousand year First German Reich. This "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" was to ensure international unity and order in the West. Charles did bring peace in his time and promoted a brief renaissance of law and learning. But his empire fell to pieces under his ninth century successors. A Dark Age ensued when Feudal Iron Men little different from more modern gangsters became local tyrants. Eventually, however, the Empire was restored by Otto the Great (936-973) and gradual improvement followed. But papal institution of an empire in the West had alienated the East. Its rulers were deeply offended and political estrangement was added to linguistic and cultural differences. Soon a clash of personalities served to make the cleavage religious as well.
THE BENEDICTINE CENTURIES
Monastic rays of light were not lacking even in these Dark Ages. They shone from abbeys isolated by choice from worldly turmoil and soon lacking anything worth plundering. These were the "Benedictine centuries" when the monastery was the only surviving refuge of culture. It furnished what hospitality it could to refugees and travelers; it taught peasants of the surrounding countryside what scientific farming survived from Roman days; it provided rulers and landlords who cared with the arts of writing and computing. The chief work of the monastery was to praise God: the "work of God," due performance of the liturgy of Mass and Office must go on. This always presupposed a minimum of learning and preservation of the means for study. Copies of the Holy Scriptures, the regulations of the Church, and the liturgical books were kept and studied; if there was leisure, not only practical books like grammars, but classics were available. It is difficult today to evaluate the quiet heroism of monks copying by hand the tools of civilization so that its light might not be wholly extinguished.
Unavoidable losses occurred during this clerical-monastic crisis. Necessary preoccupation with temporal affairs and social relief by clergy and monks always carried with it the peril of worldliness, and this was increased if unworthy rulers, secular or religious, gained control in the locality. Perhaps the chief danger may have been the development of clergy and monks into a privileged class of experts, utterly separate from the laity. There was risk that in ecclesiastical as well as contemporary secular society, the ordinary folk would be reduced to passive, second-class citizens, or worse, imperfect, secondrate Christians. Providentially at no time during the Middle Ages did this become wholly or universally true. Even if some prelates became "prince-bishops" and "lord-abbots," others continued to be spiritual fathers and responsible shepherds, while the rank and file of the parish clergy and the monks were always close to the country people and sympathetic to them-sometimes unfortunately too close and too sympathetic. But differences were inevitably rising. In a society where the majority were illiterate, and even most nobles could barely sign their names, the clergy were the only comparatively learned group.
By the eighth century Latin was understood by the clergy alone; by its side were rising the "vulgar tongues": early Italian, Spanish, French, etc., still largely unwritten, and existing in hundreds of dialects. Hence the Latin liturgy gradually became unintelligible to the common people, but there was no written or widely used vernacular into which a convenient translation could be made-and even if it had been made, who could have read it? The faithful by no means ceased to go to church; but they became more silent. If their awe and reverence increased, their active participation waned. The Eucharist was no longer their "daily bread"; in the thirteenth century they had to be commanded to receive once a year.
Then, too, pagan superstitions, rough customs and morals, ordeals, duels, died hard. Christianity required centuries to make thorough believers, and what is more, active doers. Yet this must not be exaggerated; for this world as well as the next, the Church was the medieval poor man's salvation. For centuries, it alone gave free service, pleaded his cause, and offered him refuge and protection. Its liturgy gave him consolation and wonder; its sermons inspired what idealism there was-for always Epistle and Gospel were read and explained in ordinary language, along with the Creed and Ten Commandments. The Church's holy days were the medieval serf's chief holidays; its properties were available for gatherings, feasts, plays. The painted and sculptured walls of the church were the illiterate's Bible and Church history.
Courtesy of Catholic Information Network (CIN)