Templar Edification

My high-school curriculum did not require Latin in order to graduate—I’m not quite so old as that—but I am old enough that it offered Latin as an elective. To be honest, it was an easy A, especially as I’d already taken a few semesters of Spanish, itself a Latin derivative. With its low level of stress and heavy dosage of Roman history, Latin class soon became a favorite of mine. We even took a bus-trip to Broadway, in order to see A Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Forum, which tickles me to this day. I try to watch the DVD on every Saturnalia. This youthful dalliance with the Classics continued into my undergraduate matriculation [the formal process of enrolling and admittance as a student at college or university], where I signed up for further Latin courses, a minor focusing on Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and even a few graduate-level Imperial Roman history classes. I met one of my best friends there; upon graduation, we were invited to join an international ...

For 300 years Christianity survived as an illegal religion, sporadically persecuted by the might of the Roman Empire. This meant that a life spent witnessing to the Good News of Jesus Christ often culminated in a brutal and very public death. It’s not that all Christians were killed, of course; but it happened regularly enough, and especially to the most prominent in the community, to affect the entire life of the Church. Indeed, our word for witness, “martyr,” has become synonymous with someone who dies for their faith. And we had to make sense of it, didn’t we? For 300 years the followers of Christ were crucified, beheaded, lit on fire, and thrown to wild beasts. What then did all this violence and suffering mean to the people of God? Where could we find Christ in this? Eucharistic celebrations went underground, literally, as Sunday worship took place in catacombs beneath major cities, atop the bones of the martyrs. To this day, many Christian altars look rather suspiciously like...