Persecution and Catholics as a religious minority
Our Lord's warning that his followers would be 'put out of the synagogues' has extensive application even to us today.
Our Lord's warning that his followers would be 'put out of the synagogues' has extensive application even to us today.
Editor’s Notes
We are picking up the remaining parts of Passiontide Vol. III’s Chapter III, ‘Hatred of the World.’ This chapter deals with parts of the Gospel read on two Sundays of Eastertide.
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ prepared the Apostles for rejection by the synagogue they had long revered.
That exclusion from God's people would feel like exile from holiness, not merely from society.
Why spiritual and social isolation – even for us in comparable situations – can be harder to bear than physical violence.
All this has obvious application to Catholics over the last 2,000 years. At various times, those who become Catholics find themselves on the outside of the established religious systems of their nations, and in an analogous situation to the Apostles and early Christians.
Even today, Catholics who believe and worship as their forefathers can find themselves on the outside of the self-styled “Conciliar/Synodal Church,” and treated in some of the ways described by Our Lord and Coleridge. Few are as opposed to those who adhere to the religion of our grandparents as the partisans of this new Conciliar/Synodal Church.
Finally, Coleridge also presents a picture similar to that faced in the early 2020s by those who were not prepared to undergo certain “medical treatments,” which many jurisdictions were considering making mandatory in order to access what he called “ordinary necessaries of life.”
For more on this section, its place in the Gospel and the Liturgy, and the role of persecution as a “quasi-mark” of the Church, see Part I. (It has been updated since it was published.)
Hatred of the World
Passiontide, Part III
Chapter III
St. John xv. 11-27.
Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1892
Why did Christ say his people 'hated both me and my Father'?
Why does Christ say the Holy Ghost 'shall bear testimony of Me'?
About the persecution
After this short description of the witness of the Paraclete and the Church to Himself, our Lord seems to return to the topic on which He has already said something, namely, the ill-treatment of the Apostles by the world. They must have been generally prepared for this from what He had already said, that if men had kept His word, they would keep theirs also, and if they have persecuted Him they would persecute them also.
Now, as we shall see, He makes the matter more specific and plain, especially by adding that particular which must have been the hardest for them to bear in some respects, the separation of His follower from the body of the holy nation, which answers to the Christian excommunication.
For the Apostles could hardly have expected this as a practical result of their adherence to Him, although we have seen that the confession that He was a prophet had brought this severe sentence on the man born blind whom He had cured.1 They had been accustomed to recognize the Synagogue as the assembly of the faithful, the body in possession of the exclusive privileges of the people of God. To be told that they were to be cut off from God’s people might even scandalize them, and our Lord therefore now clearly and calmly tells them that this thing was to happen to them.
Perhaps they had not hitherto been able to bear the revelation of what was to be, externally at least, the future which their work in the world was to entail upon them, as they certainly had not witnessed and were in no degree prepared to witness, what was to happen in the next few hours to our Lord Himself. Hitherto His enemies had never been able to lay their hands upon His Sacred Person, but now He was to be given over to the fury of savage executioners, and to die upon the Cross in the deepest humiliation and contempt, as well as in the most terrible pain.
The history of the Church was to be a repetition of the history of the Sacred Passion, and it was to last, not a few hours only, but through all time till the very end of the world. They were to be engaged in carrying on His work in the world under conditions identical with those under which He had Himself carried it on, misunderstanding, misrepresentation, persecution, sterility, and disappointment.
Our Lord warns them of this briefly, in order that it may not be too much for their courage or their faith to bear unshaken. He no longer leaves this to be inferred from His words, but sets it forth with the greatest plainness.
That you not be scandalized
‘These things have I spoken unto you that you may not be scandalized. They will put you out of the synagogues, yea, the hour cometh that whosoever killeth you will think that he doth a service to God. And these things will they do to you, because they have not known the Father nor Me. But these things have I told you that when the hour is come you may remember that I told you of them. But I told you not these things at the beginning, because I was with you.’
When our Lord says that He tells them these things in order that they may not be scandalized, the words have the full meaning which is contained in their etymological significance. A scandal is properly a thing that causes the feet to stumble or trip, and so fall, and here our Lord seems to mean the kind of stumbling of which He speaks soon after this, when on His way to the Garden of Gethsemani with His disciples, when He tells them that they are all to be scandalized in Him, ‘for it is written, I will strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock shall be dispersed.’
The sudden overthrow of their confidence in Him by the manifestation of weakness and helplessness which broke upon them in His arrest in the Garden, led them to fall in various ways by cowardice, failure of open profession of the truth, and the like. The same might be the effect of the persecution which was to fall on themselves after His leaving them at the Ascension, although their faith had been so immensely strengthened and elevated, and then it would be a great support to them that He had told them beforehand what was then to happen.
Putting out of the Synagogue
Our Lord speaks of what the Apostles were to suffer under two heads.
‘They will put you out of the synagogues, yea, whosoever killeth you will think that he doth a service to God.’
The first kind of persecution was that which was to fall more immediately on the Apostles and disciples from the Jewish nation, in which, as has been said, to be put out of the Synagogue involved exclusion from civil rights as well as from religious privileges, and was in truth a kind of civil, social, and religious death. No doubt the Apostles themselves, as devout Jews, loved the Temple worship and the prerogatives of the people of God.
Besides the forfeiture by excommunication of spiritual and ecclesiastical advantages, there were other consequences which seem to be summed up by our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, though He does not use the technical language which would have required no explanation to Jewish hearers. He says:
‘Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake.’2
Its terrors
He sketches here a kind of persecution very difficult to bear, the hatred of those among whom they have to live and work, the separation involved in the denial of social rights and friendly intercourse, sometimes extending to the refusal to furnish them with the ordinary necessaries of life which are sold in the shops and markets, the reproaches which consist in the upbraiding them as renegades and apostates, both from their religion and their nationality, and the continual speaking evil of them when not present, producing a general feeling of dislike and contempt against which even those who are most charitably disposed towards them would find it hard to struggle.
All these and other forms of social prescription are included in the simple phrase of casting out of the Synagogue. This kind of persecution had already been put into play before the time at which our Lord was speaking—at least St. John tells us that before this many of the chief men believed on Him, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, that they might not be put out of the Synagogue, for they loved the glory of men more than the glory of God.3
The fear of which St. John speaks could operate for a time with men even like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and afterwards with others, as it seems, as Gamaliel and the like, who ultimately became martyrs for the faith. This doubtless was the reason why the Apostles were careful not to give offence to the ‘believers of the Circumcision.’
It seems likely that in Jerusalem the Christians always kept up to some extent the practice of the Mosaic Law, and frequented the Temple as long as the Temple remained, and in every lawful way appeared to be like other Jews.4 St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, who were at the time under the very severest possible persecution of this kind, touches on more than one point in which they were in great need of encouragement and consolation.
If all the hints scattered over the Acts and Epistles which point to this kind of persecution were collected, we should have many materials for a complete picture of the sufferings of this sort to which Christians, and, first of all, the Apostles, were to be exposed, and which are predicted in this passage by our Lord Himself.
The harm caused by persecution and being a religious minority
It is hardly necessary to point out the great hindrance which was thus placed in the way of the progress and well-being of the Church by conversions to the faith.
It is a mistake to suppose that persecution is not a powerful weapon in the hands of the enemies of the Church, and perhaps this particularly applies to the social persecution of our own times. Persecution is often used for political purposes, and it often recoils on the heads of those who so use it, by engendering national hatreds, and by the decay which results to the social fabric from the arraying of class against class. But persecution often succeeds after its miserable fashion, for not all men have the courage for the great sacrifices which are required for the open profession of a severely proscribed and persecuted faith, and the oppression of consciences may often be successful in making men fear to follow the right path.
Persecution, when thus successful, is generally avenged by the miserable moral degradation of whole masses who have been intimidated, and who are made thereby bad Christians and bad subjects, useless or mischievous members of the social community.
To speak only of the Jewish commonwealth, in which the persecution of which our Lord here speaks was probably seldom inactive until the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, we cannot tell how many of those who failed under that fiery trial after the Day of Pentecost, became afterwards the men of blood and rapine, the partisans of one or other of the maddened factions which tore the nation to pieces in its last agonies, when the clemency of the Romans would willingly have spared them if they had not themselves made all peace impossible.
It is unnecessary to point out how our Lord’s words have been verified in all the succeeding ages which have passed since He spoke them, and how strong and powerful the kind of persecution of which He speaks has been, in successive generations, for placing heresy and schism on the throne which belongs of right to the one true Church.
Persecution by violence and the state
The other kind of persecution which is here mentioned is the persecution of violence and brute force, the persecution which comes from secular rather than ecclesiastical authorities, or even individuals, and which is often carried on under the forms of law against persons accused of transgressions of the civil law, rather than of simply religious opinions proscribed by the dominant sects or parties.
Such was probably the persecution of Herod in which St. James the Great suffered, and the greater part of the Roman persecutions, or again those of Japan or China, in after times, or in England in the days of Elizabeth or the earlier Stuarts.
The fanatics who bound themselves by an oath not to taste food till they had slain St. Paul, were instances of persons deceived by this spirit of persecution, and there may have been many men in all times who have really thought that their religion really required the removal by violence of those who preached the doctrine of our Lord. Our Lord foreknew all this, and now He mentions it as a thing for which it was well that the Apostles should be prepared. He assigns as the cause for both kinds of persecution, the ignorance of God and of Himself as sent by God.
‘And all these things will they do unto you because they have not known the Father nor Me.’
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Hatred of the World
Why did Christ say his people 'hated both me and my Father'?
Why does Christ say the Holy Ghost 'shall bear testimony of Me'?
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St. John ix. 34.
St. Matt. v. 11.
St. John xii. 43.
See Acts xxi. 20.