Welcome to St Mary's the Virgin
It is the feast-day of Saint Cyprian of Carthage as I write this. While we can all be forgiven for not being fully familiar with who he was, it struck me that given the new methods of history teaching there may be a number of younger generations who leave school not having heard of Carthage, let alone one of its bishops. ‘Hannibal?’ I thought, ‘…elephants crossing the Alps?’ only to find that when I typed his name into google the first recommendations to learn about him were all for television series and movies about rather different Hannibals.
Despite falling foul of the Roman Empire, Carthage remained a flourishing seaport and some four and a half centuries after the mountainous invasion of Italy, (that is, in the 240’s AD) the Church was flourishing there too, despite plague and persecution. Emperors demand loyalty. One way this was expressed by the populace was a brief ritual before they embarked on any civil interaction, from trade to temple attendance to running for mayor, was a brief washing of the hands in the market square during which a formulaic sentence was said, acknowledging that Caesar was lord of the world. Christians refused to do this. (We sing ‘Jesus is Lord’ so often it is easy to forget what it implied in the days of the early Church: - if Jesus is Lord, the Emperor is not.) Herod the Great had negotiated exemption for Jewish people from this, but the new religion of Christianity enjoyed no such luxury.
Depending on the emperor, not completing this ritual was either not much of an issue or a matter of losing one’s livelihood or even life. In Cyprian’s time a couple of recent emperors fell into the second category. Christians were severely persecuted, and some felt the ritual was a slight thing and would acknowledge Caesar with their fingers crossed; others who had converted from Judaism would say they had not really converted. This caused huge difficulties in the Church, in hard times and when more clement rulers were in power. If your father has been sent to the arena to be eaten by lions, it is understandably difficult to be polite to someone who seemingly breezed through with their fingers crossed.
It was the leadership, preaching and teaching of Cyprian that healed this divide; he not only ended the movement which wished to ban the ‘lapsare’ (the Latin word we get ‘lapse’ from), but managed to keep them within the Church family, forgiving and welcoming back those who had fallen from the faith.
In our fallen world there will always be much to forgive and be forgiven for. Given the wonder of our Lord’s forgiveness of us let us pray for the grace to be forgiving of ourselves and others, even when it feels harder than taking an elephant over the Alps.
Fr Neil.
