Friday, June 28, 2024
Memorial of Saint Irenaeus, Bishop and Martyr
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The healing heart of Irenaeus
Managing your resources while Marcus Aurelius was the Roman emperor might have been difficult. Although not sanctioned by the emperor, persecution of Christians took on a more hysterical tone during that time less than a hundred years after Jesus’ healing and preaching. Irenaeus, being a political part of the Church, bore his own measure of attack and humiliation.
Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean. Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him. “I will do it,” he said. “Be made clean.”
Irenaeus was born near the home of Polycarp, famous among Christians because he had heard John speak and thus became the oldest living connection with the Apostles of Christ. Reared as a Christian, which was unusual in those days, he first became a priest and then a thoughtful critic of the Gnostics. His writing was instrumental in gradually ending their influence.
Although he was political and involved in the work of the papacy, first in Rome and then in southern France, Irenaeus strove to love his “enemies.” The Franciscans, mostly peacemaker themselves, point this out:
The Church is fortunate that Irenaeus was involved in many of its controversies in the second century. He was a student, well trained no doubt, with great patience in investigating, tremendously protective of apostolic teaching, but prompted more by a desire to win over his opponents than to prove them in error.
I’m writing this a few hours before the Great Debate begins, this first debate of the American presidential campaign. I don’t think the debaters will seek compromise or mutual understanding when they are face to face. Political success requires both, however. The Franciscans continue in this vein, writing of Irenaeus:
A deep and genuine concern for other people will remind us that the discovery of truth is not to be a victory for some and a defeat for others. Unless all can claim a share in that victory, truth itself will continue to be rejected by the losers, because it will be regarded as inseparable from the yoke of defeat. And so, confrontation, controversy and the like might yield to a genuine united search for God’s truth and how it can best be served.
Irenaeus wanted to wean his contemporaries from sole reliance on their own vision and experience with “secret knowledge.” He taught his students and his readers to value three more objective and grounded sources of truth: Scripture, the traditions of the Apostles, and the teachings of the current Church.
This sounds familiar, and it is. This is how the Catholic church today measures “truth.” And it’s likely, given the current ecclesial and cultural and political climate, we need Irenaeus now as much as he was needed then.
Christ took away our infirmities, and bore our diseases.
(2 Kings 25, Psalm 137, Matthew 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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