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This ancient shout often accompanied the very public martyrdom of our early ancestors in the Faith in pagan Rome and other cities of the Roman Empire. The great arenas ( a name drawn from the Latin "arena" which means "sand" which was often used to cover the central surface) often provided the spectacle of wild animals attacking and devouring the condemned. To be a Christian became a crime in second and third century Rome.
We might tend to think of "persecution of Christians"as something belonging to the distant past: images of togas, sandals, effete Emperors turning "thumbs down" all come to mind. ( Here it is worth remembering that not only the "crazy" Emperors like Caligula and Nero were avid persecutors of Christians; but also the philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius sent many of our forbears to death.)
In my boyhood we learned the stories of the tribulations and martyrdoms suffered by Catholics under Communism in Soviet Russia and "Red China". I very well remember witnessing the emaciated figure of Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll in the Chapel of Cathedral College in Douglaston struggling after his release from decades of brutal imprisonment to offer Mass for us collegiate seminarians. Names like "Cardinal Mindzenty" and "Cardinal Stepinac" will ring a bell for some, as well as the movie "The Next Voice You Hear".
Today however, totalitarian atheism has been defeated by and large and no longer poses the threat it used to.
However, persecution of the Catholic Church goes on, though you would never know it from the secular media, which hates us by and large anyway.
A recent column in the "Long Catholic Catholic" by George Weigel on the assault of religious freedom produced a letter from a gentleman who very correctly mentioned the persecution of Catholics going on "especially in the Middle East." He mentioned the enemy of of the Faith as having various names:..." relativism, secularism, Communism, Nazism, statism, Socialism, progressivism, radical atheism..." etc.
True, but the letter writer left off the "ism" that is in faxct MOST hostile to our Faith.
Today the threat is not the totalitarian atheism of the "old days", but a totalitarian theism: militant jihadist Islam.
One might say this is merely the latest campaign of a very old war.
The men who flew the planes into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and which were forced down in Pennsylvania were NOT martyrs for the "socialist workers revolution" but died and killed with Allah akhbar! ("God is great!") on their lips.
Our "modern" secularized society has long regarded religion as a merely private habit; but others view it as an all-consuming cause that needs to be vindicated not with sweet reason, but with blood: theirs and ours. (As indeed it always has been. The Crescent did not gain the lands in which it prevails by an evagelization of hundreds of years, seasoned with the blood of martyrs, but most often by the sword.)
Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan, Nigeria, all are the venues of burned churches, murdered and assaulted clergy, religious and laity.
Not everyone is an "ecumenist" so it seems.
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