Around the year 251, the Roman Empire began to be ravaged by a plague. Historians estimate that up to 5000 people died per day in Rome alone. As Eusebius recounts, the pagans of Rome ran, quite literally, for their lives, shunning “any participation or fellowship with death; which yet, with all their precautions, it was not easy for them to escape” (Book VII, Ch. 22). It was the Christians that stepped forward and were “unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves and willingly receiving their pains. And many who cared for the sick and gave strength to others died themselves having transferred to themselves their death…Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner, including some presbyters and deacons and those of the people who had the highest reputation; so that this form of death, through the great piety and strong faith it exhibited, seemed to lack nothing of martyrdom” (ibid). Despite being viewed as the scourge of the Roman Empire, the Christians were the only ones who stepped forward when Rome was scourged. This event was no historical accident but instead a blueprint for how Christians should respond in a time of plague. Throughout history, we find similar responses. Whether it was Justinian’s Plague of the late 6th Century plague in Rome that Pope St. Gregory expelled with some help from St. Michael and friends or the Black Death in which the mortality rate for priests was 47%, the Church has always viewed plagues as a time to let her light shine before men.
One might be quick to dismiss these historical precedents as irrelevant to our own times. Society is structured such that plagues and their treatment are very different. Christians are no longer needed to be de facto First Responders. The State provides those. Instead Christians should get out of the way and let the professionals do their job. It is time to put said light under the bushel basket so that the contagion not spread. But this would be a misreading of the events and a misunderstanding of what it means to be a Christian.
The Christian Response
Playing armchair epidemiologists, we might comment that the Christians probably made the problem worse. That many of them died along with the sick would naturally support this fact. And herein lies the problem. A natural reading of these events reveal them to be failures, but a supernatural reading of them changes everything. It is precisely in times of calamity that Christians need to become supernatural storytellers, not primarily by their words, but in their actions.
What made the Christians during those catastrophes exemplars was not that they ran to the front lines and tended to the wounded, but that they were beacons of hope. They were beacons of true hope, not the optimism of only “two more weeks” but the hope that says “death is not the end”. The light that they shone was Christian hope, a light that enabled everyone in society to realize that dying well is the meaning of life. They tended to the spiritual wounds, they were really a Field Hospital and they remained open.
They didn’t just talk about Christian hope, but they showed it by their actions. The difference between true Christians and those who are not comes down to one thing—fear of death. It is the fear of death that keeps people trapped within the clutches of the devil. But it is Christ Who “freed those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life” (Hebrews 2:15). Each one of the cornerstones upon which the Church has been built did not fear death and each stone that is added to the edifice is free from the same fear. The Apostles had seen their Teacher and Lord die, but then He was alive. Freed from death, He promised them the same power. That was the basis of their hope and it was the source of their freedom to live for the Glory of God and the salvation of souls even if it cost them their lives.
The Cost of Hope
Like the Apostles and Martyrs, sometimes witnessing to hope cost the Christians living in the times of plague their lives. That too was necessary because it testifies to the fact that the world can offer no fountain of youth, no immortality. Still its inhabitants remain locked in fear of death. Only the Christian is truly free from the fear of death and it is this that sets them apart. But it wasn’t that they “visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually,” but also that they “held fast to each other.”
In short, hope was made manifest by the fact that they continued to meet with each other. They showed no fear of death because spiritual death is far worse. The danger of spiritual death is ever-present, plague or not. They met because they needed to constantly feed the hope that was in them. Only a hopeless lot would give up the Sacraments or treat that only as a life insurance policy.
You might think they were naïve, but they were far wiser than we; they knew that if Christians were going to rebuild society after the plague, they would need to build up the spiritual strength now. They knew they would only build as reservoirs of grace, filling up society with the overflow of divine life they received from the Church and her Sacraments. With greater knowledge they may have taken more precautions, but they would have ultimately thrown caution to the wind because of the value of a single soul.
Living as we now do under, what Bishop Schneider has dubbed, the “dictatorship of the sanitary” the Church needs to shine forth as a beacon of hope. What this might look like once prudent precautions are taken isn’t entirely clear, but it has been made abundantly clear both by history and the present moment what it wouldn’t look like. When the Church responds exactly the same way the world does to a crisis then something is wrong. The tyranny of the hopeless shuts down everything, the liberality of hope opens wide the doors. Christians must be witnesses to hope, especially in ages such as we are living.