The first three centuries of the Christian era are commonly known as “The Age of Persecution” the Church’s enemies promptly and aggressively fulfilled Christ’s prediction to His followers: “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”
Once again we see our Holy Mother Church being persecuted, as she has been in every period of her history, by secular-humanist societies and their respective governments promoting a pagan religious ideology. In this article Fr. Hardon shares the account of one of the early Fathers of the Church, St. Cyprian, who gives us directives on how to cope with rejection by the world that rejected Christ and especially with those inside the Church who contest the magisterial authority of the Holy Father, often playing into the hands of her secular persecutors. (For more accounts of this era refer to Fr. Hardon’s, Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan.)—Michael Mohr
St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage and martyr, was an extraordinary person. Baptized at 35, he was decapitated in AD 258 in the presence of all his people, after less than ten years in the episcopate.
Best known for On the Unity of the Church, Cyprian symbolizes the human side of Catholic belief in the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. The specific issues dealt with therein are whether Christians who deny their Faith under persecution must be rebaptized and whether baptism conferred by heretics is valid.
The Popes held that neither repentant apostates nor converts from heresy had to be rebaptized, but Cyprian, as leader of the North African bishops, argued to the contrary. His correspondence with two Popes, Sts. Cornelius and Stephen I, was outspoken. Pope Stephen even threatened Cyprian with excommunication. But Cyprian not only never questioned the pope’s supreme authority but wrote the most explicit defense of papal primacy in patristic literature.
St. Cyprian’s teaching on the sacrament of penance is a historical milestone. Three elements are necessary for this sacrament: the penitent must make a confession to a priest, the confession must include interior and secret sins, and the penitent must perform adequate satisfaction to expiate for the sins committed. Only then does the priest give absolution, which Cyprian variously called peace, remission, and communication, and which the priest imparts by the laying of hands on the repentant sinner.
Above all, Cyprian was a moralist and pastor of souls. A fine synthesis of his spirituality is found in his short explanation of the Our Father. Running as a theme through this classic work is the stress on the necessity of prayer to obtain the graces we need to live up to the hard demands of the Gospel. Our aim should be, he said, to become more and more like Christ, for whom the will of God was the very food of His Life and the main object of His teaching.
Cyprian wrote during the peak of the Church’s persecution. To be a Christian then meant to be ready for martyrdom. He did not have to cope with such heresies as Pelagianism, which denied the need of grace for salvation. But he laid the groundwork for St. Augustine and others to show how literally Christ meant His words to be taken when He said, “Without me, you can do nothing” on the way to heaven. When we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, said Cyprian, we are not asking God to do what He will, but that we might be able to will what God wants.
St. Cyprian is being used to defend an independence of bishops from the pope that has reached a critical stage in some countries in our day, but without justification. No doubt his baptismal controversy with two popes while appealing to the body of bishops in North Africa lends plausibility to the charge of episcopalianism. No doubt, too, Cyprian’s late conversion and rapid Christian formation made him less aware than he might have been of the latest heresy of bishops claiming superiority over the Bishop of Rome. But Cyprian’s faith in the authority of the pope over bishops was never in question. He spoke of the Bishop of Rome having primacy (primatus), and by this he meant not only a primacy of honor but of active jurisdiction as the chief source for the preservation of Catholic unity. If Cyprian erred, it was an error of inconsistency between practice and what he strongly held in principle—namely, that “the primacy was given to Peter.” Consequently, “If a man does not hold fast to this oneness of Peter, does he imagine that he still holds the Faith? If he deserts the Chair of St. Peter, upon whom the Church is built, has he still confidence that he is in the Church?”
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J., (1914–2000) was a distinguished theologian and a prolific writer, speaker, and catechist. He founded a number of Catholic organizations, including the Marian Catechists, and he was a good friend of the CUF apostolate. Learn about the cause of Fr. Hardon’s beatification at www.mariancatechist.com
Michael Mohr is chairman of CUF’s board of directors and a consecrated Marian Catechist. He and his family live in Tucson, Arizona. Fr. John Hardon, S.J.
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