Origins, 6

Growing up Catholic

it was inescapable

the inhuman barbarism

the Roman Empire subjected

the early martyrs to, 

in the entertainments

of the age.

This alone needs unpacking.

Catholics are told

how these martyrs

willingly embraced

their horrible fates

often in the jaws of lions

while spectators watched

(execution as public spectacle

being something we have

finally, finally gotten past

in the modern civilized world),

rather than deny their faith,

a kind of conviction

we later generations find

inconceivable.

These martyrs

are the symbols

of what the early Christians

sought to correct,

not the civilizing nature

of the Empire

but its lack of basic civility,

an awareness that

human life

is not trivial,

and we truly have no idea

what the Christian movement

accomplished,

since we live in a Christian world,

not a Roman one,

or any other,

and our concepts of morality

are Christian,

not Roman.

Take away the cross

and you will lose it.

Period.