Foreword

At the end of Saint John’s Gospel, after ­twenty-one chapters relating the miracles, teaching, and saving mysteries of the life of Our Lord, the Evangelist issues the following caveat: “There are many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written” (Jn 21:25).

The statement invites us to marvel at the plenitude of what our Savior accomplished two thousand years ago, in the course of the thirty-three years he dwelt among us. However, as the Catechism declares, even “when his visible presence was taken from them, Jesus did not leave his disciples orphans. He promised to remain with them until the end of time; he sent them his Spirit” (CCC 788; cf. Jn 14:18; 20:22; Mt 28:20; Acts 2:33). Accordingly, Catholic tradition refers to the Christus totus, the “whole Christ.” Christ the Head, dwelling in glory, is one with and continues to act in his Body, the Church. How this is so has been the subject of many scholarly books. But “a reply of Saint Joan of Arc to her judges sums up the faith of the holy doctors and the good sense of the believer: ‘About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter’” (Acts of the Trial of Joan of Arc; cf. CCC 795).

This second volume of essays by Professor Anthony Esolen offers twenty-four more examples of the redeeming presence of the Church in the world. You will see that the Church, far from fearing science and rational inquiry, has been the force behind some of our greatest advances. You will learn of statesmen who were moved by the faith in their courageous pursuit of a just social order. You will be inspired by the heroic efforts of missionaries, who traveled far and wide to draw more souls into the embrace of the Church. You will read of artists and thinkers who have left us some of civilization’s greatest treasures. And you will see that saints and men and women of faith, far from having their freedom diminished or personalities muted by union with Christ and obedience to the Church, stand out as history’s most free and vibrant figures.

Though we could never adequately express the ineffable goodness of Our Lord and his Church—please God, we will contemplate it for all eternity as members of the Church triumphant!—we may still do our part to make it better known while we remain in via. Thus, it is with great pleasure that we publish one more book exploring how the Church has changed the world.

Rev. Sebastian White, o.p.

Editor-in-Chief, Magnificat

Yonkers, New York

Solemnity of Saint Joseph, 2020

The Reckoning of the Times

By the time you turn to this page, gentle reader, millions of people will have gathered in Times Square as usual to watch the great Secular Odometer turn from 99999 to 100000, as the new year begins, very like the old year, progressing on in the secular imagination toward some longed-for oasis of earthly delights, between the deserts of nothing before and nothing to come. Little do the feasters know that, were it not for Pope Gregory XIII, they would have arrived two weeks too late.

The Church teaches us that time springs from and returns to its origin in the providence of God the Creator. Or we might say that time is the rich soil wherein the wheat is sown for the harvest; or it is the arena for the heroic story of man’s salvation, with its fixed center in Calvary, where Christ triumphant pierces the heart of hell with the cross. Or it is the meter of the epic of faith, as we fight the good fight or run the race to the finish. So the Church does not brush time aside. She sanctifies time and elevates it, giving us far more yearly feasts to celebrate than modern man, always a-bustle and always late, knows what to do with.

But she has also always wanted to get the time right. And here we run into difficulties.

When a baby boy was born to Augustine and Mary Washington on the shores of the Potomac River, they recorded his birthday as February 11, 1731. Many of us are familiar with the phenomenon of “losing” an hour or two as we travel by air from west to east, but that was nothing like what George Washington lost. For he was later to affirm, correctly, that he was born on February 22, 1732, giving Americans the date for the celebration of his birthday, and prompting the striking of the Washington quarter dollar in 1932, the year of its bicentennial.

What happened? Were his parents so far behind the times? It’s one thing to be off by a day or two. But eleven? And a whole year?

A small error in the beginning

We turn then to Rome. The year is 1580, and a tireless old bulldog of a man, Gregory XIII, has succeeded Pope Saint Pius V to the Chair of Peter. Gregory founded or expanded about three hundred schools and universities. He appointed men like Saint Charles Borromeo to undertake a thorough reform of Catholic seminaries. He sent missionaries to all parts of the world, receiving emissaries from Japan to thank him for sowing the faith there. He founded the English college in Douai, France for the education of priests who then returned to their native land to celebrate Mass in hiding and confer the sacraments, until such time as the priest-hunters of Queen Elizabeth should seize them and subject them to torture and a gruesome and protracted execution. It is said that Gregory sang the Te Deum when he heard about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestant Huguenots in Paris, but there was no Internet in those days, and all that the Pope knew of it was that a political revolt against a legitimate ruler had been put down. He wept when he learned at last what had really happened.

The times were also quite literally out of joint. If you ask a hundred people what a year is, you might get half of them to say that it is the time it takes for the earth to make one complete revolution about the sun. The next question is obvious. “How do you know when the earth has done that?”

“Well, you look at the calendar.”

“And where did the calendar come from? If you didn’t have a calendar, how would you know?”

Silence falls, and crickets chirp from the woods.

The sun has two apparent motions about the earth. The one is its daily journey from east to west. It is especially long in the summertime, when Mister Apollo the charioteer sweats at high noon, and his steeds long for their watering hole at the border of night.

The other movement is attributable to the tilt of the earth, of about twenty-three degrees. The tilt makes it so that the sun’s path changes from day to day as the rotating earth moves in its yearly course. In England and North America, the sun rises higher and higher in its meridian as the days grow longer, until at one point it seems to “stop”—hence we have the word solstice, sun-stop. Then its noon is lower and lower in the sky, until at another point it stops again. We can measure our years according to the regular patterns of that path.

The problem is that the year is a little longer than 365 days. Julius Caesar tried to account for that by putting in “leap year” days for every fourth year, but that turned out to be a little too many. People began to notice it. Dante, in the Middle Ages, was well aware that the calendar had been lagging. Eventually, Beatrice says, the “neglected hundredths of your years” would cause spring to begin in January!

Not to worry, old ladies tending your flower gardens: that did not mean that snow would kill your daffodils, no more than Daylight Savings Time would fade your curtains. Days would be days and years would be years, but your computation would be off.

The keys to the calendar

So Gregory summoned one of his advisors, a German priest named Christopher Clavius (Christoph Klau), called the “Euclid of the 16th century.” Clavius was that sort of Renaissance man who was really most prominent in the Middle Ages: born and raised in Bavaria, professor in Portugal, and papal mathematician and astronomer in Rome. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler esteemed him highly, and he was a lifelong friend of Galileo. His voluminous works were translated into various languages; these included Chinese, so that his fellow Jesuits, such as his student Matteo Ricci, the great missionary to China, could take them to that land of clockmakers and stargazers and seekers of the Order of Heaven.

The most obvious need was to get rid of the ten “extra” days that had intruded. But Gregory and Clavius wanted more than calendrical duct tape. They wanted a solution that would, for all practical purposes, settle matters once and for all. That required excruciatingly precise astronomical observation and measurement and computation. What Clavius came up with was perfect, and was implemented in Catholic nations by papal decree in 1582.

That year, if your birthday fell between October 5 and 14 inclusive, well, you might as well have been born on February 30, because those ten dates for that year were cut out. But the problem would have arisen again, had not Clavius hit upon the notion of omitting leap-year days for three out of four century years. So we had a February 29 in 2000, divisible by 400, but there was none in 1900, and there will not be another one in a century year until 2400. That will keep our calendars in trim for the next thirty thousand years, if the Lord does not wind things up here sooner, as we hope he will.

Had Christendom not been divided, little George Washington would have been born on February 22 and not February 11 (you see, an eleventh extra day had wriggled in already). But for a long time the Protestant nations resisted adopting a “Catholic” calendar. That finally changed for England and her colonies in 1752—another year of vanishing dates—and now the Gregorian calendar is pretty much universal.

The true new year?

“But wait a moment,” you say. “That explains the dates in February, but it doesn’t explain the year.”

Quite correct. You see, the convention of setting the beginning of the New Year as January 1 derives from Julius Caesar himself, but it wasn’t the only candidate. Christians in England, for example, before the Norman Conquest in 1066 and then between 1155 and 1752, reckoned the New Year as beginning on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation. Other Christian countries counted Christmas, December 25, as beginning the new year. And why not?

For on that day when the angel appeared unto Mary, the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and on that day nine months later we first beheld his glory, as he lay wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

And so the revelers in Times Square have a pope to thank, if they only knew it.

A Map of Mankind

An old man, dressed in a loose red robe, bows his head in respect, one scholar to another. His skin is a kind of dark amber, and his eyes glitter behind lids that sometimes make them look half shut. He is a storehouse of ancient lore. He knows the paths of the stars and the planets, what makes for a wise and useful minister, and what sacrifices are to be offered in honor of one’s ancestors. He can tell the virtues of the good emperors and the vices of the bad. He is master of the multitudinous and labyrinthine pictograms of his written language.

“Honorable Father,” he says, “I am ready to see the map.”

The other scholar, a man in his prime, is dressed in the same manner, but he wears a cross around his neck. His flesh is permanently sun-darkened, and gleams with a tinge of bronze. His hair is black, with that wave in it that signifies foreigner. He responds to his visitor with the intimation of a smile, and rolls out a large parchment upon the table. It is covered with impossible shapes, like those of fabulous beasts, shaded in various colors, all of them lurking or peering beneath a grill of arcs and parallel lines.

“Here it is,” says the young man.

They remain silent for a while. The old scholar touches the parchment here and there with his fingertips. “I do not see my land, Father.”

“We are here, my good friend Pao,” says the young man, pointing to a spot near the Great Sea. “All of this land, from the cold wasteland of the Mongol here, to Ton-kin in the south, and from the sea westward to the mountains of Tibet, all of this great land is yours.”

“I had thought we were almost the whole world,” said Pao, shaking his head a little sadly.

“Master Pao,” the Jesuit Matteo Ricci replied, laying a hand upon the old man’s shoulder, “that is a fond dream to which all men are prone.”

Meeting people in Love

When Matteo Ricci traveled to the Far East as a missionary in 1580, he knew he had to learn everything he could about the Chinese culture, in order to bring them the Good News most effectively. He understood that the Chinese were an ancient and proud people, with long and venerable traditions. He spent several years in the Portuguese colony of Macao, mastering Mandarin Chinese, a language as different from any in Europe as it is possible to be. He had already studied mathematics and astronomy in Italy under the famous Father Christopher Clavius, with an eye to using those studies to earn the esteem and the friendship of the Chinese, who believed that the moral task of mankind on earth was to reflect the beautiful, silent Order of Heaven. In other words, Matteo Ricci was what we now would call an anthropologist, as were so many others among his brother missionaries.

I have heard people pride themselves on being “multicultural” who read at most two languages, and whose idea of culture seems to be limited to what comes out of the oven and what flag flies from the eaves. They have much to learn from the Catholic missionaries. You cannot bring the Good News to a people, or really any news at all, unless you know them, but to know human beings to the core you must love what is lovable in them, honor what is honorable, and forgive what is foolish or wicked. So the missionaries observed the peoples to whom they ministered, and their letters and diaries are invaluable sources of information.

But more than information. It is one thing to be aware that the Chinese believed that their land took up almost the whole globe, and to know that they would be surprised and dismayed to learn otherwise. It is quite another to be able to disentangle that pride and folly from their admirable sense of order and tradition, spanning many centuries. Matteo Ricci, like Junípero Serra, and Isaac Jogues, and Jean de Brébeuf, learned from the inside what the people were whom he loved. And we must insist upon the fact of this love.

Love that seeks truth

Consider what happens when the depth of Christian love is not there. Margaret Mead, the queen of anthropology, went to the South Seas and studied the mating habits of the natives, resulting in the too-influential and now-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa. She had something of a liberal agenda; the natives caught on to it, and played their cards accordingly. The people under the microscope flipped the lens the other way around. I’m not saying that Mead despised the Samoans; she liked them very much. But Father Ricci had to love the Chinese, with the charity that hopes all things, believes all things, and endures all things. Father Ricci had to love them with a love that would defy one disappointment after another, unto death. He was not martyred, but he would never return to his native land. He never enjoyed the accolades due to a celebrated scholar.

I think that the Catholic missionaries had to be most discerning, precisely because the articles of our faith are of ultimate concern. They could not simply say, “The people of China leave food offerings for their deceased ancestors, so they must be worshiping them as deities.” Maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t. Father Ricci determined that the most learned among them considered it an act of filial piety. Since they brought food to their elders in life, they thought that the best demonstration of their honor would be to “bring” food to them after their death. The common people, however, had mingled the practice with a good deal of superstition, and that, too, had to be taken into account.

Father Ricci sought out the wisest sages among the Chinese, and determined that the most ancient Chinese deity of all was the T’ien-Chu Shih-I—“heavenly Lord” or “Lord of heaven.” That Lord was the one in whom all things had their origin, and whom all things in heaven and earth obeyed. So after long observation and careful study of the old texts, he wrote The True Doctrine of God, a short and brilliant catechism of the Catholic faith, filled with citations from the venerated words of such ancient wise men as Confucius and Mencius. For we believe that God does not leave any of his beloved people entirely in darkness.

Love of God, the bond of friendship

After many years of patient labor, Matteo Ricci was accorded the rarest of privileges. He, a mandarin from the West, was allowed entrance to the Forbidden City, the abode of the emperor himself. It was a momentous occasion.

For we are not talking about slick operators, buying land from indigenous peoples by paying them nuggets of glass, or rotting out their virtue by soaking them with firewater. Matteo Ricci came alone, with the best that his world had to offer, as a gift to the best of the people to whom he was both preacher and servant.

What a sight that must have been, in the early weeks of 1601, when Father Ricci, summoned at last by the Emperor Wan-Li himself, walked along the stately courtyards of the imperial grounds! I imagine him escorted by a parade of counselors and scholars and priests, while porters carry upon a litter the most fitting of gifts—maps and clocks and the astrolabe about which Father Ricci’s teacher Clavius had written with so much precision and admiration. There before them rises the many-colored palace itself, its tiers of roofs curled in the style of the East, where dwelt the emperor, the North Star upon earth, whose duty was to rule his people with the same constancy as the North Star above ruled the heavens.

The man of God met a man who longed for God. Is that not the profoundest thing we can say about our fellow men, in whatever culture we may find them—that in the recesses of their hearts they long for God? If so, then only someone whose heart and mind are turned to God can ever really understand the hearts and minds of others.

I will not enter into the disputes that arose, the most bitter of them long after Father Ricci had died, between the Jesuits on one side and Dominicans and Franciscans on the other, regarding whether the mode of worship the Chinese Catholics had adopted was licit, or whether their continuing to honor their dead in the traditional way smacked too much of paganism. It is a tangled affair, ending in defeat for the Jesuit position. But Matteo Ricci has not been forgotten. The best of that noble culture, which the methodical and murderous Mao Zedong tried to sweep from the face of the earth, survives yet, and the moral seriousness of the Chinese, their natural piety, and their love of the beauty and order of the universe will someday, I firmly trust, find their fulfillment in Christ.

Yet another reason to turn in prayer to the east.