Mike Aquilina joins Steve and Becky to explore the stories of the ancient Christian world and what evangelization looked like there. His book is Rabbles, Riots and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized.
The Catholic Conversation
8/16/24 - Mike Aquilina on Evangelization in the Ancient Cities
(upbeat music) - Great pleasure to be here. Welcome to the Catholic conversation. I am Steve Green, Director of Old Family Institute in Catholic faith and life, and I am the creator of Catholic. - And I'm Becky Green. I'm the Director of the Green Homescoring Institute, everything else in our lives. I'm the convert to the faith. Well, this is the time that occurs every four years where I spend a couple of weeks weeping and having a lot of nostalgia. And what else do I have? I start sharing old stories. - We do it, we do it, we do it, we do it. - All stories. - Becky, Becky dusts off the back when I was a gymnast. - Back when I was a gymnast, back in my day. Yeah, so we've been catching the gymnastics for the 2024 Olympics in Paris. I did not catch the Olympic ceremonies. I'm not even gonna get into it. All I heard was, it's a train wreck. - So, so. - I'm not even gonna, I'm not even gonna comment on it 'cause shame, shame on the Olympic Committee, but I'm not gonna hold it against athletes who have spent their entire lives giving to a sport that they have now reached the pinnacle and it will compete for that coveted prize, you know, the being on the podium at the Olympic Games. And of course that was a dream of mine for my entire childhood. So every four years, I go through this. What sport still exists that I might be able to make the Olympic team in? And I've narrowed it down 'cause I looked up oldest Olympic athletes at the Games, apparently a question and shooting. Still could maybe get into that at this age and maybe have a shot, so. - Becky loves horses. - I don't, I've never, I've never, I think I've ridden a pony once. - At a birthday party. - At a birthday party when I was four. - And now I'm gonna be in an Olympic equestrian. - But I'm gonna go for it. I'm gonna go for it. - I'm gonna go for it. But I, shooting. - You point out there's like, yeah, the shooting one. There's like, so first of all, I, dear listener, because I know that my, my lovely wife goes through like a bit of a mourning period every four years. She has to like, you know. - It's legit, it's real. - The old, the old wound is opened up again and so she has to go through again, the grieving process for what might have been in her gymnastics career. And then it's followed by, okay, but what can I do to get in the other things? I can't, I'm not gonna be able to do gymnastics. What can I do? So I actually stumbled, I wasn't looking for it, but I just, one of those random headlines that pops up on your phone. There was a Guatemalan gymnast who had the same, sounds like they didn't name the injury, but it sounds like the same stress fracture in vertebrae injury that Becky had. - I was, she had similar, probably similar. - So she had to drop gymnastics. So she went to shooting. She took up shooting and won a gold medal, like Guatemala's first gold medal as a former gymnast turned shooter, and then Becky found. - Oh, the best is, I'm sure you all have seen it by now, the picture of the 51 year old Turkish silver medalist with his hand in his pocket, like they just went up into the crowd and are like, "Anyone wanna try the shooting out today?" - I just, I'm sure I'll do it. (laughing) - You know, so dad comes down, puts his hand in his pocket with no ear, I think he just has like the little earbuds, you know, their little ear, yeah, earbuds, right? - The earplugs. - The earplugs, that's it. And just his regular old glasses, like you've got on, and just pulls out the gun and is just kind of holding it. They're calling like, you know, maybe as a former hitman or something that was pulled in. And like, I just, but I just so-- - That clearly knows his way around-- - I'm just, I'm so, the hand in the pocket and there's the T-shirt, like here he is, just the guy in the T-shirt, 51, and shoots his way to a silver medal. And I'm like, now that is my style. That is what I, I just love that whole, that's the Olympics for you. - That is pretty awesome. - These stories are just the Olympics. - He just got done eating a bag of potato chips and gets up. - Yeah, I mean, I think he even did sort of have like the shot, the side view sort of shows maybe, you know, was not like the most ripped person in the world or anything, I don't know, he didn't hold up the shirt. But I mean, you just get the impression-- - They didn't at least tear his shirt off. Like Noah Lyles does when he wins a sprint. - I don't know, I didn't see the actual, I just saw this picture. - His amazing 51 year old physique. As a guy who owns a 51 year old physique, I just delight in the pasta with-- - But we need to speak of your daughter who will always be impressed, both your daughters. - Speaking of my physique-- - Yeah, no, they have, so the girls, well Caleb too, they will often just come to Steve for no reason, really, and just ask him to flex his muscles. And Steve, you get all, you get all the little barris. No, I'm not gonna, no, I can't, no. - It's kind of funny, dear listeners. First of all, for those of you who know me, you're already laughing, because you know me, for those of you who don't know me, I assure you, dear listener, it is not as though I am some hulking Adonis, some Greek sculpture of physical specimen with bulging, Becky, Becky is literally weeping with laughter right now. She's married to me, but for some reason, and I could not begin to explain why, my younger kids are just very impressed with how big my muscles are. - When you flex, they point out-- - When I flex, yeah, so they want me to flex and they're like, "Oh, it's like as hard as a rock!" "Oh, it's like how big his muscles are coming from." An 11-year-old boy who's like three apples high, the smurf, it's like, yeah, I guess to tiny people, I look large anyway. So this was inevitable as we're watching the Olympics, and of course, there are many very well-constructed athletes, and at some point, they were gonna need to compare and contrast with it. - Well, we were watching men's gymnastics. - Which is even worse. - Yeah, and I also, because I'm a former gymnast, I often am, I feel like I'm a PR rep for men's gymnastics in that I'm always saying, the world does not appreciate the kind of strength and athleticism that is required to be. A gymnast, period, but a male gymnast, when you watch and you see the kind of strength and what they're not explaining, look what they're doing, flares right there on the floor. That's nuts, do you understand how that still rings? Do you understand the kind of strength that's required? So I feel like I'm always sort of advocating on behalf because I think that, because I know, I know, from first-hand experience, what is required and the kind of strength and athleticism. So we were watching the male gymnasts, and we of course were really excited about Stephen- - Netaroski. - Netaroski. Our pommel's specialist who helped lead the team to the bronze medal for the men's gymnast, which is like the first in their time they were on the podium since 2008. So it was really exciting, and he's got the glasses, and he takes off the glasses. - Stephen- - Yeah, and I just, so the kids are just all excited, they just became a huge fan of his. So, but we're watching all of the male gymnastics play out. And Kateri just, she just says it, she just announces it. She's that, look at their muscles. Those muscles, I can't believe those muscles, look at them, they're just, daddy, those muscles are even bigger than yours when you're flexing. They're just so big, look at how big they are. Steve's just sitting there nodding, and you know, it's finally occurring to her. - Right. - Right? She's has sort of a-- - Perhaps, perhaps I have been more impressed with my dad's physique than his fully warranted. And this is just beginning to occur to me as I look at the male gymnasts and the tank tops, right? Yeah, they're just standing there, and their muscles are even bigger than yours when they're flexed. Like, yeah, those guys basically have arms hanging off of their shoulders. (laughing) Yeah, it was delightful, and then of course, once Kateri made that observation, immediately that translated into, great, flex your muscles. Flex your muscles. - Flex your muscles. Come feel your, like, I think we can just look at that guy on the screen there, that gymnast. I don't think I need to flex. I think it's pretty clear. - Get out the measuring tank. - Yeah, right, yeah, this is gonna be close. I don't know, it's dad or that Olympic male gymnast. One of the two, we need to answer this question. - I love how they admire you and just really-- - Well, I'm very glad, yeah. We've kept them sheltered, we've kept them away. No, it's, well, it's what's funny. Our neighbor, for goodness sake, Mark Merrow, who, as it turns out, ironically, his dad was an Olympic javelin thrower. So our neighbor on our little cul-de-sac, his dad was an Olympic javelin thrower, Mark, our neighbor, is huge. I mean, he's like a body's built. So he's like, you don't even have to go to the Olympics. Just look at Mr. Merrow. - No, no, dad, you're just these gigantic muscles. It's amazing, yep. - Children who look up to their dad. So I just think it's true. - So yeah, hopefully, for one of my birthdays, one of these years, they'll scrape up some money together and get a sculpture made of me. Can stand out in our front lawn to greet our friends. - Well, meanwhile, I'm training for the next, I'm gonna be the next 51-year-old standing there with my hand in my front lawn. - I think what you need to do, Becky, is you need to train to shoot on from horseback. Just double-dip so that you can go either way, right? So you're learning to ride a horse and shoot, and then if it just doesn't work out for the Olympics, at least you can star in Westerns. - That's a great idea. - You're doing a little aneokly, you know? - I tried out for aneokly. I tried to sing a song to get the role when I was little, and instead they cast me as little Jake, her brother. - Well, you know Whitney Houston. (laughing) Another observation by our daughter, Katiri. - Indeed. - Yeah, she's good for your humility as a parent. - Indeed. All right, well, yeah, we actually have a guest today, so. - Oh yeah, we should talk to our guest. - Wonder if he wants to flex for us. (laughing) - Well, one can only hope. We're gonna talk to Mike Aquilina. Mike, of course, is executive vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. He's been the host of a number of EWTN television shows, and specials, he's written a bunch of books. And his latest is out from Ignatius Precious, rabbles, riots, and ruins, 12 ancient cities, and how they were evangelized. It's always fun to talk to Mike. He's super enthusiastic, a wealth of knowledge, and I'm sure he'll have some fun perspectives for us. So stay where you are, dear listener. We will be right back with Mike Aquilina here on the Catholic Conversation. - This episode of the Catholic Conversation is brought to you by Notre Dame Federal Credit Union, where your bank does matter. - Welcome back to the Catholic Conversation. I am Steve Green, the cradle Catholic. I'm here with my lovely wife Becky the Convert, and we are thrilled to welcome back to the program, the one and only Mike Aquilina here, of course, is executive vice president, the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. He is an EWTN television host, author of a multitude of excellent books, and his latest is rabbles, riots, and ruins, 12 ancient cities, and how they were evangelized. Welcome back to the show, Mike. Thanks for joining the Catholic Conversation again. - Thanks for having me back. You guys never learned. - No, it didn't. - If we had a nickel for everyone who said that, Mike, - That's true. - Living on our own private island, but. (laughing) - I do quite enjoy, I just wrapped up a four day little online writing boot camp for our little homeschool community, just some of the kids that were able to sign on for that, and so I do enjoy the alliteration of your title. - Nice to go, yeah. - If I had thought about it, I would have held this up when I was giving an example of alliteration for rebels, riots, and ruins, 12 ancient cities, and how they were evangelized. So good job on that, fun title. - Well, you want to hear something about that? - Sure. - That wasn't the title I was working with. I was working with a really boring title. As a matter of fact, I kept on shifting between 12 cities and cities of God, which are both boring titles, right? But descriptive of what was inside. - Sure, tell you what it is. - And I was about to turn the paper work in, and at the last minute, before I hit send, I thought, no, rebels, riots, and ruins, 'cause that's what's in the book. - Oh, that's great. So just popped in right there. - And it was a last minute, last minute, yeah. - Holy spirit, holy spirit works like that. - I hope so, and I hope he's behind sales, you know. - Yeah. (laughing) - Well, so tell us about the genesis of this book. Why rebels, riots, and ruins, why now? What's the point of writing about 12 ancient cities and how they were evangelized? - Well, I've always been interested in this period of history, you know, the period of the early Christians and how things happened then. And as you spend more and more and more time in that period, you get to see that there are differences between the cities, right? Each city has its own personality, each city has its own character, and that should be obvious to us. You know, if you do any traveling, you know that Des Moines is a different place for Manhattan, right? - Mm-hmm. - And that Manhattan, Kansas is a different place from Los Angeles, California. That all of these cities are different from one another, they're different from all the others. They have a special character, they have a personality, they have a certain topography that makes them distinctive. Well, all those things are true of the ancient cities as well. And if you're a nerd like me and you're living in that period, you can see it because you can picture the city and its topography and its streets and its buildings. And you can see how these events would of course happen in this place, right? - Mm-hmm. - With this particular people living there. So, you know, I get excited by that stuff and I think, well, other people will get excited by this too. And I hope they do because we experience ancient cities as dots on a map and all the dots look alike. Or as bullets in a list and all the bullets look alike. I want people to experience these cities with their differences and see what difference each place made in the history that is our heritage. I mean, these are our spiritual ancestors. These are the ones who articulated our faith for the first time. These are the ones who made a worldwide Christianity, not only possible, but actual. I get excited about this stuff because, you know, my, my, my, my father-in-law used to poke around on ancestry.com for people to put a lot of money into genealogy, you know, getting all these documents and all that stuff. That's what I'm doing here. This is our spiritual genealogy and it goes that far back. So, to me, when people tune in to the chosen or whatever, that's what they're doing. They're trying to find that imaginative entry into the ancient world. And I want to give them that entry in a vivid way. - Yeah, I, I, so first of all, I'll wait 'til you get your earbuds back in it. - I get excited and I'm telling you. - He missed him out of his head. - Dear, dear listener, because we're not on video, you couldn't see that Mike got so animated talking about giving you an imaginative entry into the ancient Christian world that he unplugged his own earbuds. And simultaneously, Mike, that was good. It wasn't like you knocked one of them out. You got them. - Just a very dramatic. It's very dramatic. - So, just in case you're not aware that Mike means it when he says he is an enthusiast for this period of history, we can vouch for him. So, Mike, one of the neat things that comes through in the book, and I agree, I think this is very much kind of that fun and engaging, but also very authentic, imaginative entry into what was the world that the first Christians had to evangelize? - What were the realities that they were confronted with the challenges, the opportunities that were unique? You know, and I think of the book of Revelation, where the letters are addressed to the church in fill in the blank city, Philadelphia. And so, this sense, which maybe is a little bit washed out in our current globalized society. I mean, cities, like you say, certainly have their own individual kind of characteristics and demographics and culture, whatever, but there's also sort of a bit of a washed out sense of where a global village now kind of thing. In the ancient world, I mean, a city was all but its own nation in a lot of cases with its very specific history and its own challenges. So, in this early Christian history, seen through the lens of these 12 ancient cities, I think you really get a sense of that. But here's where I'm going with it, 'cause of course I have to ramble a while before I actually ask our guest a question, poor Mike, he's very patient. So, there has always been this dynamic of the church engages culture and the church forms culture and the church informs culture and the church transforms culture at the same time. It's also true and maybe never more obviously true than in this period of history in the very early church, that these cultures that the church encounters also form and transform the church. So, the church is contributing hugely to the life of these cities, to the history that the Christian history begins to transform these cities, but the cities are also affecting Christianity. The evangelists are evangelizing the cities. The cities are also impacting the evangelists. Just talk a little bit about that dynamic in this period of history, because I think in a sense, just like the whole book is taking up this point. In a sense, that sets the table for the dynamic between church and culture that actually continues even to our own day, at least where the church is doing her job of being a missionary and evangelizing church. - You bring up an excellent point. And I think that the localness of culture is something that's hard for us to imagine today. I mean, think about this right now. We are talking right at this moment across thousands of miles. There's a continent between us, you know? And it's a huge continent. And we're talking across thousands of miles and then we're communicating with people all over the planet who will watch our interview and they feel like we're in their living room or wherever they're watching this or listening to it and we're in the car with them. It's that immediate, it's that intimate. You have to blank that out. Pretend you don't know that, pretend it never happened. You have to blank out the idea of all media. Of course there were no electronic media because there was no electricity, right? But there were no print media really, okay? Because there was no printing press. And even if you were writing something down on paper to show someone else, very few of the people in your city had the capability to read that because literacy was a fairly worthless skill, right? It's not gonna come in handy with your job, whatever your job was. The world was just not wired that way. What do you do then to get moves? Well, you leave your house every day and you go outside and you talk to people. You gather in some kind of public setting like by the well or by some other public utility and you stand around and you update each other on the gossip. And so every now and then somebody might have come from travels and could give a word about something that's happening abroad. And of course he'd exaggerate in and all this stuff, right? Somebody might come from out of town, be passing through and have an idea that's foreign to your locality and might spark a debate in this little place, this little public area, might even get people good and riled up, right? And create a dangerous circumstance like a brawl, right? There's plentiful evidence of all these things happening in the ancient world, but that's the first thing we have to imagine. We have to imagine a world of immediate and physical human contact in public areas and a very local culture. If you were a Christian, for example, and you recognize the Pope as the ultimate authority of the church on earth, you were never really certain of the name of the current Pope. Because when the Pope died in Rome, it might take weeks or even months for the word to reach your little village in East Syria, right? So we have to make a great effort to imagine such a world because that's why there were rebels, that's why there were riots, you know, that's why eventually there were ruins in some of these places because people gathered together and they talked to one another, all right? And they communicated with one another and they hashed out these ideas then. In the wider sense, you know, there were certain ideas that were almost universal and there were certain ideas that we have today that did not exist at all in the ancient world. Today, whether you're in the United States or in North Korea, you have certain ideas that you think are just self-evident, right? Yeah. That humans have certain rights, right? You might have the idea that there's a universal human dignity that all humans have this commonality, this requirement really that we respect them, right? We honor them. You might even take for granted ideas like human equality, right? That my people are the equal of people on the exact opposite side of the planet. We are equals in some sense because we all have this dignity, right? So human dignity, human equality, human rights, we take these ideas for granted and they did not exist in the ancient world. You were concerned about my people, like your particular people, right? And the other people really didn't matter. They were not your equals, okay? They were other. They might even be an enemy, right? And there were no rules for warfare then, no rules for proper conduct of warfare. So they were other, they had no dignity and you could do with them as you pleased if you won the battle, you know? And it was all about winning the battle. So there were certain ideas that the Christians introduced into that world that were good in the long run and we all take them for granted today, but they were revolutionary at the time. - Right, right, right. - The idea of human dignity, human equality, human rights. When Christians came preaching these things and basing them on sacred scripture, they were often persecuted for having those ideas. Even the idea of exclusive worship for this God of creation, the creator God was a crazy idea in a world of many religions, all of which were kind of porous and granted you the freedom to participate in as many cults as you like. This idea of exclusivity and religion, that seemed crazy. Only Jews did that and Jews were a minority who for the most part, even in foreign cities, kept to themselves. - Kept to themselves. - Yeah, we're talking with Mike Aquilina about his book, "Rabbles, Riots and Ruins," 12 ancient cities and how they were evangelized. How did you decide the 12 cities you were gonna focus on? What were the criteria? What were you hoping to do in selecting the ones that you take up in the book? - It was a hard decision. I made a long, long, long, long list. That was the first thing I did. And there were certain things that were necessary, certain cities, I could not leave off that list. So Jerusalem had to be in the book, Rome had to be in the book, Antioch had to be in the book, Alexandria had to be in the book, Constantinople had to be in the book. Even though it comes a little bit later in the story, it was an important city. So those five were, they just came standard, right? The others, though, were tough, right? So you wanna get a Greek city in there that was present from the beginning. Well, there are so many of them. And in a sense, they kind of look alike. So what do you do? And you have to choose between Ephesus and Corinth, both of which have great stories, and only one of them can stay. So you have Ephesus in the book and you don't have Corinth, and it still breaks my heart, too, to think of that, right? There were other places, though, that I included in order to show the diversity of the church from the first moment. Okay, so Edessa, I just did another interview on this show, just a few minutes before we went on. And the interviewer had never heard of Edessa, even though it was a major city in the ancient world. We don't talk about it much today. Why? Well, because they spoke Syriac there. And that language kind of evaporated or evolved into other things, but not our language. It was not part of our heritage, right? They spoke Syriac. They were a borderland between Rome, the Roman Empire, the Roman world, and the Persian Empire, the Persian world, which was way different. It was other, right? So Rome and Persia were always fighting over those borderlands, and the people in those cities were often seen as spies, as suspect, right? So they got this strange alien status in both worlds. And the Christians, especially, were always seen as suspect, right? Because they practiced this alien religion, and they didn't really belong to us and our heritage. And what are they doing here? What are they really up to? So often, that was a condition that sparked persecution, that sparked riots or martyrdom, that sort of thing. So I wanted to get Edessa in there, because it represented the Syriac world and Syriac Christianity, which is a very interesting and different strain of Christianity. It's hyper-aware of its Jewish roots. It's intensely Semitic. So in style and in content, it bears a lot in common with what we have from the synagogues of that period. And the Syriac authors that we have from the ancient world are clearly in dialogue with the rabbis of their time. So it's a very different, very Jewish kind of Christianity. And it's still in our world today in various Eastern rights of the church. It's present in Iraq. It's present in India in greater numbers. So those lands were part of that world. And I wanted to show people that world because it's a fascinating world. Some of the fathers operated kind of on both sides of the border. You have Ephraim of Syria, who composed thousands of hymns that we're still singing today. And he gives us this sense of what Syriac Christianity was like from the inside. Afro-hot is another great author of that tradition. And again, we get to see what it's like from the inside. So Edessa, I chose because it's alien to most readers who will encounter it, who are Americans and are Latin-right Catholics, are in the mainstream of Catholicism in this country. Another city that's like that is Etchnazin, which is an Armenian city. And Armenia is another one of these worlds that are other than the Greek and Latin worlds that we see as our ancestors, especially the Latin world. Etchnazin was the capital of Armenia in antiquity. Armenia is important because it was the first country to become Christian in its entirety following the conversion of its king. That's an important date. And it happened while the Romans were still persecuting Christians. And while the Persians were still persecuting Christians, Armenia is this land, a country that's caught between Persia and Rome and getting pressure from both sides. And they have the guts to convert during the time of the Diocletian persecution. - Wow. - Think of that kind of courage. And then they did something really interesting. They invented an alphabet for their written literature because they needed the scriptures in their language and needed the liturgy in their language. So they invented this alphabet. And this is an amazing alphabet, much larger than ours to accommodate different sounds from the ones we make. And they wanted to accumulate a literature. So the Armenians went abroad and gathered up the great Christian literature from Greek and Latin and translated it into Armenian. And now today, the Armenian copies, the Armenian translations are some of the only copies of these things that remain. So they did this wonderful service for all the rest of the church by preserving the works of Irenaeus, the classic works in Christianity that we would not have otherwise. - Did that happen before the sack of Alexandria and the burning of the great library there? 'Cause of course, there were huge numbers of volumes that were in that library. Some of them, which as far as we know, were the only copies that were lost, were some of those Christian writings that the Armenians brought back and translated. Was that done before? And did they go to Alexandria for some of them? Do we know that? - Alexandria's library was sacked and burned on several different occasions in history. It was definitely after the first century sacking of the library. But by then, the only relevant items in the library to this subject would be the Septuagint version of the Bible, the Old Testament. And there were many copies of that by that time. So that was kind of safe. - I'm sure they went to Alexandria. - Yeah, I think I was thinking of that first century sacking of Alexandria and the burning of the library. But I had it in my mind, I had it confused with the later. So okay, so that would have been after. Okay, gotcha. - That's right. I'm just displaying my historical ignorance. - No, it's not ignorance actually. There were several, you're right, but there were several sackings and burnings of the library. It would be hard to see. It would be hard to know what they might have rescued, but that's just something I hadn't thought of before. - Interesting, okay. - Yeah. - Good. And we're talking to Mike Aquilina. He is, of course, executive vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. He has been an EWTN television host, written a ton of books, his latest is "Rabbles, Riots and Ruins, Twelve Ancient Cities" and how they were evangelized. - Okay, we got a whole bunch of stuff we need to dive into here on the other side of the break, but let's hit the break now. Stay with our dear listener 'cause we will be right back with Mike Aquilina here on the Catholic Conversation. - Do more to support your parish or school with an elevate card from Notre Dame Federal Credit Union. Every purchase made with your elevate debit or credit card earns 1% back for your eligible parish, school, or nonprofit. Your tithe doesn't stop there. Mention elevate when opening a new auto loan and your selected nonprofit will receive 1% of the total loan amount. When you set up a 30-minute financial checkup with one of our financial positions, Notre Dame FCU will donate $150 to an eligible nonprofit on your behalf. Why settle for ordinary accounts when you can elevate your finances with Notre Dame FCU? Visit Notre Dame FCU.com/elivate to learn more and elevate your finances today. That's Notre Dame FCU.com/elivate. Ensured by NCUA, certain restrictions apply. - Welcome back to the Catholic Conversation. I am Steve Green, the cradle Catholic here, my lovely wife Becky, the convert, and we're thrilled to be chatting again with Mike Aquilina. He is the author of a really cool new book out from Ignatius Press entitled "Rabbles, Riots, and Ruins, Twelve Ancient Cities" and how they were evangelized. Mike, real quick as we jump into the second half here. Where can folks find the book and then where can they find you and whatever other cool stuff you're up to these days? - Well, the book is published by Ignatius Press and you can find it on their website or on other websites where books are sold. I always recommend that people go to their local Catholic bookstore because those people are doing the real evangelization of your town. So if you have a local Catholic bookstore, go there, order the book. The books, my books, you'll usually find at their best price is at catholicbooksdirect.com, catholicbooksdirect.com, and that's a family run business. So you'll, you know, contributing to a good cause there. So yeah, those are the places. - Excellent, all right. So for each of these 12 cities, as you kind of, you give us these delightful narratives of what went into the Christian history of the city, what went into its evangelization. And as we were talking about earlier, each of them with such a unique set of challenges and opportunities for the evangelists who first reached there. But there are, of course, key human characters and all of these stories too, that, you know, Rome has its particular cast of characters who are central to the evangelizing of Rome. As does, like you said, Edessa and Ephesus and Antioch. Who are a couple of, in writing this book, and like you said, you had to narrow down a huge list of cities. I'm sure you also have to, in order to trim the narrative into a book, you know, you have to put some people in and leave some people out. But who are some of the characters, some of the human figures and these dramas that for you are just your favorite. And maybe a little bit about who they are, what they contribute. And if you've got a couple, there's certainly a couple in here that I had never heard of before. As I was going through, it was like, oh, okay, interesting. So for our readers, you'll meet some new friends in these stories. But who are a couple for you as the author that just kind of stood out to you or your kind of, these are your pocket favorites. - Right now I'm having this traffic jam. Like, where to begin? - Tip your earbuds out. - Which child do you love the most, Mike? - Yes. I think story is so important to history. And in a lot of modern languages, it's the same word. So the word story is the same as the word for history. And so I like to tell stories and I think that that's the way people like to learn history. They like to get to know people. They like to watch a movie in a sense and see what happens in real time as a word. So, I mean, there are a whole bunch of figures associated with the church in Antioch and they're all larger than life, right? There's King Herod, the King Herod of the Christmas story, right? The big villain in the Christmas story. Well, King Herod is very important in the history of Antioch and in the development of Antioch. There were a lot of Jews living in Antioch. So Herod wanted himself to be considered a king of Jews, not only in Judea, but also in the diaspora, in the Greek speaking countries. So he makes a gift to the city of Antioch of this boulevard, which sports something that now appears for the first time in human history, streetlights. So imagine this, the first time in human history. Usually your city shuts down at night, it's dark. You dare not go out, right? Now there's this boulevard with street lamps all along the way and the people who saw it described it as if it were daylight around the clock. And so there were merchants out there selling their wares through the night. There were these taverns who were willing to serve you alcohol through the night. And what he wanted to do was to send a message about the Jews, the Jews are brilliant. These people are in your city, I'm their king and we do this kind of thing, right? So it was a prestige move and it worked, it really worked. He to me is a fascinating figure, you know, and sometimes it's the villains, another fascinating figure in my book, in my opinion, is Julian the apostate. This man who was raised as a Christian, renounced Christianity, ruled as emperor, as a pagan and tried to reinstate the traditional religion, the traditional Roman religion with many gods as the imperial religion. And he put all the money of the state at its service. So Julian's this fascinating figure of a Christian who left the fold for a lot of reasons, you know? And I think it's fascinating to get to know these people. These people who were enemies of the Messiah, declared enemies of the Messiah in different ways, right? They're fascinating figures and it's very interesting how the Christians responded to them, how they drew certain responses from the followers of the Messiah. So those figures are fascinating to me and there are a lot of others like them. There are others though, they're the saints. And if you, again, if you just begin with Antioch, you have Ignatius of Antioch, this passionate man who's in love with Jesus Christ, for who Jesus Christ is a palpable and near presence. And he writes seven letters as he's on his way to die in a distant city. And we have those letters today and they give us this glimpse of that generation right after the generation of the apostles and what the church looked like in that generation. And you know what? It looks like you are parish and my parish. It looks so Catholic. You know, it has a bishop and priests and deacons. It's centered on the Eucharist and they believe that the Eucharist is, as they put it, the flesh of Jesus Christ, the very flesh that was crucified and that rose, they believed, they called it the blood of God, the Eucharist. So they had this realistic sense of the sacraments. This is in 107 AD. They also believed that Jesus was true God and true man. What we believe they believe in. So he's another figure who is, again, on his way to die, he's courageous and people are marveling at his courage. He's another great figure, John Chrysostom, again. I'm still in Antioch. John Chrysostom is one of these very vivid figures who was quick to admit his faults in public. And he had no filter, okay? He was the greatest preacher in all of Christian history and he had no filter. He would say things from the pulpit and they would get a response and he'd roll with it. He wanted to use all things to reach people for Jesus Christ and that got him in a big trouble. And eventually he found himself on opposite ends of a conversation with the empress, right? She did not like the way he was preaching, especially when he seemed to be implying certain faults in the empress and he went with it when he got a response out of the people and it got him killed. So Chrysostom is another one of these joints, these larger-than-life figures, these characters and you come to know his virtues, you come to know his flaws, even his fatal flaws, and you never forget him once you've seen him. And I think in every city, you encounter figures like that in their history, the history of their evangelization, that there were these larger-than-life people. But those heroes and even those great villains represent, they're representative of crowds, of anonymous people who left behind no written trace, no memory, no living memory. And that's what we have to engage our imagination to see. They're representative of a conflict that was going on in the community, but it was personal for them. - As you're talking, I was thinking about what you brought up in the beginning where we have this, the technology that we have today that allows for this conversation where we're speaking thousands of miles apart and that this can be broadcast out and that anybody on the other side of the world could listen and hear it. And they may not like what they hear or they may be absolutely on board with it. None of us, we can probably assume at this moment, are gonna have our lives at stake because we speak something that we believe is truth and we share it and we're using this medium, this media platform as a form of our little bit of evangelization as part of the story of modern day, evangelization of Christianity. And to then to go back and as you pointed out, that was not the reality that you had these cities that were their own, Steve pointed out, country, I would say even argue like planet. I mean, this was just a completely different experience. You didn't even maybe even know that some of these places existed based on your own place of existence and your life and your little intimate culture that you're living out. And so as I was thinking about what that must have been like for not only the people who live in the cities, but for those who are going out and doing the evangelizing, it's not very courageous for us to just kind of sit here and have this conversation and we can, oh, somebody might not like it and maybe they'd even email and they'll be very angry at what they have to say to you. But we're not walking into and facing someone head on who we do not have a relationship with, who may have a totally different understanding, who may see us as enemy. And yes, if we just share enthusiastically, throwing our earbuds all over the place as we share what we believe, the person standing across from us might have the power to just say, and now you're going to die. - That's right. That's what you're going to say for daring to come into our little world and ruffle feathers and mess with it. That being the case though, on the flip side, that is what ignited what we have today. I mean, that is what began, those are the seeds, the fact that this actually continued and grew and flourished and spread is just, I can't even get my mind around it, you know? I just, I can close down a chat with somebody if I'm just done, like, I don't want to talk to you anymore, I'm done with you. Can you speak to just, I don't even really have a question, I just, to actually just stop and ruminate on that for a little bit has really just got my mind swirling a little bit, 'cause I just, it's just fascinating and impossible and amazing, I'm just awe inspired by it. - I am too, I am too, especially as I read these ancient accounts and I want to make two points. And the first of them is this, we feel safe right now, but recent history, very recent history tells us that persecution can come at any time. And it moves rather quickly from soft persecution to hard. All right, I think of the great capitals of martyrdom in the last century, okay, oh, where are they? Through traditionally Christian countries, there was in Russia, Christian Russia ended up making martyrs by the thousands and perhaps the hundreds of thousands, right? Germany, Christian Germany ended up making martyrs by the thousands, maybe the hundreds of thousands. Spain, right, Spain, Catholic country ends up making so many Catholic martyrs. It happened rather quickly in those places where it seemed to happen quickly. I'm sure that there was a gradual element to it. It's kind of like, it's like going bankrupt, right? They say that there are two stages. The first is very gradual and the second is very, very sudden, right? And we may be in one of those gradual stages. Now, I'm not alarmist and I'm not particularly worried about this, you know, I don't have provisions in my basement, but this may be our lot. If it is, I hope we're gonna learn a lot from those ancient ancestors. It's interesting to me that during this time when Christianity was a capital crime, when you could be tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed within 12 hours. All of this, you know, 'cause Roman judgment was switched. The Romans did not believe in incarceration. Incarceration is expensive, right? So two things were going to happen. You were gonna die soon and get off their budget or you were going to do productive work. And what they can consider productive work was you were gonna work in the minds. You'd probably live three months working in the minds because the air quality was so bad and your lungs would turn to glass. So they would sentence you to work in the minds. As long as you were alive, you were going to be useful, useful, and if you were a woman, you were going to be sentenced to the problems. That's where you would go and be useful, right? So what's interesting is that legal executions were considered entertainment. Like the entertainment industry was based on these executions. They would sometimes stage dramas, showing different events in the lives of the gods, right? Or different historical events. And they would actually have condemned criminals. Oh, wow. Forced to play parts in the dramas where they would be killed and disemboweled at the end, right? That they would be trapped in a burning building that was part of the set and they would be burned alive, right? And their agony was part of the entertainment, part of the play. So this was all like what you took your kid to on his birthday, all right? This was just entertainment. There's a great, a great story, a great history of Roman spectacle entertainment. And the chapter on Nero is called "No Business but Show Business." Wow. Because for him, this was it, this was Hollywood, this was Broadway and he loved to act in these places. So in the midst of these spectacles, Christians made an impression. They impressed people with their fortitude. Justin Martyr had no particular exposure to Christianity or sympathy for Christianity. And then he saw some people die as Martyrs and it changed him. He did not know that such courage and such peace were possible in men condemned to die. He just did not know that that was a possibility for human beings. He saw that and it changed him. He witnessed this and he's not the only one. We have other such testimonies from the ancient world. And even from some people who didn't convert, the philosopher, Epictetus, noted, "Some people come to fearlessness by way of madness." The Nazarenes come to it by way of habit. So he's recognizing the virtue that these people built up in their lives the habit of courage, the habit of fortitude, the habit of denial, self-denial, and the willingness to die for a great cause, that that was all of a peace. And Epictetus, as far as we know, never became a Christian. Marcus Aurelius makes similar observations. The great physician, Galen, made similar observations about the courage of the Christians. So courage is one thing, charity is another. Genuine love totally and gives us the line from the second century. He was a cultivated pagan into his adult life and then he converted to Christianity, but he gave us that line that he heard so often in his pagan neighbors or from his pagan neighbors, see those Christians, how they love one another. Love is something that's startling to people when they see it, that kind of self-gift. Saint Augustine would later say, "If you've seen charity, you've seen the Trinity." You know, that total gift of self. And we see it in the accounts of the martyrs. You see the story of Saint Perpetua who died in the arena in Carthage, this unarmed woman who has to face armed gladiators and wild beasts, right? And it's clear how she's going to die. And the man who's sent in to finish her off because the beasts have done what they can do to her and thrown her around. And she probably at this point has multiple broken bones and she's bleeding from everywhere. And they send the gladiator in to finish her off. And after witnessing that kind of courage, he's trembling so much with fear of this dying woman that he can't bring himself to do it. And she shows him how to do it because otherwise he's going to lose his job and there's nothing that the saying was in the Roman world. There's nothing more useless than an ex-gladiator, right? There's nothing more useless. So she actually shows him how to do this right here. You know, she exposes her throat to him. So yeah, I think it was courage at the moment of martyrdom and it was charity even at the moment of martyrdom. You know, we know of the conversion of Armenia which took place because the king was brought to faith, miraculously really. But we also know that the church just kept growing, not in the royal palace so much as in these tenement neighborhoods. And I think that the mechanism for that was friendship. - Yeah, yeah, it's beautiful. We're talking to Mike Aquilina. He is among many other things, the author of a wonderful new book out from Ignatius Press entitled "Rabbles, Riots and Ruins, Twelve Ancient Cities" and how they were evangelized. Mike, I want to kind of stitch together two questions here because unfortunately, as always happens, we're headed up against the end of the clock. So I want to give you a double barreled question to wrap this whole thing up with. First of all, one of the things that's very clear, you see the surprising work of providence in all these stories, the surprising work of the Holy Spirit, what the Holy Spirit does in bringing about the conversion of each of these cities is different, no, it's in the Holy Spirit, of course, has that ability, providence has that ability to take whatever circumstances exist, whatever challenges, whatever obstacles, whatever, and not only the surprising agility of providence in the circumstances of this location, but of course in the people involved as well, both the evangelists through whom the Holy Spirit is working and then those receiving the gospel to whom the Holy Spirit is being through the evangelists. So just talk a little bit about that kind of beautiful reality that throughout Christian history, the Holy Spirit is always doing a new thing and he's always, providence is always working in the way that needs to happen here or now or with this people, but then tie that to our present moment. As we all know, we're living in the post-Christian West. We're charged with evangelizing the post-Christian pagans instead of the Holy Spirit has to do some new stuff, providence has to get creative, where are some of the places that you see that creative and beautiful providence of the Holy Spirit working in our time as well? So there you go, like I said, I threw a whole laundry basket at you to try to catch all the socks before they hit the ground. As we were just, there you go. There's your question, Mike. - Yeah, you know, you're homing in on really the reason I'm motivated to write the book, right? I didn't just want to entertain people with stories, some of them very funny and some of them very dramatic. I didn't just want to entertain people. I wanted people to come away with hope. I wanted them to come away with something that was heartening that gave them a greater confidence about the future. Why? Well, because when we look at the past, we see that God has always come through, right? He doesn't just instantly change everything, but he does everything in the most fitting way. He works with the consequences of our sins. Sometimes our sins have terrible consequences on our society and on generations and generations and generations after us. But eventually he works it all out and he rises up heroes for the generations that follow. He raises up saints who correspond rather exactly to the needs of a particular place. And they're all different from one another. You know, we have cheerful saints and we have grumpy saints and we have insufferable saints. We have all different kinds of saints, right? And God raises them up for particular purposes, particular places, particular times. You know, I have to believe that he is working something great right now. I look at the course of my life and I'm old, but you know, I know a lot of people who are older than even. And I look at so many conditions that were there in the history of the church in my lifetime. And I see that those particular conditions are better today, you know, just to take some small examples. You know, I can remember when I was in high school in the 1970s, pretty much. There was no such thing as Catholic media. There were a few Catholic publishers, but frankly, they were putting out boring books and books that were pretty lame and that weren't challenging other people. And frankly, that weren't selling a lot, you know? And they were mostly catering to a clerical culture that might put books on the book rack in the back of the church. There was no Catholic television. There was no Catholic radio to speak of. There were no podcasts at all. So now we're living in a time of a media explosion. There's an embarrassment of riches. I could not possibly keep up with all of the content that I consider amazing out there. And I'm kind of picky, you know? But there's too much out there for me to handle. I just, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to watch it all at double speed. That's an amazing circumstance. And I have to believe that people are being catechized because the numbers that are there and the numbers show it, that there are people coming back to this day after day after day. God is raising up saints in every corner of the world to deal with the circumstances that make me sad, that make me angry, that make me feel hopeless some days. But then I come back to my senses and I come back to history and history teaches me that God is raising up saints at every moment and he's raising up saints right now. And he wants me to be one of those saints and he wants you to be one of those saints and we have to correspond to that. Otherwise our life is going to be meaningless, right? Because only saints live in heaven. Only saints live in heaven. We want to be there. We want to be those saints. But first we have to be these saints right now who are addressing the circumstances in our own cities, our own neighborhoods, our own parishes. - Amen, I love it. That's a great way to wrap it up. Okay, so Mike, thanks again for being with us. We've been talking to Mike Aquilina, author of "Rabbles, Riots and Ruins 12 Ancient Cities" and how they were evangelized. Always appreciate the chance to talk to you. And thank you for writing the book. I think it'll be a blessing to lots of folks and we will look forward to catching up with you down the line. - And I'll try to keep my earbudged right now. - You can take them out now, you did your job. You're no longer tethered. Great, do your listeners stay right where you are? We will be right back here on "The Catholic Conversation." - This episode of "The Catholic Conversation" is brought to you by Notre Dame Federal Credit Union, where you bank does matter. - Welcome back to "The Catholic Conversation." I am Steve Green, director of Holy Family Institute of Catholic Faith and Life. I'm the cradle Catholic and my lovely wife, Becky, in the convert. Always a joy to talk to Mikey. I love his enthusiasm. He reminds me of a professor I had at Franciscan University whose name escapes me, but he was an English professor. And he was so enthusiastic. Like, he just, his energy, his excitement about the topic, just unmatched, so it was just always a joy to be in class. - Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And the book is great. You catch some of that infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter in the book. And it is, he writes narrative history very well. And so, you're gonna meet this wonderfully eclectic cast of characters and all sorts of crazy and ridiculous situations. And through that, you do. You really glimpse the work of providence in the rooting of the Christian church in the world and the beginning of the spread of the Christian faith in spite of all the challenges and obstacles and the villains that are posed it. You see the great saints. And I'm glad he wrapped up with that at the end. I agree. No matter how bleak it seems, no matter how disturbing, no matter how troubling events around us in the culture and in the church might be, the fact of the matter is that same providence, that same Holy Spirit is active, is present, is working. And although we might not be able to see it from where we sit, you know, someday maybe, I don't know, maybe Mike's like great, great grandson will write the sequel to this book about the great saints and heroes of our time that rose up and did the work that needed to be done and the sick situations and circumstances that we're all living in. Anyway, good stuff. - Yeah, just be the heroes and not villains. - That's right, yeah, be the saint, be the saint, be the hero, respond to the Holy Spirit. - All right, well, who's coming up next time? - Next time. First time guest, really excited to have this conversation. Dan Leroy is the author of a really cool book. I am enjoying this book very much. It's entitled "Why We Think, What We Think, The Rise and Fall of Western Thought." It's essentially an intellectual history of Western civilization, but it's written specifically to help us think through the answer to the question we all have, which is how did we get here? Like, we look at the world and all the craziness. Like, what happened? How did we get here? Well, ideas for good or ill have consequences and behind all the stuff that we see that, so troubling to us, there are ideas. And he just writes a very cool kind of narrative, story-driven history of Western thought and how that got us to where we are. Anyway, so looking forward to having that conversation, make sure you tune in in the meantime, subscribe to the podcast so that you get new episodes when they drop in, as always. Thanks for being part of the Catholic conversation. Remember, the church has what the world needs, so learn your faith, live your faith, and share your faith. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]