Chapter 2 MISSIONARY ADAPTATION

FEW PEOPLE SEEM to be aware that the Roman Catholic Church in America is officially recognized as a State. How this came about makes interesting reading.

Early in his administration, President Ronald Reagan invited the Vatican City, whose ruling head is the Pope, to open its first embassy in Washington, D.C. His Holiness responded positively, and the embassy, or Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See, opened officially on January 10, 1984.

Shortly thereafter, a complaint was filed against President Reagan at U.S. District Court in Philadelphia by the American Jewish Congress, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, Seventh Day Adventists, the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Evangelicals, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.The plaintiffs sought to have the Court declare that the administration had unconstitutionally granted to the Roman Catholic faith privileges that were being denied to other establishments of religion.

On May 7, 1985 the suit was thrown out by Chief Judge John Fullam. Judge Fullam ruled that district courts do not have jurisdiction to intervene in “foreign policy decisions” of the executive branch. Bishop James W. Malone, President of the U.S. Catholic Conference, praised Judge Fullam’s decision, noting that it settled “not a religious issue but a public policy question.” ¹ The plaintiffs appealed. The Third Circuit denied the appeal, noticing that “the Roman Catholic Church’s unique position of control over a sovereign territory gives it advantages that other religious organizations do not enjoy.” ¹ The Apostolic Nunciature at 3339 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. enables Pontifex Maximus to supervise more closely American civil government – “public policy” – as administered through Roman Catholic laypersons. (One such layperson was Chief Judge Fullam, whose Roman Catholicism apparently escaped the attention of the plaintiffs.)

This same imperium ran pagan Rome in essentially the same way. The public servants were priests of the various gods and goddesses. Monetary affairs, for example, were governed by priests of the goddess Moneta. Priests of Dionysus managed architecture and cemeteries, while priests of Justitia, with her sword, and Libera, blindfolded, holding her scales aloft, ruled the courts.² Hundreds of priestly orders, known as the Sacred College, managed hundreds of government bureaus, from the justice system to the construction, cleaning, and repair of bridges (no bridge could be built without the approval of Pontifex Maximus), buildings, temples, castles, baths, sewers, ports, highways, walls and ramparts of cities and the boundaries of lands.³

Priests directed the paving and repairing of streets and roads, supervised the calendar and the education of youth. Priests regulated weights, measures, and the value of money. Priests solemnized and certified births, baptisms, puberty, purification, confession, adolescence, marriage, divorce, death, burial, excommunication, canonization, deification, adoption into families, adoption into tribes and orders of nobility. Priests ran the libraries, the museums, the consecrated lands and treasures. Priests registered the trademarks and symbols. Priests were in charge of public worship, directing the festivals, plays, entertainments, games and ceremonies. Priests wrote and held custody over wills, testaments, and legal conveyances.

By the fourth century, one half of the lands and one fourth of the population of the Roman Empire were owned by the priests.⁴ When the Emperor Constantine and his Senate formally adopted Christianity as the Empire’s official religion, the exercise was more of a merger or acquisition than a revolution. The wealth of the priests merely became the immediate possession of the Christian churches, and the priests merely declared themselves Christians. Government continued without interruption. The pagan gods and goddesses were artfully outfitted with names appropriate to Christianity. ¹ The sign over the Pantheon indicating “To [the fertility goddess] Cybele and All the Gods” was re-written “To Mary and All the Saints.” The Temple of Apollo became the Church of St. Apollinaris. The Temple of Mars was reconsecrated Church of Santa Martina, with the inscription “Mars hence ejected, Martina, martyred maid/ Claims now the worship which to him was paid.”

Haloed icons of Apollo were identified as Jesus, and the crosses of Bacchus and Tammuz were accepted as the official symbol of the Crucifixion. Pope Leo I decreed that “St. Peter and St. Paul have replaced Romulus and Remus as Rome’s protecting patrons.”² Pagan feasts, too, were Christianized. December 25 – the celebrated birthday of a number of gods, among them Saturn, Jupiter, Tammuz, Bacchus, Osiris, and Mithras – was claimed to have been that of Jesus as well, and the traditional Saturnalia, season of drunken merriment and gift-giving, evolved into Christmas. Bacchus was popular in ancient France under his Greek name Dionysus – or, as the French rendered it, Denis. His feast, the Festurn Dionysi, was held every seventh day of October, at the end of the vintage season. After two days of wild partying, another feast was held, the Festum Dionysi Eleutherei Rusticum (“Country Festival of Merry Dionysus”). The papacy cleverly brought the worshippers of Dionysus into its jurisdiction by transforming the words Dionysos, Bacchus, Eleutherei, and Rusticum into… a group of Christian martyrs. October seventh was entered on the Liturgical Calendar as the feast day of “St. Bacchus the Martyr,” while October ninth was instituted as the “Festival of St. Denis, and of his companions St. Eleuthere and St. Rustic.” The Catholic Almanac (1992 et seq) sustains the fabrication by designating October ninth as the Feast Day of Denis, bishop of Paris, and two companions identified by early writers as Rusticus, a priest, and Eleutherius, a deacon martyred near Paris. Denis is popularly regarded as the apostle and patron saint of France.

PLAYING loose with truth and Scripture in order to bring every human creature into subjection to the Roman Pontiff is a technique called “missionary adaptation.” This is explained as “the adjustment of the mission subject to the cultural requirements of the mission object” so that the papacy’s needs will be brought “as much as possible in accord with existing socially shared patterns of thought, evaluation, and action, so as to avoid unnecessary and serious disorganization.”¹

Rome has so seamlessly adapted its mission to American secularism that we do not think of the United States as a Catholic system. Yet the rosters of government rather decisively show this to be the case.

By far the greatest challenge to missionary adaptation has been Scripture – that is, the Old and New Testaments, commonly known as the Holy Bible. Almost for as long as Rome has been the seat of Pontifex Maximus, there has been a curious enmity between between the popes and the Bible whose believers they are presumed to head. In the next chapter, we shall begin our examination of that enmity.

Download a PDF file of this article.

Please follow and like us: