St. Athanasius, doctor of the Church
Feast date: May 02
Catholics honor St. Athanasius on May 2. The fourth century bishop is known as “the father of orthodoxy” for his absolute dedication to the doctrine of Christ’s divinity.
St. Athanasius was born to Christian parents living in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 296. His parents took great care to have their son educated, and his talents came to the attention of a local priest who was later canonized as St. Alexander of Alexandria. The priest and future saint tutored Athanasius in theology, and eventually appointed him as an assistant.
Around the age of 19, Athanasius spent a formative period in the Egyptian desert as a disciple of St. Anthony in his monastic community. Returning to Alexandria, he was ordained a deacon in 319, and resumed his assistance to Alexander who had become a bishop. The Catholic Church, newly recognized by the Roman Empire, was already encountering a new series of dangers from within.
The most serious threat to the fourth-century Church came from a priest named Arius, who taught that Jesus could not have existed eternally as God prior to his historical incarnation as a man. According to Arius, Jesus was the highest of created beings, and could be considered “divine” only by analogy. Arians professed a belief in Jesus’ “divinity,” but meant only that he was God’s greatest creature.
Opponents of Arianism brought forth numerous scriptures which taught Christ’s eternal pre-existence and his identity as God. Nonetheless, many Greek-speaking Christians found it intellectually easier to believe in Jesus as a created demi-god, than to accept the mystery of a Father-Son relationship within the Godhead. By 325, the controversy was dividing the Church and unsettling the Roman Empire.
In that year, Athanasius attended the First Ecumenical Council, held at Nicea to examine and judge Arius’ doctrine in light of apostolic tradition. It reaffirmed the Church’s perennial teaching on Christ’s full deity, and established the Nicene Creed as an authoritative statement of faith. The remainder of Athanasius’ life was a constant struggle to uphold the council’s teaching about Christ.
Near the end of St. Alexander’s life, he insisted that Athanasius succeed him as the Bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius took on the position just as the Emperor Constantine, despite having convoked the Council of Nicea, decided to relax its condemnation of Arius and his supporters. Athanasius continually refused to admit Arius to communion, however, despite the urgings of the emperor.
A number of Arians spent the next several decades attempting to manipulate bishops, emperors and Popes to move against Athanasius, particularly through the use of false accusations. Athanasius was accused of theft, murder, assault, and even of causing a famine by interfering with food shipments.
Arius became ill and died gruesomely in 336, but his heresy continued to live. Under the rule of the three emperors that followed Constantine, and particularly under the rule of the strongly Arian Constantius, Athanasius was driven into exile at least five times for insisting on the Nicene Creed as the Church’s authoritative rule of faith.
Athanasius received the support of several Popes, and spent a portion of his exile in Rome. However, the Emperor Constantius did succeed in coercing one Pope, Liberius, into condemning Athanasius by having him kidnapped, threatened with death, and sent away from Rome for two years. The Pope eventually managed to return to Rome, where he again proclaimed Athanasius’ orthodoxy.
Constantius went so far as to send troops to attack his clergy and congregations. Neither these measures, nor direct attempts to assassinate the bishop, succeeding in silencing him. However, they frequently made it difficult for him to remain in his diocese. He enjoyed some respite after Constantius’ death in 361, but was later persecuted by Emperor Julian the Apostate, who sought to revive paganism.
In 369, Athanasius managed to convene an assembly of 90 bishops in Alexandria, for the sake of warning the Church in Africa against the continuing threat of Arianism. He died in 373, and was vindicated by a more comprehensive rejection of Arianism at the Second Ecumenical Council, held in 381 at Constantinople.
St. Gregory Nazianzen, who presided over part of that council, described St. Athanasius as “the true pillar of the church,” whose “life and conduct were the rule of bishops, and his doctrine the rule of the orthodox faith.”
Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/st-athanasius-doctor-of-the-church-472
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Thank you CNA (staff) for this article on St. Athanasius! This great saint’s holy combat against the Arian heresy is still existing to-day with heretic branches which deny the eternal divinity of Jesus Christ as opposed to their errors of claiming having a divinity “starting” at different stages of the life on earth of the Lord, a heresy consequently denying his eternity in favor of His immortality. Jesus Christ is truly the First Born of the Eternal Father because factually Adam was never born, but created out of mud. Jesus Christ was born of a woman as the Son of Man while still having existed before since the eternity. It is by His life, death and resurrection that He brought man onto God as opposed to God taking the appearance of man in the flesh, not as separate God and man, but as God and man as one (single) Christ.
The Arian heresy exists to-day in our century in the form of some Baptist sects (the divinity of Jesus came only upon his baptism according to their teachings), or again under some other non-Catholic variances among Huguenots, with this spiritual tragedy going all the way down to the abysmal Jehovah’s Witnesses claiming that Jesus was a mere teacher!
The role of St. Athanasius is crucial in the life of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s ‘Athanasian Creed’, written post mortem by one of the disciple of the saint is a document of great value, and it is truly the bases for the Nicene Creed.
For the secret, and not so secret history, the date of…
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For the secret, and not so secret history, the date of May 2nd is also important in the life of the RCC: It is on May 2, 1989 that the last sovereign pontiff and authentic Vicar of Christ, died. His Holiness Pope Gregory XVII, better known as Cardinal Siri, Patriarch of Genoa passed away on May 2, 1989 in his ‘papal palace’ of Genoa, Italy where he had lived under house arrest for 31 years, with watching guards and handlers, since the coup d’etat of October 26, 1958, when the first antipope (J23) became the usurper which precipitated the Church of Jesus Christ into the universal chaos caused by the abominable Council of Vatican II.
Pope Gregory was likely assassinated because he had finally been able to establish contacts outside of his house arrest since June 1988. The details of this brief narrative are documented by the web-site TCW (To-day’s Catholic World). It appears that a certain Hutton Gibson, the dad of the famous actor Mel Gibson, played a financial role in the investigation of the said coup d’etat of the conclave of 1958.
This allusion to the ‘secret history’ may not be coincidental to the feast day of a Doctor of the Church: St. Athanasius saved the Church of Jesus Christ in the 4th Century, and may to-day indirectly save the same church again by reminding the world of a landmark date in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.