On Not Being Thrown to the Lions, by David Carlin

By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing, July 9, 2021

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

A few weeks ago my wife and I spent an afternoon with some old friends, a retired couple who had just come back from their winter home in Florida.  The wife of this couple told us a story from her childhood that reminded me of the glory days of American Catholicism.

She grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, not far from Fall River. She went to a Catholic school in the 1950s. The nuns told their students about the Church’s early martyrs, saintly Christians who, rather than renounce their faith, consented to being killed by hungry lions in the Flavian Amphitheater. These martyrs immediately went to Heaven, where they met Jesus and commenced to enjoy eternal bliss. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. …