The Word and the poor

My heart quivers as I begin to narrate the disasters of our times. Roman blood has been flowing every day between Constantinople and the Julian Alps for more than twenty years. Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, Dardania, Dacia, Epirus, Dalmatia and all Pannonia have been devastated, mangled, sacked by Goths, Sarmatians, Quadi, Alani, Huns, Vandals and Marcomanni ... The bishops are led slaves, the priests killed, and so are the clerics of the various degrees; the devastated churches, the horses lined up near the altars of Christ as in a stable, the relics of the martyrs unearthed. Wherever there is mourning ... everywhere the image of death. The Roman world collapses ..., wrote St. Jerome in 396. Even a true Christian, profound connoisseur of the Scriptures and of Paul's "there is no longer any Jew or Greek, Scythian or barbarian", was distressed by the profound transformation of the world , of which he was a witness.

And to think that contemporary historians say that the beginning of the long history of the so-called barbarian invasions that engulfed the Roman Empire was nothing more than a humanitarian emergency. On the frontier of the Danube, on the side of the outer bank, crowds of barbarians had encamped, Goths who had abandoned their homes threatened by the fury of the Huns. Peacefully they asked the generals of the Roman army, who guarded the border from the inside of the shore, in the land of the empire, to be welcomed into Roman happiness. The emperor Valens, warned, had seen an unexpected fortune in this mass of people: he was about to make war on Iran and needed men to enlist.

The Goths therefore had been let in, but without any organization and with much corruption: many of them, through a lace, had managed to keep their weapons. But in the empire there was devolution: each city had the power to decide independently what to do.
Some cities had welcomed refugees, others not, despite the emperor having enacted a law that required the allocation of land to immigrants.
But many assignments, again through the usual lace, had been made illegally. Eventually the tensions turned into confrontations. And the clashes had become massacres, rape, violence, persecution, atrocities of all kinds.

More or less two centuries later, Pope St. Gregory the Great will read in the fate of Rome destroyed by the Lombards the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy and his boiling pot: it is said of this city that the bones of the people are consumed, that the whole body is boiled. . Yes, the pomp of the world has passed, the pope wrote ... But as for Israel at the time of exile, there is something else: the poor. No institution can be a guarantee to the Church. The Body of Christ lives only and solely for the Word of God, for the care and service of its poor.

Flaminia Morandi
NP June / July 2016