{"id":1622,"date":"2007-05-30T09:12:10","date_gmt":"2007-05-30T09:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/on-to-tertullian.html"},"modified":"2007-05-30T09:12:10","modified_gmt":"2007-05-30T09:12:10","slug":"on-to-tertullian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/on-to-tertullian.html","title":{"rendered":"On to Tertullian"},"content":{"rendered":"

From today’s General Audience:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

\"Pope\"<\/a> \u2013\u201cBeing with the Church and acceptance of its weaknesses\u201d requires \u201chumility\u201d and \u201csimplicity\u201d, because \u201conly God is truly holy, we are in need of His forgiveness\u201d.  The Pope made these observations today to over 40 thousand people gathered for the general audience in St Peter\u2019s square, during reflections on the limitations of a great figure in Church history, Tertullian.  Among the crowds were the parents of little Maddie, Madeleine Mc Cann the 4 year old English child, abducted May 3rd in Portugal.  The Pope greeted the parents, Gerry and Kate briefly at the end of the audience; they hope this encounter will help them further inform public opinion about the event.<\/p>\n

Returning to \u201cthe line of great figures from the ancient Church, who still today are considered masters of the faith\u201d Benedict XVI focused on the personality of Tertullian, the African apologist from the late II early III centuries, \u201cthe first great Christian author to write in Latin\u201d, who communicates the positive essence of Christianity and illustrates its rational foundations.<\/p>\n

He underlined that Tertullian, is most famous for his apologetic writings, in which he aims to \u201ccounter grave pagan accusations against the Church\u201d and \u201cpresent positively the Gospel\u201d, in dialogue with the culture of the time, but above all \u201cdenounce the un just behaviour of the political authorities of the time towards the Church, by explaining the Christian customs , illustrate the new religion\u201d and show the triumph of the Spirit, which opposes the violence of the persecutors with the fact that \u201cChristians blood is an effective seed, in the end their suffering will be victorious\u201d.  In fact, in a special way Tertullian exhorts Christians to have hope in those times of persecution, exalting hope not only as a virtue, but as \u201ca characteristic which invests every aspect of Christian existence\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Pope recalled that it was he who defined human nature as \u201cnaturaliter christiana\u201d and maintained that \u201ca Christian cannot hate, not even his own enemies\u201d and that this is the moral repercussion of the choice of a faith which \u201cproposes non violence as a way of life\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Pope continued that from the human point of view, one can speak of a drama which plagued Tertullian: with the passing of the years he became ever more exigent of Christians: above all he expected them to face persecution heroically.  In the end he found himself isolated: \u201can overly individualistic search for the truth along with his intemperance led to his breaking from communion with the Church to become a follower of the Montanist sect\u201d. Still today \u201cthere is open debate regarding his behaviour\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis great personality \u2013 commented the Pope \u2013 this figure so rigid in his convictions, who demanded Christians face persecution heroically, spurs me to thought.  In the end it becomes clear that he lacked simplicity, the humility to become one with the Church, accepting its weaknesses\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

More on Tertullian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From today’s General Audience: \u2013\u201cBeing with the Church and acceptance of its weaknesses\u201d requires \u201chumility\u201d and \u201csimplicity\u201d, because \u201conly God is truly holy, we are in need of His forgiveness\u201d.  The Pope made these observations today to over 40 thousand people gathered for the general audience in St Peter\u2019s square, during reflections on the limitations…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOn to Tertullian - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/on-to-tertullian.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On to Tertullian - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}