When in Rome ...

When in Rome, do as the Christians do.

That's not always been easy advice to follow. Back in the day when Rome ruled the known world, "doing" as a Christian could easily mean facing ravenous lions in the Coliseum, crucifixion, or some other awful death. Is it easier today?

Of course, the saying, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," does not use "Rome" literally. It means wherever you are, try to fit in. Go with the flow. Go along to get along. That's not exactly the job description of a Christian in the first decade of the 21st century. Being a Christian often means going against the grain. You stand for life when the culture wants death. You solve hatred not by going to war but by extending love. You get slapped, and you turn the other cheek. They zig, and you zag.

Going Against the Grain
If you're "doing" as a Christian, you won't be out-and-out persecuted for it ... maybe. Regularly, the news brings word of people being harassed and even killed for their belief in Christ. If you're the Pope, you won't be summarily executed, as were the first number of Peter's successors. Even there, though, the previous pontiff narrowly died in an assassination attempt in 1981.

Nonetheless, physically it's easier for a Christian to do as a Christian should do, at least in the industrialized West. Philosophically, however, it involves going against the tidal force of secular materialism, whose engine is technology, whose assembly line is speed, and whose product is The Consumer. The Consumer is a socially engineered person largely distracted from the awareness of his identity as a "child" of God, made in His image and likeness.

The Consumer accounts for about three quarters of the U.S. economy, which is predicated upon this creature's unthinking impulses and denial of the free will that alone makes possible informed choice. The Consumer buys the toys he doesn't need, the clothes she will not wear, the car he won't be satisfied with, and the home she can't afford. The Consumer leaves food on the plate when half the world is hungry or starving.
Buy, buy, buy ... more, more, more ... too much is not enough.

No Time to Think
Secular materialism loves it when The Consumer doesn't think, can't find time to meditate, or fails to approach activity that might lead to God. Consequently, it bombards this poor creature with an endless barrage of advertising, sex, celebrity, and glitz. It accelerates the pace of living to decelerate the reflection on life, keeping its prey restless, off guard, and never satisfied.

Often, the media in such a society will marginalize religion. It can satirize it, distort coverage, or ignore it altogether - anything but covering it seriously.

For example, the only local daily paper published in Pittsfield, Mass., county seat for Berkshire County (where the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy is located) doesn't have a "Religion" section. There's no one assigned to the "religion" beat because there is no such beat. That there is no such beat reflects an editorial assessment measuring how seriously the editors take the topic. The same paper, however, will cover the trivial as if it mattered and the banal as if it were thunderously relevant. For instance, recent headlines from yesterday and today reveal these items:


• Comic pondering political career
• Paris' [Hilton] mom to be TV soap guest
• Vodka from trees
• Proudly gay at Passover



Did the newspaper cover Pope Benedict XVI's pastoral visit to America? Yes but blandly, with wire service copy. It did not send its own writers. Washington, D.C. is a seven-hour ride from Pittsfield. New York City is a little more than two hours away without breaking the speed limit. A paper serious about religion would have had a reporter and photographer in NYC, at least, and probably D.C. too.

'Doing' Like Christians
Covering the World Mercy Congress in Rome April 2-6 (read full coverage at mercy.com) brought me into contact with about 8,000 people "doing" like Christians in Rome. They acted small: the thousand considerations extended to a brother or sister - a held chair, a shared bottle of wine, assistance climbing stairs. They acted large: the rush of help when a sound speaker fell off the wall at St. John Lateran and struck a woman in the head, drawing blood; the outreach in the streets of Rome to strangers and passersby.

Beliefs determine action. Actions decide belief. When we become authentic individuals, free to reflect and with time to ponder, we only need to be open and we are led to spirituality. We must be "hard-wired" that way. Faith becomes something we experience and live.

The permanent legacy science has made to the Western mind is the "worship of numerical patterns, of mathematical relations as such" (Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1949). Reason, logic, and applied mathematics, it was thought, could provide a satisfactory account of the physical universe. We now know that such is not the case. The more we learn of how matter behaves, the more mysterious the universe becomes (black holes, sub-atomic particles, other dimensions).

Childhood's End
We in the West have been left with a mindset perfectly suited for spirituality and a rational basis for religion, which has, as science, the same goal: to explain the origin and purpose of life. Secular materialism, however, has confiscated reason by hammering its greatest natural enemy: the reflective, spiritually bent mind, body, and soul.

Technology is being thrust unthinkingly upon toddlers, giving laptops to babies and putting cell phones in the hands of grammar school kids. This is robbing even childhood of its time for dreaming (I think of the title of one of Arthur C. Clarke's best short stories, "Childhood's End"). Sadly, more and more people are buying into the fiction that this is OK.

The New Consumer isn't being born but is being made, in the image and likeness of its creator. It is not prophecy to point out the likely result of this mutation. For those who need it spelled out, I refer you to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with its timeless theme: "You have created a monster, and it will destroy you." The child who is not taught about God will probably not learn who he or she is as a child of God. It is the latest way of robbing the cradle.

The New Consumer will be conformist and self-indulgent, in Rome, doing as the Romans do. Goodness has no problem being in "Rome," but it requires "doing" as child of God. Do as the "Romans do" and you end up as the Romans ended.

Dan Valenti writes for numerous publications of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, both in print and online. He is the author of "Dan Valenti's Journal" for thedivinemercy.org.



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