The small group of missionaries paused to take stock of where they were. The forest was so dense around them that they felt stifled and disoriented. This was the farthest any of them had been from civilization and they had not yet encountered any of the tribes they had come to meet. They knew they were being watched; the forest was alive with eyes and strange calls that did not come from birds or animals.
If asked where this scene took place, most readers would probably guess Africa, some section of Asia, or the jungles of South America. In fact, the setting is Europe, the heart of Christendom in later times. We are so used to thinking of the historical West as both the center of Catholic civilization and the source of missionaries to the rest of the world that we forget that the peoples of the West themselves needed conversion as much as any remote African or Indian tribe today.
The early spread of the Faith beyond the borders of the civilization in which it was born, to the lands from which the ancestors of most of us came, is an enthralling tale, full of adventure and endless challenges for the bearers of the Faith. The great variety of the tribes they encountered required very different missionary tactics.
Some border tribes had long been in contact with the civilized Roman and Greek worlds and were thus familiar with both the language and the culture of their evangelizers. Other, more remote peoples had almost nothing in common with the missionaries. Indeed, they were often under the influence of either the formidable Arian heresy or the powerful underworld of paganism, witchcraft, and even human sacrifice.
Here we will take a brief look at the spread of the Church within the Roman Empire and then mention a few of the daunting challenges met by Catholic apologists in the world of the barbarians.
Rome and the Faith
We are familiar with our Lord’s mandate to the apostles and their post-Resurrection missions—especially those of St. Paul, most of which occurred within the borders of the Roman Empire. Because the borders of that empire at its height ran for more than 3,000 miles—from Britain eastward across Europe to the Black Sea and Byzantium (capital of the eastern Empire), south along the Mediterranean to Arabia and Egypt, and across North Africa to the Atlantic—the task of conversion was challenging, to say the least.
When we consider that the persecution of Christians by the Roman state began with Nero in A.D. 64 and continued off and on until the Catholic emperor Constantine stopped it with his famous edict of Milan in 313, it is remarkable that there were enough brave Christians left to undertake the conversion of their fellow citizens.
Those same centuries of persecution, however, saw the spread of the Faith throughout the empire, a development for which we have a great deal of documentary evidence. There are, for example, harrowing—and deeply touching—eyewitness accounts of the martyrs of Lyons, who preached to their persecutors and those who watched their agonies for entertainment, until their last breaths.
We also have the diary of St. Perpetua, a young mother and martyr in Carthage, North Africa, which gives precious glimpses of the interrogation and imprisonment of a group of Catholics in that city. The diary has an appendix in another hand describing the martyrdom of Perpetua herself.
The persecutions seem to have increased, rather than reduced, the number of Christians in the Roman Empire, and by the time of Constantine the entire realm was on its way to becoming officially Christian. There were still heresies and other ills to combat, but with the freedom of the Church to organize and operate openly, popes and bishops could turn their attention to the further reaches of the empire where the Faith had not yet taken firm hold, and to the border areas where wandering pagan tribes still lived.
Some of these tribes were hostile to all things Roman. In the case of the Franks, the founders of France, the state that would come to be called “the eldest daughter of the Church,” there were obscure and lingering grievances against the way they had been treated by long-dead Romans. The details may have been forgotten, but they did not like Romans, and this got in the way, at least for a time, of their willingness to listen to what Roman missionaries had to say.
But this vague grudge was nothing like the enmity of many of the Germanic tribes further east. Arian missionaries had gotten to them before the Catholics did and instilled in them hostility to all things Roman and Catholic.
We might pause here to consider briefly the formidable obstacle to conversion that Arianism proved to be, since in some ways it prefigures the difficulties that still plague conversion efforts. Arianism refers to the heresy taught at Alexandria, in Roman Egypt, by the priest Arius. Arius was an early fourth-century preacher with quite a following among intellectuals, including pagans, because of his elegant language and subtle ideas. Among those ideas was the proposition that Christ was not quite God; he was the highest of God’s creations but not equal to the Father. All this was couched in involved and subtle oratory that made it difficult to analyze.
Young Athanasius, who became a fierce antagonist of Arius, saw right through it, but most bishops of the time, temporarily at least, swallowed it whole. We cannot follow the whole controversy and how it was finally condemned by the Church, but here is the significance for those barbarians we left in the previous paragraph: The followers of Arius, unrepentant, left the empire and went to preach to the Germanic tribes beyond the northern border—with great success.
Picture the poor pagans, flattered and courted by smooth-talking Romans who professed to be bringing them the wonderful new religion of Christianity. They drank it up—and with it the grudge against Rome instilled by their teachers, who bitterly resented their own condemnation and exile. Over the generations, this barbarian version of Arianism became a sort of simplified warrior cult with lots of singing in the woods and midnight prayer services. Arianism was a way of life, the “way we have always believed in our family,” as we still hear as justification for heresy.
Unlike Catholicism, it brought no culture with it; thus it was very difficult for the missionaries of the fifth century, who were eventually successful with the pagan Franks, to find any common ground with the Arian tribes. In some places, it took a long time for Arianism to die out, more or less, and even then some Arian ideas continued to simmer underground, whence they oozed out during the Reformation.
Beyond the Roman frontiers
The conversion of outlying areas of the empire had its difficulties, but at least there was a Roman presence, whether military or commercial, the Latin language, and generally urban settlements where Romans and provincials mingled peacefully. Often some of the resident Romans were Christian, so when new missionaries from Rome arrived in England, for example, they were not in a completely unfamiliar or hostile environment.
It was a different situation if they tried to go north to the land of the sinister Picts, in modern Scotland, or to Ireland, where St. Patrick had to match Druid magic with miracles. It was also a different situation when, having converted the pagans of some European territory and provided them with churches, schools, monasteries, and useful agricultural knowledge, the missionaries saw all their work, and many of their converts, swept away in one of the waves of invasion out of Asia that punctuate late Roman and medieval history.
The Huns came rampaging into Europe in the fifth century, sweeping ahead of them the terrified tribes that later settled within or just outside the Roman Empire. Those tribes would eventually be converted, some sooner, some later, but the Huns did not stay long enough to be preached to. Having destroyed numerous cities, trade depots, and people, they were finally defeated by a barbarian-Roman coalition army and apparently persuaded by Pope St. Leo X to go home—wherever home was.
Christendom pulled itself together and rebuilt, but in the ninth century another group of fierce invaders poured in, devastating, killing, and disrupting. They were called Hungarian because their ferocity resembled that of the Huns (they, however, called themselves Magyars). They spread panic throughout Europe, with rumor reporting them in places where they had never been. Many people fled to the western coasts, only to be massacred by pagan Viking raiders who happened to be on the move at the same time.
The Vikings would eventually settle in Scandinavia and be converted. The Hungarians, meanwhile, were not anxious to return to the steppes of Asia and settled permanently in the old Roman province of Pannonia, where they martyred the missionaries sent to them until their royal family was finally converted. That family produced saints in abundance, and the kingdom of Hungary became an eastern bulwark of Catholic civilization against barbarism.
All this time, more peaceful migrations had also taken place in eastern Europe, so that by the 13th century we find Poland and other flourishing Catholic states there. It seemed that a serene Christendom might finally breathe freely. Then came another invasion.
The Mongols came sweeping out of east Asia in the 13th century like a continent-wide tornado. They wiped out the Christian Russian state of Kiev and occupied Russia for 200 years. They also occupied Hungary for a short time, which must have seemed very long to the surviving inhabitants. They ravaged parts of that country, turning them into wasteland, and massacred a large percentage of the population. For the rest of the century they raided eastern Europe sporadically, an unpredictable threat always hovering over the people of the region.
The Mongols were not unreceptive to Christianity; some of them had become Nestorian Christians, and Franciscan and Dominican missionaries were sent to Mongol China, where they had some success. There was hope for the conversion of the whole country until the overthrow of the Mongols by a native Chinese dynasty destroyed that prospect. At least it also seems to have stopped the Mongol invasions of the West.
The last and the worst
The final wave of invasion of the West from the East was also the worst: It was the explosion of Islam out of Arabia. I have told this story in my book Islam at the Gates and will merely summarize it here. Long or short, it is a depressing story.
The armies of the fanatical new Arab religion of the sword swept over North Africa in the late seventh century, wiping out Christianity there and crossing from Africa into Spain in 711. They also moved up the eastern Mediterranean coast, occupying part of the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Arabs, however, were unable to conquer the great capital of the empire, Constantinople.
That would be left for a more formidable group of Muslims, the Ottoman Turks. They had been vassals of the empire until their leader figured out that it would be more profitable to conquer his employer’s realm for himself and his tribe. Under Ottoman onslaughts, the empire was gradually reduced to the capital city of Constantinople, which fell in 1453.
Now the Ottomans, having taken over the lands originally conquered by the Arabs as well as the former Byzantine Empire, decided they might as well have Europe as well. To conquer the world for Islam, in fact, was their modest goal. For the following four centuries and longer, Europe was at war with militant Islam on land and sea. Eastern Europe was conquered by land, Greece and other southern areas by sea. Italy and the Mediterranean islands were raided and the inhabitants enslaved. Hungary, destined once again to take the brunt of invasions from the east (that of the Soviets being the most recent), was conquered and devastated and remained under Turkish rule for 150 years, as did the Balkan states.
Not until the Ottoman fleet was decisively defeated at Lepanto and Malta and their siege of Vienna in 1683 failed did the Ottoman hold on Europe begin to crumble. The Christian coalition that repelled them from Vienna pursued the fleeing army through the Balkans and achieved a decisive victory—ratified by a peace treaty that the Turks were forced to sign.
Like some of the earlier invaders, the Turks seemed impervious to conversion. They did, however, manipulate religion to serve their own purposes. At the time of the Reformation, for example, they favored Protestantism within their conquered territories as a support against the Catholic Hapsburgs and encouraged its growth within Hungary to the point that one Hungarian city was dubbed “the Calvinist Rome.”
Some of the Islamic Turks occupying Hungary found Calvinism so congenial to their own religious ideas that they attended church services, though they left at the distribution of “communion.” There is even the story of one Muslim who became a Calvinist preacher, though I have not been able to confirm this. Still, that the story exists points to a certain interesting affinity between Islam and Calvinism.
Given all the historical ups and downs we have just raced through, from the persecution of the Church by the Romans to the obstacles to a peaceful and unified Christendom posed by paganism, invasions, and heresy, it is a wonder that the whole of pagan Europe did, in fact, become, and remain until the Reformation, Catholic.
Even after the shattering of Christendom by the new, manmade religions that divided nations and families, the continent as a whole retained the culture and many of the moral vestiges of original Christianity. Not only did the West become Christian; it yearned to spread the Faith beyond the West—especially the nation of Spain, which undertook the conversion of the New World. But that is another story for another article.
The record of the conversion of “all nations” is, overall, a heartening one. Catholic history tells of so many souls converted, so many saints, and so many great Catholic countries. The disheartening part, of course, is that all of that has been unraveling in recent history.
Still, what was done once, with God‘s grace, can be done again with that same grace and with the indispensable help of our Lady, whom virtually every missionary in history has invoked—often with spectacular results.