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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1783 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 22, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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In terms of cantankerous sass, it’s hard to beat St. Lawrence, a third century deacon in Rome. Immediately after the bishop of Rome was executed by order of the emperor, Lawrence was ordered to hand over the church’s treasury. Instead, he spent three days feverishly giving away as much as he could to the poor, then “presented the city's indigent, crippled, blind, and suffering, and declared that these were the true treasures of the Church: ‘Here are the treasures of the church. You see, the church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor!’” This naturally pissed off the authorities, so they decided to roast him alive on a giant gridiron. After he’d been roasting awhile in extreme agony, he told the guards, “Turn me over. I’m done on this side.”

Damn sassy as fk. Holy shit what a beast. I love stories like this hahaha wow. They really made em different back then huh?

It’s also hard not to appreciate St. Jerome, who is most famous for his translation of the Bible into Latin, but who was also, as one scholar put it, an “irascible, morbidly sensitive old curmudgeon,” who made frequent acerbic comments to and about his fellow clergymen, including Sts. Ambrose and Augustine.

A quick search pulled up this article, which includes some other gems:

When Jerome experienced his own sort of exile after the death of his patron Damasus, he venomously hissed at the “Senate of Pharisees” for having driven him from his beloved Rome.

He was not the continent Augustine who never hinted at struggles with concupiscence after his famous moment in the garden that brought him the chastity for which he had been praying. In his mid-seventies, Jerome tells us that it was only when his body was broken by age that he was freed from his disordered desires.

He was not the disciplined Antony of Egypt who spent 20 years alone pursuing a life of renunciation and who perfected the art of self-mastery. He completely failed at his own desert experiment, even though he had dragged his sizeable library across the Mediterranean to keep him company (what a spectacle that must have been!). Years later, he said of his time there that “when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome. I used to sit alone because I was filled with bitterness.”

Honestly, he sounds a lot like a Mottizen.

Yeah he definitely sounds like he would belong here. A Mottizen in spirit.

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