In his wonderful historical meditation, Chrysopolis, Dr. Alan Fimister informs us that September 18, 2024, is the 1,700th anniversary of the battle that marked Constantine the Great’s victory over Licinius, thus securing his sole rule of the Roman Empire and making possible the Council of Nicaea.
Alan Fimister’s article is a reminder that the Cross of Jesus Christ, whose image secured Constantine’s victories at Milvian Bridge and Chrysopolis, is our only hope. It is particularly fitting that the precious Relic was discovered by Saint Helena, Constantine’s mother, whose prayers, no doubt, were instrumental in helping him to end well after all.
Apropos of the Holy Cross, here is the rousing final paragraph of Dr. Fimister’s thoughtful and timely historical meditation, which deserves to be read in its entirety.
What then are Licinius’s legions to do if there is no hope of victory against the shining standard of the Cross? Then as now, their tactic, their only possible means of delaying the ultimate victory of the Church is “never to direct their attack against this standard, nor even incautiously to allow their eyes to rest upon it”. Our strategy must therefore always be to confront the world with the Cross, to accentuate the conflict, to make no compromise, to preach above all “those principal truths which are directly opposed to the errors of this day” with the high praise of God always in our mouths and the two-edged sword of God’s word in our hands. The signal for the beginning of the final persecution of the Antichrist, we are told by the Prophet Daniel, is the taking away of the perpetual sacrifice (Dn 12:11). The degradation of the liturgy and the proliferation of sacrilegious communions is the harbinger of that dark hour. Every good confession and pious communion forestalls it and arms us against it. The defence of the natural law against unnatural vice and the innocent blood that desecrates almost every land may seem a lost cause, but it is not. Every time a voice is raised in the wilderness, the eyes of the enslaved rest, however fleetingly, upon the Cross, and the legions of darkness are weakened and forced into direct confrontation with it, a confrontation in which they cannot prevail. All the idiotic slogans about “the right to chose” and “reproductive rights” and “all are welcome” and “love is love” are designed to steer Licinius’s armies away from the Labarum. We must not be driven into euphemisms; “homosexuality” is sodomy; “reproductive rights” is child murder; “trans awareness” is castrating children. Reason is not secular, reason demands that all men and all communities of men worship God in the manner he has established, and this is what we must demand to. To stand on any other ground is to guarantee defeat before a single weapon is unsheathed. Every time we choose some other ground and trust in eloquent words of worldly wisdom instead of the Cross, we empty the Cross of its power, and we lose.
