By Regis Martin
Crisis Magazine
October 24, 2025
As often happens with the most portentous and far-reaching events, the learned and the clever will be the last to know. Something undeniably huge and seismic took place in a tiny town in the Eastern Mediterranean more than two millennia ago, and scarcely anyone took notice. "A star shone forth in the heavens," wrote St. Ignatius, bishop and martyr, recalling the event near the end of the first century, "and its light was unutterable. Its strangeness caused amazement, and all the rest of the constellations with the sun and the moon formed themselves into a chorus about the star. But the star itself outshone them all."
It was the great secret, he said, "crying out to be told, but wrought in God's silence," and so it escaped "the notice of the prince of this world." What was this secret? Only that salvation would come through a Virgin giving birth to a Son who would die upon a Cross.
Thus it all began with the coming of a Child in the first century, then ratified in the public life by the Emperor Constantine following his conversion in the early fourth century. And now, of course, no honest historian will dare deny that it was this that Providence intended to be the decisive turning point in all human history. Nothing less than a complete eruption of eternity into time, causing the very Logos of God to assume the flesh and blood of the human being Jesus.
"The hint half guessed," says T.S. Eliot,
the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled...
It was, hands down, the single greatest game-changer in the history of the universe. In a book written back in the late 1930s called The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church, Charles Williams, friend and fellow Inkling to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, provides a precise outline of the event and its profound and far-reaching impact. Something truly momentous, he suggests, transpired during the time between the missionary voyages of St. Paul-who, instructed by the Holy Spirit, will leave Asia behind and thus enter the soft underbelly of Europe-and the arrival of St. Augustine who, fresh from his own conversion, enters the cities of Carthage and Hippo to become their bishop.
"When St. Paul preached in Athens," recounts Williams,
the world was thronged with crosses, rooted outside cities, bearing all of them the bodies of slowly dying men. When Augustine preached in Carthage, the world was also thronged with crosses, but now in the very center of cities, lifted in processions and above altars, decorated and bejeweled, and bearing all of them the image of the Identity of dying Man...There was offered everywhere "the clean sacrifice." Men were no longer to die, for Man had died...
There will be no more duels to the death fought out in the Colosseum among gladiators, gaudily staged to amuse the Roman mob; or the sight of Christians being torn to shreds by ravenous beasts. Bloodlust had long been the dark underside of pagan Rome. It broods over every account of the city, like the face of the Emperor Caracalla, who once received the leading citizens of Alexandria, summoning them to a sumptuous banquet, only to have them all summarily butchered. Only Romans would allow themselves to be so brutalized by habitual displays of torture and sadism and still argue, as did Cicero, that such spectacles inspired manly disdain for suffering.
Yes, something truly tremendous, horizon-shattering even, has taken place. And the world will never be the same again. Pope St. John Paul II, standing before the Colosseum 20 centuries following the birth of Christ, spoke of it as a place "once consecrated to triumphs, entertainments, and the impious worship of the pagan gods, but now dedicated to the sufferings of the martyrs purified from impious superstitions."
The blood that had so freely flowed, soaked for so long into a pagan soil, has since seeded an entirely new world. This was not the result or the flowering of some juridic theory but the fruit of a myriad or more acts of love, gestures of sacrifice, all anchored to a God whose Name is Love and whose life is a Blessed Company-or Family-in the very image and likeness of whom we have all been graced to grow. Christus totam novitatem attulit, semetipsum afferns, announced the martyred bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus, back in the second century. Christ brought all things new by bringing Himself.
Here is the real heart and center of Christian Culture: that Christ, who having entered fully and irrevocably into the human condition, elevating our story to become His-story, has put all the idols to flight. A humanism without Christ, a world shorn of every trace of the sacred, was never intended as a scenario permanently written into the script of history. It is God's Word that is to be written-and on pages that will never be effaced. He who wedded Himself to our world, pitching the very tent of Heaven into our history, has come to urge us to anneal ourselves at once, and the institutions we form, into the very fire of divine love.
That said, what can only follow but a series of marching orders given to a Church who sees herself as Christ's Bride and Body, enjoined by no less an authority than God Himself, to carry the Good News of Christ's Gospel to the very ends of the earth, baptizing everyone in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit-knowing that God will be with us, more present even than the Church is present to herself, until the end of time, the final trumps, the consummation of the world itself.
The only question, then, that matters is this: Is the Church to give the world a Christian shape, or must she instead shape Christianity to the world? Everything turns on the answer we give to that question.
Is she truly an extension of Christ Himself, configured to God in such a way as to lead the world back to Him? And if she is not, if her ambitions have been so circumscribed as to fit the size of the straightjacket the world has designed for her, then we are in a state of despair and nothing good can ever come of our continuing to belong to a Church that has given up on herself and on God. Then she is no longer moved by love-not for God, or herself, or for the world God has given her to help redeem. A whole world awaits us, therefore, whose conquest will depend not only on our prayers but our politics as well.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.