THE WORLD'S GREATEST SECRET
John Mathias Haffert
table of contents
CHAPTER TWO
WHY THE
SECRECY?
The early Christians lived
in a clandestine church set _against a backdrop of fear. They would move
through underground passages, and perform their religious rites deep in the
bowels of the earth where pagan eyes could not penetrate. The reason lies in
one terrible word: persecution. Only understanding of that terrible word can
enable us to grasp why the subject of this book first became the world's
greatest secret. distinguished in symbols around Peter's tomb and in the
catacombs of Rome. The horrors of early persecutions have been revealed in
various documents, beginning with the Bible itself. In the Acts of the
Apostles there is a description of the stoning of Stephen, and later St. Paul
in his Epistles refers to the persecutions in Rome. At the time that Paul
wrote, persecutions were still a comparatively new phenomenon, and they were
not quite so thorough as they subsequently became. Paul himself was able to
preach openly in the Eternal City (though under custody) for two years before
he was beheaded. Tertullian, writing in the second century, gives us an
inkling of the persecutions which Nero inaugurated. Then the writer Pliny
paints a wider picture. It was he whom Emperor Trajan sent to the Province of
BithyniaPontus to quell "disorder" reported there. He writes that he
was amazed to find that a large percentage of the province had become
Christian. This caused "disorder" because the members of the new
religion no longer bought animal victims for sacrifice to the gods, and
dealers in animals felt the economic pinch, as did the pagan priests.
2 Pliny asked the Emperor
how he should handle the matter and Trajan's reply, recorded by Pliny, became
the basis for persecution of Christians until Constantine became Emperor in
313, and briefly afterward in the reign of Julian the Apostate. The decree of
Trajan demanded that Christians recant and offer sacrifice to the gods or die.
Shortly after this the staircase and wall were built over Peter's tomb in the
cemetery on Vatican Hill. Does all this sound like a fantastic tale from some Never Never
Land, only dimly discernible beyond the mists and shadows of time? To us of
the twentieth century, it should seem more real than that. We are no strangers
to persecution. It rages virulent, violent and vicious a about us. Father
Leopold Braun, A. A., for many years pastor of the one Roman Catholic church
within the borders of the U.S.S.R.' said that he did not keep baptismal or
marriage records. The Cheka, or secret police, who appeared unexpectedly from
time to time to inspect his files, would have visited reprisals on his
parishioners had he kept such records. Then Father Robert Greene, M.M., who
was a missionary in the little village of Tung-an in South China, tells his
experiences in his book Calvary in China. When the Reds took over in 1950, one
of their first acts was to Paint on the side of the church in huge characters,
words Fr. Braun was allowed in the Soviet Union when the United States granted
the country diplomatic recognition. 'The former name of the Soviet secret
police, now known as the KGB (from the Russian name of the organization, which
means Committee for State Security).
3 Seeing this, the happy
parishioners thronged to the church as usual for Sunday Mass. As they entered
the door Communist soldiers stood aside and watched. A few nights later, the
priest, lying awake in his bed, heard sounds beneath his window. He looked
out. Red soldiers were marching by, leading a civilian prisoner. In the
morning he was told: "'Old Lee Tu-pao was taken from his home last night
and no one knows what has happened to him."' Eventually the church
building was used as a prison where Red soldiers questioned the unfortunates
and "encouraged" them to "confess." Father Greene
describes the glimpse he had of it one day: "Two men strung up by their
thumbs to a hook on the wall, their toes barely touching the floor.... I know
of one Christian who went eight days thus strung up before he eventually
died."' Naturally, the Christians lived in a nightmare of suspense and
dread. Father Greene hid the Blessed Sacrament in his bookcase. To make
matters worse, he distrusted his own former parishioners, and parents
distrusted their own children. A similar fear and distrust existed in East
Germany. The February 1966 Bulletin of St. Ignatius Church, San Francisco,
published an excerpt from a letter written by a priest in East Berlin. A woman
came to him and asked: "My son wants to flee to West Germany to study
engineering. Should I let him go?" The priest ponders in his letter:
"Is the woman's prob Fr. Robert W. Greene, M.M-Calvary in China, lem
genuine, or does she have 'the task' of exposing me as 'an instigator of
defection?
4 Dr. Thomas Dooley tells of
the terrible persecution of Christians in Vietnam in his immortal book Deliver
Us from Evil. And in his book The Night They Burned the Mountain, Dr. Dooley
tells of his fears when confronted with the thought that he might have to
abandon his crew of Asian workers and leave Laos before the Communist
invasion: "I knew that the six or eight of my star pupils would be taken
out and beheaded in front of the whole village and their heads, with the
organs of the neck hanging down, would be impaled upon stakes. I knew that the
Communists would take my Lao crew, stand them in a circle facing inward, and
with machetes would deftly cut the tendons in the back of their knees. When
the crew would fall to the ground, the Communists would walk around and hack
them to pieces. I have seen the Communists do this and just leave the men in
the middle of a room or in a field. When the tendons were cut, the Lao would
not bleed to death. They would crawl like animals until they were caught and
hacked to death. This is what they would do to Chai, to Si, to Ngoan, and to
Deng. To the girls on my staff they would do even more dreadful things."
Perhaps somewhere in the world we will always have persecution, although that
is usually followed by grace and conversion. But the mind boggles at the
hideous facts. We find that we are thinking of them as if they were the stuff
of an old Alfred Hitchcock TV skit which had somehow gone awry; we can
scarcely realize that they are actual Occurrences on this familiar planet,
Earth.
5 Horror is always difficult
to grasp whether it is a ancient Rome, of present-day totalitarian regimes, or
for that matter, of yesterday's Nazism which took the lives of hundreds of
thousands. Who will forget the awful drama of day-to-day secrecy which fills
the diary of Anne Frank, a secrecy which only postponed the agony of the gas
chamber? Only twenty-four hours after the Nazi, Adolph Eichmann, had been
hanged, the present writer drove past the chalk walls of the prison in Israel
where the hanging occurred. All was quiet. If the wretch had cried out as he
fell through the trap, no echo resounded from the quiet hills. It was as
though the grisly deed of his hanging and all his own grisly deeds had never
taken place. Peaceful green fields lay beneath the shadow of the timeless
Palestinian hills. Christ saw those same fields - so the mind darts off on a
tangent, seeking a pleasant, romantic thought. We wondered then: "If we
find it difficult to realize the monstrosity of an Eichmann who died here
yesterday, can we ever realize the grim persecutions of two thousand years
ago?" However, it helps a little to have the cryptographic writings of
the early Christians. The writings are tangible evidence. And we find
cryptography in abundance not only on Peter's tomb, and under the
Basilica of St. Peter's, but also in a first century room discovered in 1915
under St. Sebastian's Church beyond the walls of Rome.' The symbols and the
writings, meaningless to an outsider, like lightning flash back over the
centuries to reveal how the early Christians lived.
6 Looking at the Christians
in China under Mao, we know what that meant. The Christians of the little tow
of Tung-an knew that discovery would lead to the firin squad - or much worse.
In some cases, they were in fear not only for themselves but also for the
people who sheltered them, so they exercised the caution of hunted animals.
They used every form of concealment, reticence, and seclusion; they created
every barrier curtain, purdah, shade, mask or disguise that ingenuity could
devise. ' Obviously, it was the same for the early Christians. To become a
Christian in the first centuries was to choose concealment as a way of life.
Fear was a cloak that one donned along with the symbolic white robe of
Baptism. The poor creature was henceforth hedged about with countless
inhibitions, lest a word, a gesture, or some tiny act of his give him or his
friends away. The catacombs, fetid, cold and damp, were the meeting places of
the brethren. There they could perform their religious rites hidden from
hostile gaze, and protected by the Romans' superstitious respect for
cemeteries. In this atmosphere of secrecy the Christians hid their beliefs in
symbols, and archeologists today study those symbols for answers. As far back
as the fourth century, historians called the Christian life "the
discipline of the secret." However, much earlier, before it was called
anything at all, it was a deeply ingrained discipline. It was so much a part
of Christianity that it could not be shuffled off even after the need for it
no longer existed. Secrecy survived in the East until the fifth century, in
the West until the sixth. It took time for people to believe that the
persecutions were really over and done with.
7 For a long time there was
a latent fear of renewal. When partially trusted strangers or new converts
from paganism attended Christian rites, they were allowed to stay only for the
first part of the prayers and ceremonies They were required to leave when the
second, more private, part was about to begin. The first part of the
liturgical* service was designated for "the catechumens" (that is,
for those still learning the catechism of the Faith) and the rest designated
for "the faithful" (that is, for those who had proved their
steadfastness in the Faith and had been baptized). The great act of the
liturgy of "the faithful" was perhaps the most carefully guarded
secret of all history. In the Liturgy it was referred to as "the
secret" until 1964! This secret so filled the hearts and minds of the
first Christians that archeologists and historians working all around the
Mediterranean keep uncovering the secret symbols day after day. Early
Christians had not been afraid t o express the secret in symbols and pictures
because unless a man knew the secret, the symbols would be meaningless. The
secret was too mystic for mere hu~ mans to believe. Indeed, it was almost too
mystic for, humans to believe. After Vatican Council 11 removed the', label of
secrecy and openly substituted "Liturgy of the Eucharist" for
"Secret," the mystery began to creep into interfaith dialogue. The
current sound and excite Merit seems to echo what was heard when Christ first
announced it.
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