he Catholic Church is in crisis, one
comparable to the great Arian crisis of the fourth century. Traditional Catholics today are like the faithful Catholics of those ancient days, and our leaders, particularly our bishops, are like the courageous Fathers whom the Arians persecuted.
They have the churches, but we have the Faith.
Today, liberal modernists are well-represented and influential in the Catholic hierarchy, the dioceses, academia and the media, largely because they support and promote their own while suppressing opposition to their agenda. They also hold heterodox views, like the heretics of old.
As an example, liberal modernists tend to emphasize Our Lord’s humanity over His divinity, and treat traditional and orthodox christology as unimportant or obsolete. This makes it easy to compare their ideas to those of the ancient Arians, who taught that Christ is a creature.
Seen in this clear light, today’s liberal modernists are indeed an “Arian church.”
The Ancient Arians
In ancient times Arianism, like liberal modernism, was widespread among the general population and the elite. But there is another important similarity in the historical character of our two crises.
Arianism, unlike other heresies, was not simply a set of ideas that appealed to a more or less limited set of people in the Church. It was not an esoteric or Gnostic school, a personality cult or an enthusiast craze. Rather, it was a massive conspiracy, a vehicle for the ambitions of designing men.
What happened? The heresiarch Arius, a deposed Alexandrian priest, supplied the theological errors we now call by his name.
In fact, however, the heresiarch himself is perhaps a less important figure in the story of his own heresy than his patron, a grasping bishop known to history as Eusebius of Nicomedia.
A distant relative of Constantine the Great, Eusebius used his influence over the imperial family to advance himself and his network of fellow Arians.
For decades, these conspirators used the power of the Church and state, public opinion and mob violence, to repress and terrorize anyone who resisted or opposed them.
The Ancient Resistance
The great Church Fathers of this era wrote numerous works refuting the errors of Arianism and investigating the mysteries of the Trinity. The theological works of St. Athanasius, St. Hilary of Poitiers, and St. Gregory Nazianzen, for example, remain with us today as ancient classics.
Most interestingly, these writers also recognized that they were confronting a conspiracy, and not just working out a disagreement.
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