June 25, 2012
According to venerable ancient tradition, the city of Rome was founded on April 21, 753 B.C., by twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, whose father was Mars, the god of war. Abandoned as infants, they had been nursed by a wolf in a grotto beneath Rome’s Palatine Hill. As adults, the two argued about which hill to build on – Romulus preferring the Palatine and Remus the Aventine. In any case, when Romulus began building his city wall on his hill, Remus ridiculed his brother’s work and then ominously jumped over the wall, thus belittling his brother’s accomplishment. Romulus responded by killing him – thus guaranteeing which of them Rome would be named after! In time, of course, Rome would become the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever yet known.
To that same city, some eight centuries later, came Peter and Paul, brothers not by blood, but by their common faith in Jesus Christ, who had called them to be apostles. The Christian community they found in Rome was small – socially and politically insignificant, therefore an easy target when the Emperor Nero needed scapegoats to blame for a destructive fire in A.D. 64. And among those who eventually gave their lives as witnesses to the Christian faith in that persecution were the apostles Peter and Paul, whose apostolic ministry and witness of martyrdom the Church celebrates with great solemnity annually on June 29.
Presumably Peter and Paul could have found ways to avoid martyrdom. One famous legend recounts how Peter could have fled to safety but returned to Rome and embraced his martyrdom after meeting Jesus on the road. “Lord, where are you going,” Peter had asked. “I am going to Rome to be crucified again,” Jesus responded.
If the small, threatened Christian community of Rome required encouragement and confidence to persevere in their new faith, what more powerful reinforcement could they have had than the witness offered by the martyrdom of those two illustrious apostles – Peter, crucified on the Vatican Hill, and Paul, beheaded on the Ostian Way – who were the Church’s link back to the Risen Lord himself!
The old Rome, which Romulus had established – powerful pagan Rome – founded on the murder of one brother by another, was, for all its grandeur, a human city like any other, a warring conqueror city to be conquered in turn by other warring conquerors. The new Christian Rome of Peter and Paul ultimately conquered the old Rome, but in a new way. The powerful pagan Rome, founded on the murder of one brother by another, was itself conquered by the faith that empowered the brothers-in-Christ to die together as witnesses to a new way of life.
As we celebrate this day made holy for us by the mission and martyrdom of Ss. Peter and Paul, let us also, as St. Augustine once said on this occasion (Sermon 295), “embrace what they believed, their life, their labors, their sufferings, their preaching, and their confession of faith.”
Father Ronald Franco, CSP, is pastor of Immaculate Conception Church Knoxville, Tenn.