Would St Ambrose Get Fired Today?

Saturday was the Feast of St Ambrose, famous for excommunicating Emperor Theodosius. Today? Today he would be deposed by Rome so fast your head would spin!

From Crisis

By John M. Grondelski, PhD

What would Pope Francis have done with an Ambrose standing in the emperor’s path?

The Church celebrates the Memorial of St. Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor, on December 7. By liturgical standards, he’s important. Not only is his an obligatory memorial (i.e., you have to celebrate it), but it’s an obligatory memorial in Advent.  

Saints—especially saints of the early Church—were often the subjects of classical art. Great painters often depicted them,  and especially signature moments from their lives, in their paintings.

One of those great painters depicting a great saint was the master of Flemish Baroque, Peter Paul Rubens. His subject was St. Ambrose. The specific painting I have in mind is “St. Ambrose and Emperor Theodosius,” which Rubens painted around 1615 and which today is held by the famous Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. (Rubens’ student Anthony van Dyck produced a similar painting which hangs in London’s National Gallery.)

The painting depicts St. Ambrose barring the way to Emperor Theodosius as the latter sought to enter the Cathedral of Milan. We need something of the backstory.

St. Ambrose was the great fourth-century bishop of Milan. A major reason he was chosen for that See was his opposition to the Arian heresy, which he intended to eliminate. His influence as a churchman is unquestionable: he was responsible for the conversion of St. Augustine, who himself held Ambrose up as the model bishop. His preaching and teaching were so powerful that he was regarded as one of four (along with Ss. Athanasius, Augustine, and John Chrysostom) great ancient doctors of the Church. Anyone who visits St. Peter’s Basilica sees the Throne of St. Peter, encased as a relic by Bernini, and borne up by those four great doctors.  

Theodosius was Roman Emperor in the late fourth century. Around 390, there was a massacre of citizens in Thessalonica. According to the traditional account, up to 7,000 people were killed in collective punishment for the lynching of a Roman soldier who had a popular charioteer arrested for pederasty. In that traditional account, blame for the punishment was laid on Theodosius and his “choleric” temper. The tradition says that while Theodosius’ anger subsided, he supposedly tried sending messages to revoke the punishment, but it was too late.  

Today’s historians, of course, dispute most of the facts surrounding the tradition, inferring it was framed the way it was to make the Church look good. In any case, Theodosius made his way to Milan in the hope of repentance (and to redeem himself both politically as well as spiritually by ecclesiastical pardon). St. Ambrose did not want to be seen as sanctioning or whitewashing Theodosius’ deed, so he conveniently made himself absent from the city, corresponding with the errant Emperor and demanding extended public penance on his part prior to his restoration to full Communion. This Theodosius did.

The tradition (and artists) turned that call for repentance and conversion into a confrontation at the cathedral door, where Ambrose bars Theodosius—dressed as an emperor—from entering the church until he first dons penitential habit and performs public penance for his bloodletting. This apocryphal scene of Ambrose actually standing in the way of Theodosius’ entry to the church prior to his public penance was the stuff of such tradition as to be regularly depicted in the life of St. Ambrose. Excluding Theodosius from Communion until he does public penance, yes; standing in the doorway, no.

My focus, however, is on how this depiction stuck—and stuck positively—in the Catholic imagination. For centuries, nobody suggested that Ambrose was the “bad guy” or Theodosius the “abused victim.”

I allude to this episode in light of Pope Francis’ November 25 Address to the “Academic Community” of his refashioned John Paul II Institute for “Marriage and Family Sciences.” This “beginning of the academic year” talk functions as a kind of trendsetter for the Institute’s works. It gained international attention because the pope supposedly was calling for welcoming those living in fornication as well as the “divorced and remarried.”  

While the actual text is not as straightforward as the press played it, in some sense they were not wrong: this is the usual Francis modus operandi of what’s-said-by-not-being-said. On the one hand, the pope is correct: the Church needs to open its doors to “everyone.” But for that connection, a sinner may find himself in an even worse place. Proximity to grace might work its effects.

But the papal text shows no follow-through. While the pope insists the Church is “Mother of all,” “everyone, everyone, everyone,” he leaves out that mothers do not just affirm their children. They also have to correct, sometimes even chastise them.  And that’s the part that, if we hear it from Francis, we hear sotto voce, with nowhere near the intensity of his “welcome” message.

Nowhere in his address, for example, does Francis explicitly reaffirm constant ecclesiastical teaching that premarital cohabitation—understood as living sexually together—is a mortal sin. The question of divorced and remarried persons is referred back to Francis’ arguable novelties in Amoris Laetitia.  

Francis’ approach is not new to me because I was exposed to this jesuitical approach to moral theology in my graduate studies, where I learned that what wasn’t said was often more important than what was.  

Which makes me wonder: What would Francis have done with an Ambrose standing in the emperor’s path? Would he invite his early resignation? Tell us he’s been wrongly criticized before taking that resignation? Give him a coadjutor with right-of-succession? Name some suffragan a cardinal? 

Or—in Francis’ fashion of criticizing those “who sit in the chair of Moses”—would he criticize the Milanese doctor for holding up the chair of Peter? Or send him a note on what proper “theology” is and how to apply it “pastorally?” Would we be told Ambrose was “weaponizing” the Eucharist and being “unaccompanying”?

History tells us that Ambrose did not hesitate to exclude a politician from the Bread of Life for his crimes against life. History tells us Ambrose welcomed Theodosius first to show real repentance, which he did.  

One might ask: Who should be taking lessons from whom?