This is not an exact analogy, but thinking about the current period in the church always brings this to my mind.
Diocletian initiated a persecution of the church throughout the Roman Empire. His representatives entered a city or town and called all inhabitants into the square where a shrine to Jupiter was erected to which every inhabitant was required to pay homage. Christians were required to renounce Christ on pain of death. All holy books had to be surrendered and were burned. Many Christians suffered martyrdom, but many more including priests and bishops apostatized.
At length, Constantine emerged as the dominant of the tetrarchy, and the martyrdom ended. But the crisis for the church continued in as much as some portions of the church had remained faithful under great suffering while a large portion of the “faithful” had apostatized. Donatists in Carthage, decades later, rejected the claims of St. Augustine’s Christian community to the title Catholic since it had capitulated to imperial pressure long before. The church, in time, healed the crisis through special penances, understanding and time.
It was a small thing to kiss the feet of an idol, was it not? One can almost hear the voices rationalizing its utter meaninglessness, that preserving their lives would benefit society more than their ignominious demise, that those who perished were unreasonably radical. The Catholic conscience, it seems to me, suffers a type of Stockholm Syndrome in today’s society where the hostage accepts the rationalizations of the hostage taker and sympathizes with his antagonist.
The Catholic conscience in America today is held hostage by immoral jurisprudence divorced from natural law that has made itself an enemy of human life and of divine will. The Catholic response to that, at least to me, is not unlike Diocletian’s Catholics.
