This apostasy by the Vatican’s highest authority carries many grave implications.
You might not have read the Book of Maccabees. (Catholics and Orthodox regard it as canonical while Protestants and Jews mostly consider it simply an inspiring, accurate history of God’s people enduring corruption and persecution.)
But the Lutheran George Frederick Handel thought the story important enough to compose a beautiful oratorio retelling it, Judas Maccabeus. The Jewish holiday of Channukah has its origins in the events recounted in Maccabees — commemorating the rededication of the Temple after pagans had profaned it.
Maccabees is certainly worth a read for Christians today trying to navigate a path between an overbearing, increasingly intolerant secular culture and Church leaders who dither, waver, or even seem to be on the side of the Enemy. (I’m focusing here on my own Roman Catholic Church, but as you read this, think of all the rainbow-flagged, “affirming” pastors and churches in your own tradition, some of which you might once have trusted.)
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In Maccabees, we see the plight of the Jewish people under foreign occupation — this time not the cruel Assyrians or the tolerant Persians, but the glittering, sophisticated, and above all seductive Greeks. After Alexander the Great destroyed the Persian Empire in 323 B.C., fought his way to India, then died at age 33, his generals split up the new empire he’d founded among themselves, squabbling over its component parts for the next century. The section that included ancient Palestine was the Seleucid Empire.
Its rulers prided themselves on the artistic, philosophical, and cultural inheritance of Greece, whose civilization Alexander’s armies had spread throughout Central Asia and the Near East. Wherever they ruled, these Hellenistic kings established academies and gymnasia (athletic/cultural centers) — and set up temples to the Greek pagan gods. The goal was to gradually assimilate all the natives to the “higher” civilization, making them easier to govern. It was a form of colonialism.
After a few decades of relatively tolerant rule over the Jews, Seleucid rulers decided it was time to force these subjects, too, to fall into line. They started encouraging pagan worship, bribing and corrupting the Jewish high priests, then finally just picking their own, collaborationist priests — whose job it was to keep the Jews in line while gradually Hellenizing and paganizing them.
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