Monday, 5/2/16
In the year 310, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, stopping on
a ridge above the Mediterranean, paused
to watch the children at play on the beach. He was surprised to see that one of
the boys was pretending to be a priest offering Mass. Amazed at the devotion and
the accuracy of the boy’s wording, Bishop Alexander called him up, and went on
the take over the education of young Athanasius.
In ten years, by 320, Athanasius had become the invaluable friend
of Bishop Alexander, and it turned out that, as the saying goes, “A friend in need is a friend n deed.”
In that same year of 320 Father Arius, a popular old pastor
in Alexandria, had begun telling people that while Jesus was a wonderful man,
he was not the Son of God. Bishop Alexander, hoping to do away with the disagreement,
had all the priests in Egypt gather in a synod to point out Father Arius’s
error. With Athanasius leading the opposition to the view pf Father Arius, the
entire synod condemned his views.
That should have ended the matter, but Father Arius crossed
over to Syria where he gathered a large number of priests who agreed with him
in seeing Jesus as only a good man. That following came to be known as “Arians.”
Athanasius, at the death of Bishop Alexander, became the
bishop of Alexandria. As such, he became the bishop to Anthony, a very saintly
hermit who lived for fifty years in the Egyptian desert. And through those
years he had attracted a number of male and female hermits who in time began
coming together in our first monasteries and convents.
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