Free Republic

In the fourth century, St. Ambrose of Milan spoke truth to power. U.S. bishops could learn something from him.On Saturday, New Mexico state Sen. Joe Cervantes, a Democrat from Las Cruces, tweeted that because he voted to repeal a state law that criminalized abortion, he was denied communion by Bishop Peter Baldacchino, apparently after several warnings (something the senator conveniently neglected to mention).I was denied communion last night by the Catholic bishop here in Las Cruces and based on my political office. My new parish priest has indicated he will do the same after the last was run off. Please...

On August 22, AD 392, an unlikely man was raised to the imperial purple of the Western Roman Empire. His name was Eugenius and for most of his career up to that point, he had been an academic serving the Western imperial court. The pagan historian Zosimus, writing in the early 6th century AD, describes Eugenius’s early career and his path to power: There was in the court a person named Eugenius, a man of learning, who was a professor and teacher of rhetoric. He had been recommended to the notice of Arbogastes by Rictomeris as a person of a...

Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was born in the year 340 into the family of the Roman prefect of Gaul (now France). Even in the saint’s childhood there appeared presentiments of his great future. Once, bees covered the face of the sleeping infant. They flew in and out of his mouth, leaving honey on his tongue. Soon they flew away so high that they could no longer be seen. Ambrose’s father said that the child would become something great when he reached manhood. After the death of the father of the family, Ambrose journeyed to Rome, where the future saint...