Dear Friends in Christ,

This weekend is a big weekend for us. Yes, for many of us, this is a big weekend because of the Super Bowl of the National Football League, but there are a number of other reasons why this is an important weekend for us.

This Sunday, the Church celebrates World Day of Consecrated Life as well as World Marriage Day, two important vocations in the life of the Church that reflect God’s love for us in complementary ways. If you are a married couple who is reading this, thank you for your witness to Jesus’s spousal love for His Church. If you are a consecrated religious, such as our own Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist, thank you for your complete gift of your lives to Jesus. I encourage all of us to pause and thank those in our lives who have chosen these parallel paths towards Christ.

In this weekend’s letter, as we continue to explore the early days of the Church’s history, I invite us to focus our attention on an important figure in the life of the Church, namely Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome. Constantine was born in 272 AD to his father, Constantius, an officer in the Roman army, and his mother, Helena, who became the Saint who discovered the True Cross of Jesus in Jerusalem. There are a number of important events in the life of Constantine, but here, we will only focus on three key contributions from his life.

First, Constantine was the first emperor who allowed Christians to freely practice their religion in public without the risk of persecution. He permitted this after his miraculous experience at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, a bridge just north of Rome, which occurred in 312. At this battle, Constantine received a vision of a giant cross in the sky with the words, “In hoc signum vinces,” which is Latin for, “In this sign you will conquer.” Constantine won the decisive battle and soon afterwards declared Christianity legal with the Edict of Milan in 313. Because of this, Christians no longer had to hide in order to worship.

Secondly, Constantine contributed to the Church by establishing a new imperial capital in the East which was fittingly called Constantinople. When establishing this new city, Constantine took all the richness of Rome and the deep devotions in Christianity and brought them together in the city’s architecture, culture, and daily living. Constantinople remained a center of the Church in the East for over a thousand years until its fall to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.

Lastly, Constantine was an important figure in the Church because he called the Council of Nicaea in 325 in order to solve the problem of the Arian Heresy. As I mentioned in last week’s let-ter, the Church at this time was debating about Jesus’s identity, and this Council, the first of many Ecumenical Councils, helped formalize the Church’s position on who Jesus is. From this council that Constantine instigated, we get the Nicaean Creed that we recite in the Mass each Sunday.

May Christ’s Peace be with you, Fr. Briggs