Dear Vice-President JD Vance,
Your intention to be present with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew for the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea is not insignificant. It is incumbent upon you to seek the answers this Providence provides. The patriarchs of the East and West are now closer to communion than they have been in almost a century. One of the most striking features of this upcoming event is your potential presence at it. You should begin your reflections by recalling the importance of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and the subsequent effects it had on the evangelization of the world.
Recall that the origins of the disease that is Western self-hatred—which you have fought vehemently against in its present form—find a key chapter in later retellings of Constantine’s role, especially among some radical Reformation heirs and secular historians. Looking for a moment when the Church lost her way, certain separated brethren and Enlightenment critics would have us believe that the moment came when Constantine converted, and the empire with him, granting the Roman bishop new privileges and the Church a public role it had never known. Such, then, is the beginning of the downfall of the Church and the West. Constantine’s patronage of councils and his favor toward the bishops is when Christianity lost its purity and became corrupt, they tell us.
Many Catholics in the West have bought into this scheme. Not content with critiquing the various abuses that have always been present from the very beginning—Judas’ treason, Peter’s moral failures, Demas and worldly pleasures—many insist that by uniting himself and the empire with the Church in the way he did, Constantine and his successors turned Christianity into something wholly different and worse off. This, Mr. Vice President, is one powerful root of Western self-hatred. The secular version of this Great Myth is your present concern. But once again, your presence at the commemoration these 1700 years later will challenge all of this. You, precisely as Vice President, are first a member of the Catholic Church. You exist within her and not above her, as St. Ambrose said to Emperor Theodosius.
Your challenge will be to think about all this yet again. You cannot be content with shallow revisions of history by the secular offspring of this anti-Constantinian myth. You must begin by looking at Nicaea with fresh eyes and heart. What really was accomplished by the emperor’s conversion? What fruit was borne by the
royal decrees favoring the Church as having been established by the Creator God? Is this really part of what Jesus meant when he said that all earthly authority belonged to Him?
You must take on the challenge of rooting out our self-hatred of the West by reconsidering this union of the laity and the clergy in the One Church of Christ. You will have this opportunity in the days leading up to your visit to this 1700th commemoration.
You should end your reflections, however, with the Council itself. It is fitting that the Council that would declare the full divinity of Christ—against Arius’s denial—should be summoned by the first Christian emperor and attended by bishops in communion with the See of Peter, whose legates were present as Pope Sylvester himself remained in Rome. The emperor and the bishops, with the successor of Peter represented among them, illustrate for you the plan of the Incarnation: to sum up all things in heaven and on earth. You, Mr. Vice President, are quite possibly a new Constantine-like figure, but only in a certain sense, given your present position within the American Empire, as it were. Your interest and hopeful presence at the commemoration of the Council is not only your choice, but was destined by God, as a symbol and sign of the purpose of the Incarnation. It’s in the symbol of Nicaea that the Fathers at Chalcedon found their warrant for the union of Godhead and manhood in Christ.
This letter encourages you to make sense of your role as a layperson within the Church. The other Catholic laymen, like Marco Rubio, will have their opportunity to renew their minds on this matter as well. That is the process of the mission Christ has set out for the laity. And this is how I propose you read the situation in Nicaea this year.
Your brother in Christ and fellow American,
Chris Plance
C. G. Plance
C.G. Plance is a Catholic theologian, educator, and apostle for the renewal of Catholic culture and the public recognition of Christ the King.
He currently serves as a high school theology teacher and as Associate Professor of Theology at Catholic Polytechnic University in Glendale, California, which he founded. He is is currently establishing Sts. Mary and Martha College in Duarte, California, a residential school for young Catholic women preparing for marriage and family life, offering a rigorous degree in Domestic Science and Theology that forms students intellectually, spiritually, and practically for the vocation of Christian wife and mother.
A husband and father of seven, he resides with his family in Los Angeles, California.
