Roman-era catacombs were unearthed last week in Bethlehem during construction in an empty lot beside Bethlehem University. Can’t wait to find out more.

An early-Christian mosaic has been found in Syria. Readers of my book Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols will have fun decoding it.

Many apologies for the slow blogging. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. My friend Bob Lockwood and I spent a chunk of last weekend at the great annual gathering of the Pittsburgh Catholic Men’s Fellowship. Last night, Bob and I were honored, along with Dr. Susan Muto and Father Mark Gruber, O.S.B., during the Catholic Historical Society’s celebration of Pittsburgh’s Catholic writers. (Afterward, I took the kids to see the dazzling Brenda Polk as the Fairy Godmother in a local production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.)

If you don’t mind, I’d like to share with you my remarks from the dinner last night. It’s not patristic, except in an extremely accommodated sense. But hey.

Three weeks ago, when I saw the ad for this event in the Pittsburgh Catholic, with my photograph placed alongside those of Bishop Zubik, Dr. Muto, Fr. Gruber, Mr. Lockwood, and Mr. [Regis] Flaherty, I remembered a story about the poet Howard Nemerov.

In one remarkable week in 1977, Mr. Nemerov received word that he had won the Pulitzer Prize … and then the National Book Award.

His reaction was exuberant. He cried out: “Overrated! At last!”

I took those words as my own. “Overrated! At last!” A writer knows when he’s outclassed by present company. But he lives for such moments. So I thank God, and I thank the Historical Society for inviting me to share such an Olympian table. I am happy to be overrated if it means I am allowed to praise this city’s Catholic culture — if I am allowed to praise our communion of saints, the Church of Pittsburgh.

I didn’t have the privilege of growing up here. But that hardly matters. To grow up when I did was to live off the largesse of Pittsburgh’s Catholic literary scene. My friends and I, like millions in our generation, learned our early lessons in the faith from the picture books produced by that prolific priest of Western Pennsylvania’s coal fields, Father Lawrence Lovasik.

Father Lovasik had an almost-papally infallible instinct for identifying the facts that would resonate with kids. We consumed his Picture Book of Saints, his catechisms and prayerbooks, and his primers on angelology and sacraments. As we grew older, Father Lovasik offered us spiritual direction in the finer points of kindness and Eucharistic devotion. He guided us along simple paths to the divine life, to the familiar places in our neighborhoods where heaven meets earth.

When we went off to school — if we went to Catholic schools, as my mother insisted we must — we took our lessons from Pittsburgh authors. If our school was struggling, we were still using textbooks produced in the early twentieth century by Pittsburgh’s Father Jerome Hannan — his Bible History: A Textbook of the Old and New Testaments; and his excellent The Story Of The Church, Her Founding, Mission And Progress. In my hometown, these books retained canonical status — more than half a century after their first publication — because Father Hannan had eventually become bishop of our diocese.

If a school of my generation was more well off and up to date, then it could afford the state-of-the-art textbooks, like the Cathedral Basic Readers produced by Monsignor John B. McDowell. They were no less Catholic than their predecessors, though they bore more modern-sounding titles like Cavalcades; All Around America; Fun with Our Family; and Fun Wherever We Are.

Monsignor McDowell, too, would go on to become a bishop — an auxiliary here in Pittsburgh. And I know him well enough to know that he would pass along any credit for Pittsburgh’s Catholic literary culture to the generations before him. In fact, over the last decade, he has devoted his own literary labors to that end: writing histories that give cultural credit, across the centuries, wherever it’s due.

He would have us hear the voice of Pittsburgh’s church in those who lived here, and wrote here, and have been raised to the altars: John Neumann, Francis Seelos, Maria Theresa Gerhardinger, Katharine Drexel — but also in those whose fame was more local, though no less fascinating, and maybe no less important to history — and whose lives, in some cases, were perhaps no less holy than those who have been canonized: Michael O’Connor, Suitbert Mollinger, James Cox, and Adrian van Kaam.

If we draw the genealogical lines, we would all, I think, find our way back to a remarkable man of the nineteenth century, Monsignor Andrew Lambing (1842-1918), a prodigious and prolific man of letters. Not least among his accomplishments was the founding of the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, which still sponsors an annual lecture in his honor. Monsignor Lambing wrote the foundational histories of Allegheny County and of Pittsburgh — and he wrote histories of the Dioceses of Pittsburgh and of Allegheny. He wrote serious theological studies in pneumatology (the science of the Holy Spirit) and mariology (the study of the Blessed Virgin), as well as a handbook of comfort for children who had lost their parents.

Academic history was his avocation, which he pursued in addition to the running of parishes and an orphanage. A giant of a man, grown fit through his early work on farms, in brickyards, and in an oil refinery, he served as a priest for 30 years before he missed a single day on account of illness. He is reputed never to have taken a vacation.

In the multivolume History of Pittsburgh and Environs published by the American Historical Society in 1922, Monsignor Lambing is listed prominently among the region’s “MEN WIDELY FAMED.” How prominently? Well, he appears just after Charles Schwab and George Westinghouse, but before Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. He’s number three out of forty men identified as builders of this region.

I get exhausted just thinking about Monsignor Lambing’s literary accomplishments, which seem to have been an afterthought to his pastoral work and brick-and-mortar administration.

But I can’t help but be grateful to him for setting the high standard for the next generations — for Father Hannan, and Father Lovasik, and then Monsignor McDowell and so many others.

Twenty-three years ago this month I dropped, as if by a providential parachute, into this wonderful culture when I took a writing job at a high-tech company in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. My wife and I fell in love with this place and this church. Here we’ve raised our six children in the faith — on a hearty diet of Lovasik and Hannan and McDowell — not to mention Muto and Gruber and Lockwood, Lawler and Wuerl and Hugo. We cannot quite imagine leaving. 

It’s good to be here, as everyone in this room well knows. 

It’s a privilege for me to speak here tonight and get all these mushy affections out of my system. If I have to be overrated for a moment to seize the opportunity, so be it! 

As for my own accomplishments, I’ll prefer to recall an experience I had speaking to a group of Catholic high-school students here in the city. It was a career-day sort of thing, and I was supposed to talk about my important work as a writer. I rattled off the titles of my books as if they were a long litany, figuring the kids would be impressed.

Then I invited questions about the writing life — I was ready to play the seasoned sage — and after an awkward pause a hand went up in the back.

“Yes,” I said as I pointed to the young man.

And he asked me a question it’s good to remember as I stand here among my heroes, past and present. He said: “Um … have you ever written anything that anyone would actually read?”

Perhaps for the first time in my life I was left speechless. And I’ll take this moment now to begin the second time.

Thank you for being here, and for listening.

Father Z podcasted an Easter sermon of St. Augustine and relates it to the recent controversies at Notre Dame.

My beloved daughter gave me her old iPod when she got a new one. I can’t work to music, so I’ve been using it only when I exercise — but that’s meant a daily lecture on the Fathers. And so far I haven’t paid a penny. I burned through the Louth lectures right away. Then, on iTunes, I found free downloads by John Cavadini, Robert Louis Wilken, Jaroslav Pelikan, John Peter Kenney, and many others. I loaded up, and I haven’t heard even half of the material I found. If you have an iTunes account, it’s really worth your while to go searching after terms like “patristics,” “Christian history,” and “Augustine.”

Al Ahram gives us a rare glimpse at an early Christian artwork on Mount Sinai.

These are the books I mentioned on Chuck Neff’s Relevant Radio show, “Searching the Word,” today.

 Easter in the Early Church, by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap.

 From Darkness to Light, by Sister Anne Field

The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation, by Father Edward Yarnold, S.J.

On Pascha: With the Fragments of Melito and Other Material Related to the Quartodecimans (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press “Popular Patristics” Series)

Selected Easter Sermons of St. Augustine

I missed this when it appeared last week: Why Was Jesus Crucified?, by Larry Hurtado.

I leaned upon his excellent book  The Earliest Christian Artifacts as I wrote  Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols.

It’s rather remarkable that someone who wrote a book titled Christianity in the Land of the Pharaohs (Routledge) is just discovering The Secret History of Procopius — and discovering it online, quite by accident. Thus, Justinian’s villainy arrives as news to her. Still, I think she goes overboard in her uncritical swallowing all of Procopius’ claims (“the full truth,” as she puts it). The Secret History reads like the blog of an anonymous disgruntled employee. There are probably grains of truth here and there, but there are surely equal portions of embellishment, exaggeration, and salacious inventiveness.

Alert from Jim Davila PaleoJudaica: “The book of 2 Enoch, previously known only in versions in Old Church Slavonic, has now been partly recovered in an earlier Coptic translation. The fragments were found nearly four decades ago and the transcriptions and photos have been sitting unnoticed for many years.”

He also points us to a nice profile of St. Jerome. (Don’t forget Jerome’s theme song, “The Thunderer,” penned by Rock n Roll Hall-of Famer Dion.)

This (from the London Times) is just too cool.

In Ancient Rome lions ate Christians, so we are told. But what did early Christians eat? A lot of fish, according to recent research on bones from the Roman catacombs.

“The eating habits of Rome’s early Christians are more complex than has traditionally been assumed,” say Leonard Rutgers and his colleagues in The Journal of Archaeological Science. Their work was based on analysis of 22 skeletons found in the Catacombs of St Callixtus on the Appian Way, an area utilised in the 3rd to 5th centuries AD (although some of the skeletons were radiocarbon-dated to the 2nd century).

My interview with Dr. Jack McKeating…

The Gospels say little about the business of crucifixion. “And they crucified him” is all St. Mark offers (15:24), with no word of how it was done or how the cross tortured its victim.

The early Christians offered little more when they recited the Creed: “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered, died and was buried.”

The Crucifixion comes at the climax of the Christian drama. Yet tradition records the matter as little more than a fact. “They crucified him.” “He was crucified.” History provides no coroner’s report, no painstaking medical reconstruction.

Perhaps our first Christian ancestors could not bear to say any more. They had seen men crucified. They could walk to the outskirts of town if they wanted to count the cost — in blood and pain and humiliation — of their salvation.

Unlike Christians through most of history, we today have not grown up with the experience of public executions and public torture. Still, like the family of any murder victim, we feel the need to know the truth about our Savior and brother — not least because we believe He died for our sake.

Over the past 20 years, a friend of mine, Pittsburgh surgeon Jack McKeating, has applied his professional skills to this problem — reviewing the historical and archaeological evidence in light of recent medical research. Some years back, I interviewed him on the subject for Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.

“Any serious Christian has to take an active interest in the passion of Jesus Christ,” McKeating told me. “Unfortunately, we’re often too dispassionate about it. We tend to think of it in unreal terms, as an abstraction. But it involved a real person who underwent an absolutely brutal experience out of love for me.”

McKeating traces his interest to the late 1980s, when he was away from home on a fellowship in surgical oncology.

“I was in a Bible study with three other surgeons,” he recalled, “a fundamentalist, a Methodist, a Baptist and me.” One morning, one of his colleagues brought “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” a 1986 study from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

That study gathered the descriptions of crucifixion from ancient sources. It analyzed the skeletal remains of crucified men, and it considered all the data in light of current medical research.

The JAMA study led McKeating to the classic text in the field, A Doctor At Calvary, an exhaustive account written by French Catholic surgeon Pierre Barbet. Barbet completed his book in 1949 after decades of research.

McKeating praises both studies for their scholarship and their unflinching care.

“Anyone who studies the matter has to start with these sources,” he said. “But keep in mind that it is a start. As we advance in medicine, we are able to learn still more about our Lord’s passion.”

How did crucifixion usually happen? Applying their medical knowledge to the historical data, doctors such as McKeating, Barbet and the JAMA team have attempted to reconstruct the events.

The ancient Romans had a special genius for torture. It helped them keep order in a vast empire. The public spectacle of extreme suffering — repeated with some regularity — served as a deterrent to would-be rebels and insurgents.

Crucifixion was the utmost refinement of the Roman art of torture. The Jewish historian Josephus called it “the most wretched of deaths.” It was designed to cause the most pain in the most parts of the body over the longest period of time.

Crucifixion was humiliating, too, so it was usually reserved for slaves, lower-class criminals or those whose crimes were especially heinous. The stripped man was exposed, naked, to a boorish crowd that delighted in such spectacles. They cast stones at him, spat at him, jeered at him.

The end began when executioners extended the condemned man’s arms and bound them to a wooden beam. Sometimes, they would also drive nails through the man’s wrists at the highly sensitive median nerve. The executioner relied on the element of surprise for the first hammer blow. The victim was unlikely ever to have experienced such pain before. It was “the most unbearable pain that a man can experience,” Barbet concluded.

Nailing the second arm, however, could pose a problem, because the nervous system would instinctively recoil from any repetition of that pain. The executioner would need to struggle against an arm rigidly resistant to his efforts. All of this wrangling, involuntary on the part of the victim, would intensify the pain in the arm already nailed.

The beam then was attached to a pole. Every shift of the beam renewed the pain in the median nerve. But all of that was just a prelude to the real torture of crucifixion.

The victim found himself suspended above the ground, his body slumped forward, his knees bent and his feet positioned as if he were standing on tiptoe. That position made it almost impossible for him to draw a breath.

“Crucifixion stretches the chest cavity open,” McKeating explained, “and the weight of the body pulls down on the diaphragm so the lungs are kept open. It requires great effort to breathe in and even greater effort to exhale — which is normally a fairly passive process.”

The victim could not breathe inward or outward without lifting his body up by the nails in his wrists and pushing up on the nail in his feet. With every breath, then, he felt the coarse metal tearing at his nerves.

Gradually, his limbs cramped and weakened. As he was less able to lift himself up, he began, slowly, to suffocate.

A victim of crucifixion alternated between the panicked sense of asphyxiation and the searing pain of the nails in his flesh. Relief from one inevitably brought about the other.

In a strong man, this could go on for many hours, even days. If the Romans wanted to accelerate the process, they would break the victim’s legs so he could no longer push himself upward to take a breath.

“Jesus was probably a strong man,” McKeating said. “He was relatively young, He worked hard, and He tended to travel by foot. But by the time He reached Calvary, He had undergone many hours of preliminary tortures that alone might have killed him.”

In the Garden of Gethsemane, “His sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Lk 22:44). The JAMA article, following Barbet, attributes this to a phenomenon called hematidrosis or hemohidrosis — hemorrhaging into the sweat glands. This is a rare condition that occurs in people at the extremes of human emotion. It leaves the skin very tender and highly sensitive to pain.

Jesus would have keenly felt every blow as His captors “mocked him and beat him” (Lk 22:63). The beatings continued through long hours in which He was also forced to walk from one interrogation to another — before the Sanhedrin, before Pilate, before Herod and again before Pilate. The JAMA research concludes that He walked two-and-a-half miles during that sleepless night.

Pilate ordered Jesus to be flogged, and Roman flogging alone could kill a man. A typical whip of cords was studded with metal, sharp animal bones or shards of pottery. It was designed to bruise and tear the skin. Often, a man was whipped by two torturers, one on each side, while he was bound to a post or pillar. It was here that Jesus probably suffered His greatest blood loss.

His back, torn open by the Romans, then had to bear the rough wood of the crossbeam, which probably weighed 75 to 125 pounds. He had to carry the burden along an uneven roadway from Pilate’s praetorium to the hill of Calvary, a third of a mile. Surely, He fell often.

“Some people say that Jesus’ suffering was somehow easier because he was God,” McKeating said. “But that’s not so. Many theologians believe He suffered in a greater way because He had perfect knowledge of what was happening. Also, His senses would have been more acute and more sensitive to pain because they were not at all dulled, as ours are, by sin and self-indulgence.”

What killed Jesus?

“I think it’s multifactorial,” McKeating said. “I think the proximate cause of death was probably suffocation — asphyxia. But I think the end came relatively swiftly — just three long hours — because our Lord was probably in shock before He was actually crucified.

“After the exposure, the emotional duress, the severe beating and then the scourging, He was probably in Class 3 shock, out of a possible 4.”

A great physiologist once described shock as the rude unhinging of the cellular machinery of our bodies.

“The technical definition,” said McKeating, “is that it’s inadequate perfusion of blood to the tissues of our body.

Our bodies normally have five liters of blood. McKeating said that “in a typical Roman scourging, a man would have lost a liter and a half.”

Shock would have weakened Him and left Him anxious and confused, hastening the end.

The Gospels suggest other factors, McKeating said. “After Jesus died, the soldier’s lance thrust brought forth blood and water (Jn 19:34). Where did the water come from? Probably pericardial effusion. Fluid would have built up from internal injuries, pulmonary contusions, bruises, beatings, and it would have filled His chest cavity or the sac around His heart. Every time the heart would beat, then, it couldn’t expand the way it needed to, and it couldn’t fill up. Eventually, it would stop.”

Forensic scientists say that the better we know what killed someone, the more likely we are to find out who killed him.

Who killed Jesus? After a decade-and-a-half of study, McKeating doesn’t hesitate to respond.

“I did,” he said. “My sins did.”

Holy Thursday is one of my favorite days of the year. We celebrate the institution of the priesthood and the Eucharist. The Aquilinas do it up big. So I’ll take my bow, join my family, and direct you to my posts from previous years — here and here.