the history of heresies, and their refutation - Catholic Apologetics ...

embrace it, as he dreaded the vengeance of his people. Fleury, nevertheless, quotes many authorities to
prove that Leovigild spent a week before his death, deploring the crimes he committed, and that he died
a Catholic in the year 587, the eighteenth of his reign. He left the kingdom to his son Reccarede, who
became a Catholic, and received the sacrament of Confirmation in the Catholic church; and such was his
zeal for the faith, that he induced the Arian bishops, and the whole nation of the Visigoths, to embrace it,
and deposed from his employment, and cashiered from his army, all heretics. The beginning of his reign
was thus the end of the Arian heresy in Spain, where it reigned from the conquest of that country by the
barbarians, an hundred and eighty years before, in the beginning of the fifth century; and when the
Emperor Justinian, by the victories of Belisarius, became master of Africa, about the year 535 (chap. 4, No.
64), the Catholic faith was also re-established. The Burgundians, in Gaul, forsook the Arian heresy under
the reign of Sigismund, the son and successor of King Gontaband, who died in 516. Sigismund was
converted to the faith in 515, by St. Avitus, Bishop of Vienne. The Lombards in Italy abandoned Arianism,
and embraced the Catholic faith under their King, Bimbert, in 660, and have since remained faithful to the
Church. Danæus thus concludes his essay on the heresy of the Arians : " This dreadful hydra, the fruitful
parent of so many evils, was then extinguished, but after the lapse of about nine hundred years, in about
the year 1530, was again revived in Poland and Transylvania, by modern Arians and Antitrinitarians,
who, falling from bad to worse, have become far worse than the ancient Arians, and are confounded with
Deists and Socinians "(11).
ARTICLE III. 69-74. - Heresy of Macedonius. 75 - 77. -Of Apollinaris. 78. -Of Elvidius. 79.-Of Aetius.
80, 81. -The Messalians. 82.-The Priscillianists. 83.- Jovinians. 84.-Other Heretics. 85.-Of Audeus, in
particular.
69. As Arius uttered blasphemies against the Son, so Macedonius had the temerity to speak
blasphemously of the Holy Ghost. He was, at first, an Arian, and was deputed to the Council or Cabal of
Tyre, as legate of the Emperor Constantius. He was then intruded by the Arians into the see of
Constantinople, as Socrates informs us, though Paul, the lawful bishop, was then alive, and he received
ordination at the hands of the Arians. A horrible circumstance occurred at his induction into the
Metropolitan see. He went to take possession in a splendid chariot, accompanied, not by his clergy, but
with the imperial Prefect by his side, and surrounded by a powerful body of armed troops, to strike terror
into the people. An immense multitude was assembled, out of curiosity to see the pageant, and the
throng was so great, that the church, streets, and squares were all choked up, and the new bishop could
not proceed.
(11) Fleury, t. 5; Gregor. Jur. 9, t. 15; Danes, Gen. Temp. not. p. 237.
The soldiers set about clearing the way; they first struck the people with the shafts of their spears, and
whether it was by orders of the bishop, or through their own ferocity, they soon began to wound and kill
the people, and trampled on the slain and fallen; the consequence was, that three thousand one hundred
and fifty dead bodies lay stretched in gore in the street; the bishop passed through, and as his entrance to
the episcopal throne was marked by blood and slaughter, so his future government of the See was
distinguished for vengeance and cruelty. In the first place, he began to persecute the friends of Paul, his
competitor in the See; he caused some of them to be publicly flogged, confiscated the property of others,
more he banished, and he marked his hatred of one in particular by causing him to be branded on the
forehead, to stamp him through life with a mark of infamy. Several authors even say that, after he had
banished Paul from the See, he caused him to be strangled at Cucusus, the place of his exile (1).
70. His rage was not alone directed against the friends of Paul, but against all who professed the faith of
the Council of Nice; the wretch made use of atrocious torments to oblige them to receive communion
from him. He used, as Socrates informs us, to have their mouths forced open with a wooden tongs, and
the consecrated particle forced on them, a punishment greater than death to the faithful. He used to take
the children from their mothers, and have them most cruelly flogged in their mothers presence; and the
mothers themselves he used to torture by squeezing both their breasts under the lid of a heavy chest, and
then caused them to be cut off with a sharp razor, or burned them with red coals, or with red-hot balls,
and left them to die in prolonged tortures. As if it was not enough to torture and destroy the Catholics
themselves in this manner, he vented his rage on their churches, which he destroyed to the very
foundations, and their ruins he had scattered abroad.
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