O tempora!

It is a dark day for American higher education when college teachers can no longer distinguish Christian heresies from racist ideologies. Our correspondents inform us that a professor at one of our nation's institutions of higher learning recently informed her class that Nazism was based upon "Aryanism" (sic?), "an early Christian heresy which taught that Jesus was a white European male."

Clearly it was the spread of this pernicious heresy that nearly consumed the early Church, leading St. Jerome to write ingemuit totus orbis et Arianum se esse miratus est and St. Basil to exclaim:

"Our afflictions are well known without my telling; the sound of them has gone forth over all Christendom. The dogmas of the Fathers are despised; apostolic traditions are set at nought; the discoveries of innovators hold sway in churches. Men have learned to be speculatists instead of theologians. The wisdom of the world has the place of honor, having dispossessed the glorying of the cross. The pastors are driven away. grievous wolves are brought in instead, and plunder the flock of Christ."

A lone student who was brave enough to point out that Arian and Aryan shared nothing in common beyond a mere phonetic similarity was quickly silenced by the teacher, who refused to recant her confused beliefs. St. Athanasius, ora pro nobis.