I recently saw this Make Your Own Roman Arena activity book in a dollar store and snapped a picture of it:
I can't help but feel that this activity book is insensitive and offensive to all Christians. After all, martyrs' blood filled the Colosseum sewers at the height of the persecutions of Early Church Christians, and to have such abhorrent behavior trivialized as the subject of a kids' activity book (without explaining the historical context) is sad and intolerable.
If you look inside the arena you can see a lion dragging a dead or dying Christian by the arm. Fun!
For anyone who thinks that I am being too "thin-skinned" that I see the worse in things, that I should relax because this is just a kids' book, I end this post by referring to Monsignor Fulton Sheen:
“America,
it is said, is suffering from intolerance - it is not. It is suffering
from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue
and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with
the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”
“Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error … Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory.
Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”
I can't help but feel that this activity book is insensitive and offensive to all Christians. After all, martyrs' blood filled the Colosseum sewers at the height of the persecutions of Early Church Christians, and to have such abhorrent behavior trivialized as the subject of a kids' activity book (without explaining the historical context) is sad and intolerable.
If you look inside the arena you can see a lion dragging a dead or dying Christian by the arm. Fun!
For anyone who thinks that I am being too "thin-skinned" that I see the worse in things, that I should relax because this is just a kids' book, I end this post by referring to Monsignor Fulton Sheen:
A Plea for Intolerance by Fulton J. Sheen
In 1931, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen wrote the following essay:“Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error … Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory.
Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”
In this age of relativism, political correctness, and rampant tolerance, I am making a plea against the type of tolerance that trivializes the spilled blood of all Martyrs of the Church.
~JT~
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