The Saint Excommunicated by the Pope and Proven Right

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:02]May God bless you. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Christ is risen. Friends, there is a saint who was excommunicated by the Pope and he was proven right. There are stories, you know, in church history that are so uncomfortable that many of us, Catholic, Orthodox, it doesn't matter. We would rather leave them buried. And here is one of them. One of the greatest saints in the history of the church, St. Athanasius the Great, was condemned. He was rejected. And according to strong traditional account, he would excommunicated under Pope Liberius. And here's the shocking part.

[00:00:36]Athanasius, in spite of it all, he was right. He was right against powerful emperors. He was right against powerful bishops. He was right against the religious mood of his age. And for five long years, he even stood against the pope himself. That should cause us all to pause. Now, he wasn't a rebel. He was not a man who, you know, hated authority and he was not trying to invent a private religion or a personality cult.

[00:01:04]He was a Catholic bishop defending the central truth of Christianity. That Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man.

[00:01:14]That he's of the same substance as the father. Not almost God, not you know the highest creature, not godlike, not a demigod divine being, not a heavenly spokesman, true God from true God. That was the fight. The crisis was the heresy of Aryanism. Aras was this young, attractive, articulate, popular priest.

[00:01:38]Everyone loved him. Everyone went after him. And his followers taught that the son of God was not eternal in the same way as the father. And they could use reverent language about Christ. They could call Christ exalted, glorious, unique, even a lesser divinity in some sense. But they would not say what the church says that he is homo that he is uh of the same substance as the father.

[00:02:07]One Greek word, you know, one Greek word became the battlefield for the entire world. Homoios.

[00:02:16]And the Aryans, they made it so um easy to agree with them. They said, you know, we'll agree with that. Just put a little I in there. So it's not homoios but homousios of similar substance and they made it such that if you had disagreed with them you became a problem but Aanius wouldn't fall for it. He said no it's homoios to modern ears that may sound like theological hair splitting but Athanasius he knew what was at stake. If Christ isn't truly God, then God himself didn't enter into the world. And what he did not assume, he did not redeem.

[00:02:53]If Christ is not truly God, then the cross is not God's own act of salvation.

[00:03:00]If Christ is not truly God, then the Eucharist is not the flesh of the word made flesh. If Christ is not truly God, then Christianity collapses into just another religion, a form of religious poetry. So, Athanasius wouldn't move. And because he wouldn't move, the world moved against him. And thus, we have the phrase Athanasius contraundum. He he was bishop of Alexandria and North Africa for about 45 years. But you know of those years more than 17 of them were spent in exile, driven out, hunted, accused, slandered and replaced by the machinery of church and empire. You know, he lived in in cemeteries, in fields, in deserts, in forests, in marshes. He had to go in exile up in Europe. He was all over the place. And here is the part that really should make us focus. He was not opposed only by worldly powers and emperors. No, he was opposed by much the vast majority of the church's hierarchy.

[00:04:14]Bishops, priests opposed him. Many bishops would not stand by him. Many bishops condemned him. Most compromised against him. Most stayed silent while he was slandered.

[00:04:30]Some watched while he was exiled. Some found it safer to preserve their own position than to defend the truth about Christ. And that's what makes Athanasius's example so jarring. The danger didn't come from the pagans and from people outside the church. It came through people who were baptized and not just baptized but ordained and consecrated. It came through uh bishops, his own his own brother bishops, his own clergy. It came through men who wanted peace more than they wanted truth itself. The emperor wanted unity at any cost. And the bishops were willing to accommodate him. The powerful wanted a formula that everyone in the empire could sign off on. Something that was vague and flexible, something that uh sounded orthodox enough to pace to to pass the taste test uh but ambiguous enough to please the ambitious. And Athanasius alone saw through it all. He knew that heresy does not always arrive at our door wearing horns with a pitchfork.

[00:05:40]More often, heresy arrives at the door in really polished language, smiling, and it says, "Let's not be extreme here." Sometimes it says, you know, we're all basically believing the same thing. Just stop dividing us with these dogmas and these doctrines. Let's focus on what unites us, fraternity, mercy.

[00:06:02]And that is when a saint must become inconvenient.

[00:06:07]That is where the scandal of Athanasius the great enters into the history books because he would not relent on this word. He would not give up. And then they pulled in the big ones. They pulled in the pope. Pope Liberius had initially defended Athanasius. But under some pretty significant worldly power from the emperor and others and other bishops, Liberius broke and he weakened.

[00:06:33]And according to strong traditional account, he excommunicated Athanasius.

[00:06:38]And so there stands Athanasius, you know, a a believer, a Catholic bishop, defender of Nika, uh a future doctor of the church, and for several years under a cloud of Roman condemnation, of papal condemnation. So just think of that paradox. A man defending the creed was treated like a danger to the creed. A man preserving orthodoxy appears heretical and disobedient. The man who is later honored as one of the great saints, Athanasius the Great, was for a time regarded as nothing more than a great problem. Now, this must be said carefully. Athanasius doesn't prove that everyone uh may become his own pope. He he doesn't prove that private judgment stands above the judgment of the church.

[00:07:30]He proves something uh more interesting and more Catholic that authority exists to serve the truth. It does not exist to manufacture doctrine or to manufacture truth. It serves truth. And a pope cannot make an error orthodox in the case of Aryanism. Um a council cannot overturn God himself. An emperor cannot command the eternal son of God to become less than conssubstantial with the father. And Athanasius understood this with the clarity of a saint. He didn't fight because he was contankerous and loved conflict and attention. He fought because he loved Jesus Christ. And his love for God was more than his fear of men. And he knew that if Jesus is not truly God, then no one's saved. There's no such thing as a uh there's no point to a martyr and there's no point of um of any of this. No sinner, no child at birth, no dying man whispering the name of Jesus. None of this stuff really matters. Everything depends on this that the one who saves us is the one who made us. And that's why Athanasius wouldn't bend because he believed that that sinner, that dying man, that that child, that they could have salvation because God became man. He was of the same substance of the father and the same substance as you and me. And that's why um he would not bend. And that made emperors hate him. That's why false bishops wanted to silence him. And that is why the silence of the majority couldn't defend him. Couldn't defeat him. Sorry. Uh and that's why the church now calls Athanasius the great.

[00:09:29]And we look back at this and we see friends that the quiet men who were willing to buy peace by acquiescing, they're forgotten. You know, the flattering men of the of his age, they're forgotten. The cautious uh clergy, they're forgotten. The bishops who bent with the wind, they're forgotten. But the exiled man, the condemned man, he remains. He's a saint. St. Athanasius the Great proves that the church is not saved by pleasant men saying agreeable things, but by what? It's saved by holy men refusing to lie about Jesus Christ.

[00:10:15]So as we live in this chaotic time in church history and you look around and you say, "Am I the crazy one?" No.

[00:10:24]Remember this. The church does not need smoother cowards. The church doesn't need clever compromisers. She doesn't need men who can explain betrayal in beautiful, soothing language. No, the church needs saints. Saints who will say that Christ is God when the emperor says say less. Saints who will say that you know the saints who will say the creed when bishops say just just be quiet. Saints who will suffer exile rather than purchase peace with a lie. And Athanasius still speaks.

[00:11:08]He speaks to every bishop. He speaks to every priest and every seminarian, every deacon, every monk, every sister, every layman, every man, woman, and child. He speaks to every man, everyone who is tempted to keep his head down while the truth is mocked and while Christ is diminished. And his message is thunderously simple. When almost everyone is silent, Athanasius says speak. When almost everyone bends, then you stand. When almost everyone chooses peace without truth, you choose truth in Christ. Because the world does not ultimately remember the the cowardly men who kept their place and were silent.

[00:11:57]The church remembers the saint who kept the faith. St. Athanasius, great God for us.