The Real Santa Claus

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The Binks tells us how it is…

So what would Santa say? A pious legend about St. Nicholas of Myra at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) relates how the heretic Arius was invited to explain himself:

..Arius was called upon to explain his heretical views, and thus he started preaching his execrable heresies before the Council Fathers. St. Nicholas listened as Arius attacked the Divinity of our Blessed Lord, becoming more and more full of righteous anger. Finally he became so enraged that he charged at Arius and struck the heretic a mighty blow! Unfortunately, the assemblage of Bishops made like the U.S.C.C.B. and blamed St. Nicholas for the altercation. He was expelled from the Council and the Emperor had him stripped of his Episcopal vestments and thrown in prison….

Error and false teaching are very bad. Insofar as Arius rejected the faith, none of it was his to talk about; the church was not his, Christ was not his; the hope of heaven was not his, the Bible & creeds were not his.

Via St. Irenaus of Lyons, we learn what St. Polycarp himself saw of how the Apostle John reacted to false teachers:

“there are those who heard him tell how John, the disciple of the Lord, when he went to take a bath in Ephesus, and saw Cerinthus within, rushed away from the room without bathing, with the words ‘Let us flee lest the room should fall in, for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within’. Yea, and Polycarp himself, also, when on one occasion Marcion confronted him and said ‘Recognise us’, replied, ‘Ay, ay, I recognise the first-born of Satan’!”

As St. Polcarp, a disciple of St. John the Evangelist, put it: “For every one who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is antichrist; and whosoever does not confess the testimony of the cross, is a devil, and whosoever perverteth the oracles of the Lord (to serve) his own lusts, and saith there is neither resurrection nor judgment, this man is a first-born of Satan.”

After all, the Angel’s Song at Bethlehem (St. Luke 2.14) is not “Happy, Happy! Joy, Joy!” but the more serious “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men in whom he is well pleased.” And that peace?– found through a well-pleasing belief in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, though whom alone we have everlasting life. Even jolly old St. Nicholas knew that.

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