What can a little underground paper do in the face of the awesome power of deans, especially when it’s mostly confiscated before it can even be read? Well, as it turns out, apparently quite a lot.
As fear led Pilate to crucify Jesus and the Roman state to martyr thousands, so, too, did fear drive some in the halls of power to hide our paper from inquiring eyes. But The Catacombs proved to be like the Little Engine That Could, slowly but surely moving up and over the mountain. Chug ... chug.
When we rolled out ... chug ... chug ...into the light of day with the first issue of The Catacombs, we assumed it would take some time before the rumbling influence of our little paper was felt in the halls of power. Granted, we know our paper was seen in the halls of power since so many copies were seen piled in the Campus Life and Dean of Students offices, but this is not the same as influence.
The confiscation of a paper that only wants to point out the need in our lives of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful — and this College’s unique role in helping us to seek these things in light of the great Catholic Tradition — seems like overkill because it is. We couldn’t have planned a better verification of the claims we made in our first issue about the Dean of Students, who won our first “Millstone of the Month Award” for transforming personal opinions into policies that overrode the teachings of our school’s professed faith. (To read the Millstone article, go to bit.ly/millstone2.)
And yet, over the summer the winner of our “Millstone of the Month Award,” left Aquinas College. Chug ... chug. (We have not seen the millstone since, which is okay because we have a stack ready to go, if necessary.) We don’t know why the Dean left but here’s our theory.
Tertullian claimed that the “blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church.” He meant that the Christian witness of those who stood up for Truth against Roman power helped convert first individuals, then the culture of Rome, and finally the state itself. Chug...chug. Could it be that our little paper, by awarding the Dean the Millstone, led Aquinas College to clean out its Augean Stables? We think so. Chug...chug.
And the power of the press keeps a rollin’! Chug ... chug. Woo woo.
(Think train whistle, not Curley).
