Who
Saint Clement of Rome (Bishop of Rome c. 88 to c. 99) was the third successor of Saint Peter, following Linus and Anacletus. He served the Church in the closing years of the first century, while many who had walked with the apostles were still alive. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, writing a hundred years later, remembered that Clement “had seen the blessed Apostles and had been conversant with them,” and that he could almost hear their preaching still echoing in his ears.
Around the year 96, just after the persecution under the Emperor Domitian had broken, Clement wrote a long letter from the Church of Rome to the Church of Corinth, where a serious quarrel had arisen. Young, ambitious men had deposed the rightful elders of that community. The letter Clement sent in reply, known to us as 1 Clement, is the oldest Christian letter outside the New Testament. It was read aloud in Christian assemblies for centuries, almost as if it were Scripture. Later tradition tells us Clement was martyred under the Emperor Trajan, tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea. His relics were brought back from the Crimea in the ninth century by Saints Cyril and Methodius, and rest today in the lovely old Basilica of San Clemente in Rome.
The original voice
Love bears all things, is long-suffering in all things. There is nothing base, nothing arrogant in love. Love admits of no schism, love makes no sedition, love does all things in concord.
Saint Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 49
What they meant
The Corinth Clement was writing to was not a peaceful place. It was a community torn by factions, with ambitious newcomers pushing out the older men who had been leading the church for years. The Christians there had forgotten something Saint Paul had spent his whole life trying to teach them, which is that the Body of Christ is held together not by argument or power but by love. So Clement, from a distance and with the authority of the Roman Church, wrote them this long, gentle, very firm letter, calling them back to humility, to peace, to the bond that had been theirs from the beginning.
In the middle of the letter he writes one of the most beautiful passages in early Christian literature, sometimes called the hymn to love. It echoes Saint Paul’s great chapter to the same city, 1 Corinthians 13, but it is Clement’s own voice, in his own situation. Love, he tells them, is not a feeling. It is the only thing strong enough to keep a community together when pride wants to tear it apart. Love does not pick sides. Love does not split the Church. Love quietly does all things in concord. That is the only way a Christian community survives, then as now.
This letter also contains, almost in passing, the earliest clear teaching on apostolic succession. Christ was sent by the Father, the apostles were sent by Christ, and they in turn appointed faithful men to succeed them. Clement does not present this as theory. He presents it as the lived experience of a church only sixty years old. The bishops you can see are the visible thread of a love that began with Jesus and is still being handed on, unbroken, in your own time.
Voices that came after
Nineteen centuries later, in his Wednesday General Audience of 7 March 2007, Pope Benedict XVI returned to Clement and to that quiet, ancient letter. He drew out the deepest line of all from it, the line that still gives us courage when we feel the Church is something we have to fix or carry or save by ourselves.
The Church is above all a gift of God and not something we ourselves created; consequently, this sacramental structure does not only guarantee the common order but also this precedence of God’s gift which we all need.
Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, 7 March 2007
Why it still matters
The Corinthian temptation has not gone anywhere. We still want to depose the inconvenient elder, run the parish council our way, win the argument in the WhatsApp group, prove that we are right and someone else is wrong. We still confuse strong opinions for strong faith, and forget that the only thing that has ever held the Church together is the very quiet, very stubborn, very ordinary virtue Clement called love.
Clement reminds us that the Church is not a startup we have to manage well. She is a gift we have received. Our job is not to keep her on the road by force of personality. Our job is to keep loving inside her, with humility, with patience, with that long suffering generosity that does not split into factions when things get hard. The bishops, the priests, the structures, all of it is the visible scaffolding of a love that goes back to Jesus and that holds, even when we behave badly.
Today, before bed, you might think of someone in your own life with whom love has gone a bit thin. A relative, a colleague, a fellow parishioner, a neighbour. Not to fix them. Just to remember that love does all things in concord, and to ask the Lord for the quiet grace to be the one who chooses concord first.
A line to carry into the week
Love does all things in concord.