St. Augustine once wrote that neither pagan religion or Stoic indifference really made Rome strong in the face of suffering. Rather, in Rome’s greatest suffering, the good and the bad, the rich and the poor, all found refuge in the great Catholic basilicas of the city. Devotion to true religion, supported by just laws under the emperors, was not a guarantee that you would not suffer, but rather it was a refuge which trained a people in the way of the Cross, in a school for facing “enormous negative shocks,” so that suffering would not devastate a people by despair, causing them to flee from God, but instead test their faith, unite themselves to Christ Crucified, and so paradoxically increase in strength under the very virtue of humility. Augustine concluded that “what matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings,” and that laws supporting Christian devotion are not contrary to the common good of Rome, but positively in its interest. So it is for us today.