Briefly Reviewed: December 2025

Rabbles, Riots and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized

By Mike Aquilina

Publisher: Ignatius

Pages: 206

Price: $17.95

Review Author: Elizabeth Hanink

Just when you think the problems in the Church couldn’t get any worse, along comes a book that makes you think twice about that proposition. Things could be worse and, in fact, have been worse. And yet the Church has survived, thrived even, and much of what we experience of the Church today is due to the way special men and women reacted to events early in her history.

At first glance, Mike Aquilina’s latest book appears to be a romp through the first 400 years of Catholicism. The story is short, breezy, and full of quirky people and places. It is, in a nutshell, a quick review of 12 major cities that made substantive contributions to the growth of the early Church. The reader gets a sense of “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium.” But there is more to the book than that, much more. Each city was chosen to exemplify a lesson in how the early Church responded to challenges and how those responses influence us today.

Most of the cities are easily recognizable, some because they still exist: Rome, Jerusalem, Milan. Others, like Alexandria and Carthage, featured prominently in our world history classes. Still others are unfamiliar. Ejmiatsin and Lugdunum were new to me. Yet even these obscure places have influence today.

Ejmiatsin, located in what we now call Armenia, for all its existence has had two names, Vagharshapat being the second. Most readers would be surprised to hear that Armenia was the first Christian country, and that Ejmiatsin’s cathedral, built in A.D. 300, is still the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Many documents written originally in Greek and thought to have been lost are available to us today thanks to tireless translators and a few outstanding Christians who established the Armenian alphabet and preserved these ancient texts.

Lugdunum is another old metropolis. Today it is known as Lyon. Thanks to its location 200 miles up the Rhône from the Mediterranean, it became important. Initially, Christians accounted for a small percentage of the population, but by the middle 100s Lugdunum had a bishop, Pothinus. According to the ancient historian Eusebius, it also became the site of one of the earliest persecutions of Christians. A widely distributed letter from the surviving community gives details of the mistreatment under Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “The greatness of the tribulation in this region, and the fury of the heathen against the saints, and the sufferings of the blessed witnesses, we cannot recount accurately, nor indeed could they possibly be recorded.” It continues, “For with all his might the adversary fell upon us, giving us a foretaste of his unbridled activity at his future coming. In every way he tried to stir up his servants against the servants of God, not only shutting us out from houses and baths and markets, but forbidding any of us to be seen anywhere at all.” About a particularly brave martyr, St. Blandina, the letter reads:

After the scourging, after the wild beasts, after the roasting seat, she was finally enclosed in a net and thrown before a bull. And having been tossed about by the animal but feeling none of the things which were happening to her, on account of her hope and firm hold upon what had been entrusted to her, and her communion with Christ, she also was sacrificed. And the heathen themselves confessed that never among them had a woman endured so many and such terrible tortures.

It got worse, and the cruelty, according to Aquilina, did not end even after the martyrs were dead. Their bodies were burned to ash and thrown into the Rhône, so no relics could be retrieved.

St. Irenaeus, the second bishop of Lugdunum, took on a different sort of adversary: the Gnostics. His Against Heresies covers a multitude of false teachings and explains why they are wrong. It is an example of how necessary it is to make clear and careful distinctions between truth and falsehood, a lesson we certainly need today. He came from Smyrna, where he knew St. Polycarp, a disciple of the Apostle John, and so brought a direct apostolic tradition. Today Lyon is “littered with monuments of twenty centuries of Christian history,” as Aquilina describes it, but no figures are celebrated more than Irenaeus and Blandina.

Aquilina covers more: Antioch, Constantinople, Edessa, Ephesus, and Ravenna. Each offers an important lesson; each contributes something to our understanding of how Christianity spread, how we understand Christ, and how we worship Him. It is important to know our history and to hang on to it. Still, Aquilina is careful to separate lore from fact and encourages us to be flexible. Places come and go, parishes merge or close, we have good popes and not so good ones. But, as Aquilina points out, the Church herself will remain until “we are all with Christ in what Scripture describes as the New Jerusalem.”