Letter 10

From: [Visigothic bishop] To: [Visigothic bishop] Date: ~599 AD Context: Epistulae Wisigothicae letter 10; episcopal correspondence on the pastoral challenges of ministering to a population that includes both old Roman inhabitants and Gothic settlers with different legal and cultural backgrounds. To my dear brother bishop, The pastoral challenge you describe — ministering to a mixed population of Romans and Goths who live according to different legal traditions, who worship together but do not always live together, and whose social relations are still being worked out after more than a century of cohabitation — is one I know from my own experience. The key insight I have arrived at after many years is this: the Gospel is not Roman and it is not Gothic. It does not take sides in the tension between the two populations and it does not endorse the social structures of either. What it does is create a new kind of community that transcends those distinctions — or that ought to, and that we are called to build toward. In practice, this means that the church must be genuinely the church of all the people in the territory, not primarily the church of the Romans with Gothic participants, or the church of the Goths with Roman clergy. The liturgy should be the same for everyone. The pastoral care should reach everyone. The poor-relief should serve everyone equally. Where this is difficult — and it is often difficult, because the social tensions are real — the church's role is to model and teach the equality of all persons before God, even when that equality is not yet reflected in the social arrangements of the world outside the church doors. Your brother, A fellow pastor