Intervention. When those who have Someone Else’s best interests at heart seek to interrupt the behaviors that they believe are so detrimental to that Someone Else–and, often, even to themselves as collateral damage. Such was the case when today’s saint, Caesarius, decided to stop the (ancient) Apollonian rituals at Terracina, in Italy.

It seems that the people of this village held regular, solemn rituals to honor their town’s patron God, Apollo. Each such ritual involved a young man who willingly gave up his life to the Sun God. As Butler describes what happened to each of these male volunteers:

After having been long caressed and pampered by the citizens, apparelled in rich gaudy ornaments, he offered sacrifice to Apollo, and running full speed from this ceremony, threw himself headlong into the sea, and was swallowed up by the waves.

Enter Caesarius, “a holy deacon from Africa,” who “not being able to contain his zeal, spoke openly against so abominable a superstition.” Apparently it was ok for Jesus to offer himself as a sacrifice to his God on behalf of humanity, but not (at least in our saint’s view) for young men in Terracina to do the same with respect to Apollo.

To be even clearer, a foreigner (who followed a religion involving human sacrifice) came to this village and proclaimed the voluntary practices of the villagers to be abominable superstitions. Caesarius zealously sought to intervene, to stop these human sacrifices, and to persuade the villagers to turn away from their worship of Apollo.

Not altogether surprisingly, this attempted intervention did not go well at all. The town’s leaders elected to put Caesarius and a Christian priest named Lucian into a sack–and tossed the two of them over the cliff and into the sea.

Now as a (particular variety of) 21st-century American, I certainly believe that Caesarius and Lucian should not have been executed for speaking up about something they did find morally objectionable–even if they did so in an objectionable way that criticized the morals of the townspeople. But what does it say that Christianity makes saints of those who meet their deaths in service of their God, even when they meet their deaths by seeking to intervene when others are voluntarily seeking to meet their deaths in service of their God?