So how’s this for the crowning achievement of your life’s work? You stopped heretics in Britain who were going around telling people that they weren’t born as sin-inclined, wretched creatures. And because you have successfully convinced people that they really are pieces of shit, you end being rewarded with sainthood and remembered on this day, every year, for centuries!

Yup, that’s how St. Lupus (yes, just like the disease) made his chops: by battling those bad Pelagians who said that the doctrine of original sin–that humans are frail, sin-proned creatures who have forfeited the gift of God’s sanctifying grace (= life without death). Lupus’s ever-so-vital work of convincing people how fallible and fallen they were took place primarily during the late 300s and early 400s. As Butler describes it:

About the latter end of the fourth century, Pelagius, a British monk, and Celestius a Scot, broached their heresy in Africa, Italy, and the East, denying the corruption of human nature by original sin, and the necessity of divine grace. One Agricola, a disciple of these heresiarchs, had spread this poison in Britain.

Lupus was thrilled when asked to accompany another future saint, Germanus, to Britain where they “entirely banished the heresy by their prayers, preaching, and miracles.”

Why, why, why is it so so so important to convince people that they are not not not any good in and of themselves? Why?!

The Marxist in me says, “Follow the money.” Would there be so many financially viable churches were there no message of “we are all that stands between you and hell”? Can the institution continue without the proclamation that “you are sinful and we have the solution”?

Well, as today demonstrates, Lupus is a saint because he made sure that those 4th and 5th-century inhabitants of Great Britain came to recognize that they were born into/with original sin, whereas the idea that people are born beautiful, in God’s image, and do not need to be saved from who and how they are is (still) heresy.