But there was one place, and one place alone, the Visigoths dared not enter: church. For all their cruelty, the Visigoths were Christians, albeit of the Arian heresy. And while their faith didn’t otherwise translate into their conduct of war, it did lead them to respect Christian houses of worship. Though Augustine doesn’t comment on this, if any of the Visigoths had wanted to attend church on a Sunday during the sack, they might have worshiped in Roman churches themselves. Indeed, toward the end of the fifth century, the Visigoths accepted the Nicene Creed. Could their adoption of Trinitarian theology have begun here?
I thought about this history of respect for churches as sanctuaries while reading CT’s recent report on US officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) going to an Atlanta church to arrest a Honduran man, Wilson Velásquez—on a Sunday, no less.
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