And please let’s remember that Philip Pullman's is not the first blatant attack on our faith. Consider, for example, a piece of graffiti uncovered on a wall in Rome during a 19th-century excavation. The graffiti, say many scholars, may date to as early as the year 85 — about the time the Gospels of Luke and Matthew were being written. The graffiti image shows a man with a donkey’s head hanging on a cross, while another man prays to him. The scratched caption below the image says “Alexamenos worships his God.”

	Graffiti image found in Rome in 1857 and dated to the first century by many scholars. The scratched writing says "Alexamenos worships [his] God." The image is in the Palatine Museum in Rome.

Poor Alexamenos. Imagine living in a society where Jesus on the cross was scorned as an ass, where you and your fellow Christians were accused of being cannibals who had sex with their mothers and engaged in other abominations and were, ironically, condemned as atheists. Imagine living in a society that routinely scorned and ridiculed you — and sporadically decided to torture and kill you.

I’m glad we don’t live in those times, but maybe we can learn something from them. While early Christians sometimes vented their anger at their oppressors, they also engaged the Roman writers and critics who attacked them. They defended and explained what happened at Eucharist, and what Christians believed, and often out-thought their opponents. And above all they fearlessly preached Christ crucified and risen, and, like us, they did their best to live what they preached.

Despite the ridicule, condemnations, sporadic torture, and executions, Christianity could not be stopped. It grew and flourished in a strongly anti-Christian culture. More and more people found the new faith attractive and life-giving, even in the face of death. Do we really fear the same would not be true today?

And what of Alexamenos? How did he react to the graffiti? Did he get terribly angry — or fearful that the authorities might identify him as a Christian? We’ll never know. But there are two things we do know. First, he didn’t plaster over the offensive graffiti, and, second, someone, maybe Alexamenos himself, scratched another phrase into an adjoining wall: “Alexamenos fidelis”: Alexamenos [is] faithful.

Being faithful to Christ and the life of discipleship he calls us to: Can any response we might make to Pullman’s atheism be more powerful than that? To deal with the beam in our own eye instead of the speck in Pullman’s, to love Pullman and pray for him as Jesus calls us to do with all our “enemies,” and to spend more time focusing on our own, and the whole Church’s, continual need for conversion, to take care of the poor and the hungry and the suffering, to work for forgiveness and peace, to move more deeply into living the gospel, to learn to trust God and not be so fearful — is this not the life Jesus calls us to live?

That, in the end, is Catholic Digest’s response to "The Golden Compass" and the His Dark Materials trilogy: Watch and read them if you want to. Don’t watch or read them if you don’t want to. Keep your children from them if you wish. But if you choose to watch or read, and faith questions come up, discuss them and help your faith grow. Seek help from your pastor or parish religious education staff if you don’t have answers. As with all of us, be faithful to Christ as best you can and repent when you fail. And when the inevitable challenges, criticisms, and attacks come, respond to them intelligently, grow and strengthen your faith through them, and, above all, remember the command of Jesus and the frequent exhortation of Pope John Paul II: Be not afraid.

Dan Connors
Editor-in-Chief
Catholic Digest