As the guards took Ignatius westward through Asia Minor, Christians came to meet him along the way. During the journey, he wrote letters to several Christian communities and to fellow church leaders, encouraging them to remain faithful and united. Seven of those letters survived. Through them, nearly nineteen centuries later, we can still hear Ignatius speaking in his own voice. His words are urgent, personal and sometimes intensely emotional. Ignatius knew he was a condemned prisoner, yet his attention continually returned to the Christians he would leave behind. He worried about divisions within the Church and urged them to remain united in faith, charity and their life together in Christ.

Letters from the Road

In those letters, Ignatius explained what that unity meant to him. Christians were to remain united with Christ, with one another and with those entrusted with the care of their communities. He wrote of bishops, presbyters and deacons as parts of one harmonious Church, even comparing their unity to the strings of a harp sounding together.

What makes those appeals especially striking is the situation in which he wrote them. Ignatius was a prisoner on the road to Rome, with no expectation of returning home. Yet his letters preserve an unexpectedly clear picture of Christian life at the beginning of the second century.

At the heart of that unity was the Eucharist. Ignatius did not treat it merely as a symbol of Christians belonging together. He spoke of one bread shared by the faithful and famously described the Eucharist as the “medicine of immortality.” In his letters, unity with Christ, unity with the Church and participation in the Eucharist continually belong together.

A Church Already Called Catholic

Ignatius’s concern for unity also gave us one of the most enduring lines in early Christian writing. Writing to the Christians at Smyrna, he said:

“Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”

This is the earliest surviving use in Christian literature of the word “Catholic” to describe the Church. The Greek word carries the sense of the whole or universal. Ignatius was not naming a newly created denomination. He was describing the fullness and universality of the Church gathered around Christ.

That makes the expression far more interesting in its original setting. Ignatius was writing at a time when Christian communities were scattered across different cities of the Roman Empire. Yet he understood them as belonging to something larger than their individual congregations — one Church united in Christ, in faith and charity, and in the Eucharist.

Toward Rome

A 1977 profile of St. Ignatius of Antioch highlighted his defence of Church unity, the Eucharist and the role of the bishop during the earliest decades of Christianity.

Newspaper clipping: The Catholic Voice, 30 Sept. 1977, p. 9.

As Ignatius continued westward, Rome drew closer.

His letter to the Christians there is among the most intense of the seven. He feared that they might somehow intervene on his behalf and urged them not to prevent the fate he believed awaited him in Rome. His language can be difficult for modern readers because his willingness to die is so intense. But Ignatius was not simply fascinated by suffering. His deepest desire was union with Christ. He had spent his life proclaiming a Saviour who truly took flesh, truly suffered and truly died. Faced with death himself, Ignatius wanted his own witness to remain faithful to the Christ he had proclaimed.

In one of the most famous passages of his writings, he compared himself to God’s wheat, ready to be ground so that he might become the bread of Christ. The image gathers together everything that had occupied him on the road — Christ, sacrifice, Eucharist and the longing to belong completely to God.

Early Christian tradition records that Ignatius eventually reached Rome and died there as a martyr, traditionally by wild beasts. The precise details preserved in later martyrdom accounts are harder to establish with certainty, but the letters themselves leave little doubt that Ignatius expected to die in Rome and deliberately prepared the churches he loved for life without him.

He left behind no great institution bearing his name and no enormous body of writing. Seven letters are all that survive.

Yet those seven letters allow us to stand remarkably close to a Christian bishop travelling toward death in the early second century — hearing his fears, his hopes, his love for Christ and his conviction that a scattered people could nevertheless remain one Church, gathered around one Eucharist, in one faith and one love.