Fr Henry Charles

In his encyclical, God is Love, Benedict XVI included witness among the three essential functions of the Church (the other two being worship and service). Witness originally meant a public attestation of one’s faith.

The Acts of the Apostles, however, in describing Stephen’s death, uses the term to mean witness unto death;and this is the meaning which martyr, the word in English translation, came to have, and which has remained its standard meaning.

Earlier in 2006, according to Lawrence Cunningham, in an article in the Jesuit weekly, AMERICA, the Pope spoke against a too generous and elastic use of martyr and martyrdom.

He gave no examples of what he meant, but Cunningham suggested instances like the murder of Italian Sister Leonella, in Mogadishu, Somalia, at the hands of angry Muslims, after Benedict’s remarks in Germany. A martyr, the Pope said, is one who dies, either directly or indirectly, out of hatred for the faith (in odium fidei).

Sister Leonella’s death was occasioned by hatred of the Pope’s remarks, and strictly speaking, would not perhaps qualify as martyrdom.

And yet, in the medieval period, Aquinas defended the use of the term for the deaths of John the Baptist and the Holy Innocents, even though they too, while they suffered for the faith, did not die, strictly speaking, in its defence.

In our own day, there were protests when the nun/philosopher Edith Stein was canonised as a martyr by Pope John Paul II. It was argued that she died in Auschwitz for being a Jew, not because she was a Christian.

A more muted protest arose with Maximilian Kolbe’s designation as a martyr. Kolbe died when he volunteered to replace a married prisoner who was chosen for death in a starvation bunker.

There is, it seems, a broad and a narrow understanding of martyrdom. This is what usage in Aquinas clearly implies, and the broader understanding would fit the situations of a great variety of modern martyrs: Archbishop Oscar Romero, for example, the six Jesuits at Central American University, along with their housekeeper and her daughter; the thousands of priests and religious killed during the Spanish Civil War, and the great numbers of those tortured and executed under Communist regimes in the last century.

Pope John Paul in fact considered martyrdom under totalitarian regimes the most significant ecumenical fact of our times. He asked that a new martyrology (an honours’ roll of martyrs) be assembled to honor all those who died in those circumstances.  The numbers would be vast indeed, greater perhaps than all those who perished in the persecution of Christians under imperial Rome.

One unique dimension of contemporary martyrdom is that many of those who died for the faith, did so at the hands of others who were themselves Catholic.

In fact, the number of Central American martyrs, the victims of death squads, includes many who were not killed not simply by other Catholics, but by those who argued that they were defending “Catholic” civilization against incursions by Communists and other leftists.

In the light of this situation, their supporters have continued to argue that many of the deaths, e.g. Archbishop Romero’s, were really political, not religious.

The argument, of course, turns on a particular understanding of “political”, where the political and the religious belong to completely separate spheres.

The separation denies any importance to that category of witness the Church today considers essential to its preaching, namely work on behalf of justice.

Yet, even after one takes the argument apart, the religious situation remains historically one of remarkable novelty -- dying for the faith at the hands of fellow Catholics in so-called Christian societies.

Under the broad definition, martyrdom in Central America would for the most part be dying not in direct challenge to the faith, but dying for causes that are indirectly related to it. Today, as I say, this would include issues like the claims of justice.

In Veritatis Splendor, his encyclical about the objectivity of moral norms, Pope John Paul saluted the witness of those who show by their willingness to die that some fundamental truths must be stood for even at the cost of one’s life.

The issue of motive is paramount; that is, the significance of martyrdom lies not only in what one dies for, but in the manner of one’s dying. Martyrdom is always critically an act of innocence standing against power. Its focus is on the act of being true, not on the pain that this entails. 

In the fifth century Augustine reprimanded the Donatists for boasting of the suffering of their ancestral martyrs:  Non poena sed causa, he said. That is, it’s not the pain but the cause that counts. The maxim would rule out activities today like suicide bombing, which involves the willful killing of others. It would also rule out any masochistic pursuit of suffering or pain.

The changing face of martyrdom means that we need a fuller symbolic language for our stained glass windows and other icons. Catherine has her wheel, and Thomas More his executioner’s block. We need to add representation of the bullet, barbed wire, and blood on the altar.

All these symbols, whether old and new, fundamentally signify at least two things. They speak, first, of the great diversity of the ways Christians in which have always witnessed; and secondly, as signs of witness unto death, they remind us of the unique emblem of such witness, two cross beams, nailed or roped together, on a hill far away.