Truth and consequences: past or present, just what makes a martyr?

In what century have the largest numbers of Christians died for their faith? If you're thinking Roman Colosseum, try thinking instead Nazi Germany, Latin America, China. Many have argued that more Christians died in the 20th century than during the entire period of Roman persecution. That claim may well be true, although scholars don't agree on exactly how many died during the Roman period, when empire-wide persecution of Christians began after a decree from Decius in the year 250 and culminated in fierce persecution under the emperor Diocletian around the year 303. Within the decade Emperor Constantine would, for all intents and purposes, end the period of the Roman persecution of Christians.

Whether the numbers who died during the Roman persecution is anything like the wholesale slaughter of Christians in the Soviet Gulags or in the Nazi occupation of Poland and other areas of Europe or China after 1948 is dubious. Nor has the modern era of persecution ended if we are to believe reports coming out of the Sudan and the factual record of the continuing Chinese persecution of Christians.

Why should Catholics care about martyrs today? Our contemporary martyrs remind us that some things are worth risking one's life for. In taking that risk, modern martyrs, better than any encyclical or theological essay, underscore the truth of the gospel. As a recent Italian theologian has written, most of our contemporary martyrs died not so much because their persecutors hated the faith but because they hated love. The bishops, priests, religious, and lay folk died not as suicide bombers, they died because they loved the people they served. Greater love than this, says the gospel, no person has than to give up one's life for an another. Pope John Paul II has called today's martyrs "icons of the gospel of the Beatitudes."

Martyrs, both ancient and contemporary, are also prophets in the precise sense that they judge us by a simple rule: They are willing to risk all out of their love of Jesus Christ seen in others. How much are we willing to risk for the gospel? When the martyrs are seen in that light, the proper response is not admiration but humility.

An undying example

Before the peace of Constantine, the early church considered martyrs to be the model Christians. The great honor accorded them gave the cult of the saints its greatest impetus. The veneration of the saints shaped everything from the liturgy to early Christian architecture.

After the fourth century the terms martyrdom and martyr took on a broader meaning, but the cult of the martyrs did not wane. While the idea of dying for the faith remained the classic understanding of the term martyr, the rise of the ascetic replaced the martyr as the prototype of Christian heroism. Saint Athanasius said that Saint Antony, the desert solitary, was a martyr every day of his life. The early Irish monks used the term martyr variously: "white" martyrdom was the life of penance; "blue" martyrdom was mortification of the will; "green" martyrdom designated those who undertook a voluntary life of perpetual exile. The highest form, however, was still the "red" martyrdom of those who shed their blood for the sake of Christ.

The idea that the ascetic life is a kind of martyrdom has lingered for a long time in the history of the church. Late in the 19th century, Saint Therese of Lisieux wrote in her autobiography that she had been told religious life itself was a kind of martyrdom.

Throughout Christian history the model of those who died for the faith continued to inspire. Saint Anthony of Padua became a Franciscan in the 13th

century motivated by the early Franciscan friars who were martyred in Morocco. Saint Teresa of Avila tells us in her autobiography that she and her brother as children dreamed of going to North Africa to die for the faith. Those who died as missionaries in the Americas and the newly explored lands of Africa and Asia provided impetus for recruits to replace them in the missions as soon as their deaths were reported.

Passing the test

In the contemporary period, however, a number of questions arise about what we mean when we call a person a Christian martyr. In antiquity the test was simple: A Christian who died for being a Christian while proclaiming that fact in public witness was a martyr. Such people were witnesses for the faith--the word martyr means "witness"--who paid with their lives. Saint Augustine, in a neat aphorism, defined the test for the martyr: non poena sed causa--not the punishment but the reason for the punishment.

Many who died for the faith in the 20th century did not suffer because of the public witness of their faith in the narrow sense of the term. When Edith Stein was canonized, a debate raged about whether she died as a Christian martyr or because she was a Jew. John Paul II wore red vestments at her canonization to express his judgment.

Archbishop Oscar Romero, the women martyrs, the six Jesuits, and other clergy and laypeople murdered in El Salvador did not die technically because of their faith but because they were thought to be political subversives. The martyred bishops, priests, religious, and laypeople of Central and Latin America, as Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino and others have noted, had the dismal honor of being killed not by pagans who hated Christianity but by people who prided themselves on representing the most authentic form of Catholic culture while also fighting against "Marxist traitors."

In the Nazi period and in the suppression of Christianity in the former Soviet Union, the loathing of Christianity was open, but even then, many died not because of their faith but because they were seen as enemies of the state and, as such, perished alongside nonbelievers killed for the same reason.

So the question occurs: In what sense were these people martyrs in any but the most generic sense of the word? The question is not a new one. History, as chronicled, for example, by Robert Royal in The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century (Crossroad), provides some clues.

In the year 1011, Alphege, the archbishop of Canterbury, was captured by Danish raiders, who held him for ransom in Greenwich. When he forbade people from collecting the monies for his release, a crowd of drunken soldiers beat him to death. Danish leaders, as an act of reparation, returned his body to be enshrined at Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. A cult soon developed in honor of the saint who stood against the Danes.

Later that century, Lanfranc, who then held the See of Canterbury, worried that Alphege should not be given liturgical honors as a martyr because he did not die for the faith but as the result of a drunken rage. To clear up his own doubts, he asked Saint Anselm, another future archbishop of Canterbury, about this matter. Anselm replied that Alphege should enjoy honors as a martyr because he had been killed for the sake of justice, even though he had not died because of hatred for the faith. Alphege remains in the Roman martyrology to this day; his feast day is April 19.

The question of the martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist comes up in the Summa Theologica and other writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He asks whether John was truly a martyr because the cause of his death was not defense of the faith but his denunciation of Herod's adultery. Aquinas answers that one may die for the faith in the broad sense of giving witness to the truth that the faith encompasses. Hence, he says the church is right to honor John because he died explicitly to sustain justice and to defend the truth.

Aquinas' insight helps us to understand why we cannot deny out of hand the title of martyr to our contemporaries such as the martyrs in Central America or those who are slaughtered in the southern part of Sudan. They die as victims of injustice, singled out for their faith.

The same Thomistic insight was used to honor Father Maximilian Kolbe, the priest who during World War II offered himself in exchange for another concentration camp prisoner sentenced to death by starvation. Kolbe was proclaimed a martyr at the time of his canonization because he died, not so much from hatred of the faith, but from his willingness to lay down his life for another. John Paul II saw Kolbe's act to be in conformity with Christ on the cross who gave his life for the sake of others.

The theological discriminations made by Aquinas shed light on another historic practice of the church. Since the fifth and sixth centuries respectively, for example, the liturgical calendars of both the East and the West have honored as martyrs the infant children slaughtered by King Herod, known as the Holy Innocents, although it is patent that they did not die "in defense of the faith." The Fathers of the church, however, insisted that the children died for the sake of Christ and instead of Christ. Commenting on Psalm 47, Saint Augustine wrote that "Herod destroyed innocent children, but Christ crowned these little ones who died in Christ's cause." As a consequence they have every reason to be honored as martyrs in the church.

So who's really a martyr?

The complexity of violence against church workers and simple observant Christians raises the issue of how to determine who is a martyr in the church. Did the parish priests who fought the Mafia in Sicily deserve to be called martyrs? When Mafia killers gunned down Don Giuseppe Puglisi in Palermo in 1993, the pope told audiences in Sicily that the priest was a martyr for justice and indirectly a martyr for the faith.

What about those religious and laity who work for social justice at risk to their own lives in places like India and Africa? Do they qualify as martyrs in the sense of John Paul's meditation on martyrdom for the sake of moral truth? In the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (On the Church's Moral Teaching) and in other encyclicals, the pope holds up for emulation those who stand against any compromise with evil even unto death. Such martyrs, the pope insists, witness to the immutability of God's law, the inherent dignity of all humans, and the love demanded by a gospel life.

In a recent essay about the Salvadoran martyrs in the journal Horizons, Professor Thomas Schubeck of John Carroll University raises new questions about the character of martyrdom. His criteria for Christian martyrdom may be phrased as a series of questions: Did the persons in question bear public witness to moral truth? Did they do so out of love of God and love of neighbor? Did they exhibit that fortitude when facing death as a result of their witness? Were they witnesses to the truth of the gospel and did they live in pursuit of that truth? Did those persons bear witness to justice or, to be more precise, exercise that love that does justice? Answers to those questions must be rooted in historical evidence while being sensitive to the spiritual motives of the person in question.

For the church to canonize someone as a martyr is, of course, a public (and hence, political) statement. As sociologist Amitai Etzioni pointed out decades ago, canonization is a strategy that can be used to domesticate a person's charismatic power. The converse is also true because canonization says, in effect, that the person is a model held up both for veneration and, when circumstances warrant, emulation.

The witness of the martyr, then, sends three messages.

First, martyrs point out the implacability of truth's demands, but in doing so, they pass judgment on those who do not act in the same fashion. The canonization of Edith Stein, for example, should never be used as pious

camouflage for Christian failures to confront the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Second, the witness of the martyr teaches, positively, that there are some immutable truths or some instances of human solidarity in the name of love and justice worth dying for. When we honor such persons we stand, however timidly, in their company as they give luster to the communion of saints.

Finally, the recognition given to contemporary martyrs (by the pope, for example, at the Colosseum in Rome during the Jubilee Year) reminds us forcefully that martyrdom is not a distant memory in the tradition of the church but a reality as contemporary as the reports in our daily newspapers.

LAWRENCE CUNNINGHAM is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.