What they overcame: being a modern-day martyr has less to do with how one dies than for what one lives.

OCTOBER 19 IS THE FEAST OF THE NORTH AMERICAN martyrs, eight 17th-century Jesuits who gave their lives for the faith; and last year, in the weeks before and after this feast, Constance Baker Motley, Vivian Malone Jones, and Rosa Parks joined the ranks of the martyrs of North America. Unlike their Jesuit predecessors, these three courageous women were not tortured and killed but died of strokes, heart failure, or natural causes. Still, they belong in what poet Rudyard Kipling called the "thin red line of heroes." For martyrs, the dictionary informs us, are witnesses; and the testimony of these three witnesses to justice changed the world in ways thought unimaginable.

That was their gift--their martyrdom--that the example they set broke the chains of our imagination, and that after they were done no one could imagine telling a black woman she could not sit in the front row of a bus, or in a college classroom, or on the bench of a federal court.

Constance Baker Motley's mother wanted her to be a hairdresser. Neither she nor the world around her could imagine that the ninth child of a West Indies cook would be one of the first black women accepted at Columbia University Law School, or would go on to help Thurgood Marshall write the brief for Brown v. Board of Education. Southern audiences came out in droves to see the black female lawyer who represented Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, and watched in stunned silence as "that Motley woman" shattered one segregationist barrier after another in what she called "the second civil war," winning nine of the 10 cases she argued before the Supreme Court.

Constance's mother also never expected her daughter to be the first African American woman appointed to a federal judiciary, or to serve as the chief justice of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. But she did, and by the time she died on Sept. 29, 2005 lots of other mothers had different expectations of their daughters, thanks to Motley's witness.

WHEN VIVIAN MALONE JONES WALKED INTO FOSTER Auditorium on June 11, 1963, she was not the first black student to attend the 132-year-old University of Alabama, but she was the first to stay and the first to graduate. Gov. George Wallace had promised the white people of Alabama that nobody like Vivian would ever attend their university.

But he wasn't counting on the courage of the National Honor Society student who registered for classes that muggy June day and then went to unpack in a dorm evacuated by white co-eds. And he wasn't expecting that this young woman's resolve to stay would only grow stronger when Medgar Evers was assassinated the next day in Jackson, Mississippi. Nor did he anticipate that 33 years later he would be giving her the Lurleen B. Wallace Award for Courage (named after his wife) and asking for forgiveness. By the time she passed away on Oct. 13, 2005 Vivian Malone Jones had opened a lot of doors and minds.

Rosa Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress on her way home from work on Dec. 1, 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man who had boarded the crowded Montgomery bus she was riding. Black women didn't do that sort of thing if they didn't want to be arrested, or lynched.

But Parks, an active member of the NAACP, decided to do the unimaginable, and later that evening agreed to become both the plaintiff in an anti-segregation case that would unleash a wave of death threats against her and the figurehead of a year-long boycott that would end bus segregation in Montgomery and throughout the South. The rage and violence prompted by these choices cost Parks her job and eventually forced her to leave Montgomery, but still she struggled on, marching in Selma and Washington in 1963.

President Clinton later gave her the Medal of Freedom, Congress bestowed the Congressional Gold Medal on her, and after her death on October 24 more than 30,000 people paid their respects to the first woman to lie in honor under the Capitol rotunda. The woman who would not be told where to sit had taught a nation to make room for everybody.

IT SEEMS PARTICULARLY IRONIC, EVEN INSTRUCTIVE, that these three martyrs to justice and equality should pass before our eyes for the last time in the weeks when the oldest old boys' club in the world was meeting in Rome (a city that has never been good to martyrs) for the Synod on the Eucharist.

In the days we were remembering the witness of women who fought so hard to ensure that their sisters would not be barred from taking their seats on buses and at lunch counters, in classrooms or courtrooms, Catholic bishops from around the world were repeating old and tired formulas barring women from the sanctuary, sacristy, and eucharistic table. Like others before them, they could not imagine a woman at the altar. Perhaps some of them will live long enough to apologize to our daughters.

Martyrs, as George Bernard Shaw put it, "see things as they have never been, and ask why not." Their lives are testimonies to a world not yet imagined. Moses helped the Hebrews imagine a free land flowing with milk and honey, a place where there would be no slaves or poor. Jesus taught his disciples to imagine a reign unlike anything ever seen, an anti-kingdom where masters waited upon slaves and beggars dined at banquets. Constance, Vivian, and Rosa helped a nation imagine a world without Jim Crow.

We need a host of such martyrs today--North American and otherwise. We need women and men to stage sit-ins in sanctuaries and organize boycotts of collection baskets. We need a legion of Constances, Vivians, and Rosas to set an example that will help us imagine a Catholic Church free at last from sexism and patriarchy.

These three recent films explore the roles of modern-day trailblazers.

The Long Walk Home (Miramax, 1990)

Ghosts of Mississippi (Columbia Pictures, 1996)

Whale Rider (Tristar, 2002)

PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.