If you have been following this blog lately, then you have probably guessed from the title that this post began as a comment to Josh Nadeau’s series about Art, Politics, and Martyrdom (Parts I, II, and III), which itself began as a comment to Michael Rennier’s Come Rack! Come Rope! So maybe it’s not the most original topic I could have chosen. But the alarming rate at which Christians across the globe are being martyred for their faith should warn us that it’s long past time those of us in the West shed our false sense of security and do some soul-searching about Christian death. So: my voice joins the chorus. Feel free to add yours.
As Josh pointed out, martyrdom is often too easily reduced to a political act rather than an act of faith. Just imagine if St. Joan of Arc made a reappearance in the modern day. If a teenager jumped into the fray of the current U.S. presidential election claiming that Saint So-and-So sent her to anoint Candidate X as the next leader of the free world, I doubt she would garner much attention outside of a short-lived burst of derisive laughter on Twitter. But if she were eventually martyred because of her visions, how many of us would credit it as a religious martyrdom rather than a political one?
Yet Jesus’ own execution was motivated by a perverse mixture of politics and religion that turned Caiaphas, Pilate, and Herod – natural enemies all – into allies. The crucifixion cannot be extracted from the politics of the day any more than the martyrdom of St. Joan of Arc, St. Edmund Campion, St. Thomas More, and so on. If Jesus had preached His message in twenty-first century America, some dire fate might have befallen Him, but the government would not have nailed Him to a tree. If it’s not Roman-occupied Jerusalem, the crucifixion doesn’t happen. Earthly politics shaped the course of eternal salvation.
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Romans 13:1
If we are to understand Christian martyrdom at all, we must first rid ourselves of the modern prejudice that insists the Church and the State must remain separate in all things. For the Christian, nothing – least of all government – exists outside of God’s domain or without His consent. We must also rid ourselves of the secular notion of martyrdom as dying “for a cause.” The Chinese students who were gunned down in Tiananmen Square in 1989 were martyred in the service of a political cause. I have no doubt their sacrifice was accounted to them as righteousness. But it did not accomplish the same thing Christian martyrdom accomplishes, nor did it happen for the same reason. Christian martyrdom does not exist to effect political change. Christ’s death did not bring down a single official. St. Joan of Arc helped to put the Dauphin on the throne while she was still alive, but her death did not further that cause. The plague that is ISIS has only worsened since the martyrdom of the twenty-one Coptic fishermen. Yet all of these deaths did – and continue to do – exactly what God intended them to do: they “bear witness to Christ who died and rose… [and] to the truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine.”[i]
Part II of Josh’s series looked at martyrdom from the side of the ones doing the killing, who may not have the faintest idea that they are killing someone for the sake of Christ. They may see only the political side of the coin, and believe themselves to be acting for the greater good of a culture, state, etc. He’s right, of course. I have long harbored an objection to the idea of Christian martyrdom that is based in looking at things from the killer’s side, though from a different angle. My problem is this: being killed for the sake of Christ requires that a fellow human being (or human beings) commit a mortal sin. How can a God who rejoices over the one lost sheep approve of such a plan? I do not utter the prayers of the saints who begged to bear wounds like the Lord’s because I cannot pray for any soul to harbor enough malice to inflict them.
The portrait most closely resembling St. Maria Goretti, according to her mother
Yet Christian martyrdom – which is often viewed as a get-out-of-Purgatory-free card for the person doing the dying – also exists to save the ones who kill. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this is the case of St. Maria Goretti (who happens to be a friend of mine.) On her deathbed, Maria famously prayed, “I forgive Alessandro Serenelli (her murderer), and I want him with me in heaven.” Not only was her prayer effective in converting Serenelli while he was in prison, but the cause for his canonization has been opened. I like to think Maria Goretti didn’t need to be martyred in order to serve the Lord; she would have found plenty of other ways to do so, had she lived. But Serenelli needed a miracle to bring him to the truth, and so the loving Father provided one through the witness of His daughter.
St. Maria Goretti’s martyrdom is unique in that it is one of few where politics played no obvious role, and where the Father’s grace offered to the murderer became apparent here on earth, during his lifetime. As Christians, we know that the saving grace of the Cross was offered to Caiaphas, Pilate, and Herod as much as to the rest of us, but we have no record that they accepted it. Likewise, in the majority of cases of Christian martyrs, history either did not record the fate of their killers, or else the killers went to their graves without much second-guessing of their actions. In the eyes of the world, this makes the claim that martyrdom is God’s grace offered for the sake of the ones who killed them rather untenable. But to look at Christian martyrdom through the eyes of the world is to miss the point. Christ prayed for those who slaughtered Him, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Maria Goretti prayed the same for Alessandro Serenelli. St. Edmund Campion prayed it for Queen Elizabeth:
To this effect only do I labor about thy person, and will labor, whatever shall become of me (for whom these adversaries so often augur the gallows) as though I were an enemy of thy life. Hail, good Cross. There will come, Elizabeth, the day that will show thee clearly which have loved thee, the Society of Jesus or the offspring of Luther.
Blessed Agnes Phila, one of the Seven Blessed Martyrs of Thailand, prayed it in her letter to the Chief of Police who killed her and five other women during an oft-forgotten purge of Christians in that country:
Please open the door of heaven to us so that we can confirm that outside the Religion of Christ no one can go to heaven. Please do it. We are well prepared. When we will be gone we will remember you. Please take pity on our souls. We will be thankful to you and will be grateful to you for it. And on the last day we will see each other face to face.
Christian martyrdom is not an act of political defiance, though the killers may often view it that way. Christian martyrdom is an act of mercy offered for the salvation of the ones who kill, as well as for the culture that bred them. It is a participation in the saving Cross of Christ. We do not always see the saving effects of the Cross in this world; so too, we do not always see the saving effects of martyrdom. But the Christian trusts that the Father’s grace will not be ineffective. Otherwise, why do we bother being Christians?
In his series, Josh also addressed the human tendency to whitewash and de-humanize martyrs, especially in art. I agree with him, to an extent, that such portrayals are unhelpful. St. Maria Goretti did not offer her famous prayer of forgiveness while wearing a halo and smiling. She did it while suffering unthinkable torment and gasping for air – and it wasn’t even her idea. Her pastor coaxed her into it; one might say he dragged it out of her like a deathbed confession. There is no way to know whether or not some part of her recoiled when she spoke the words, but I suspect it did. She was human, after all. And she was participating in the suffering of Christ, who cried out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” We do Maria, and ourselves, a disservice if we think that such a prayer as hers could ever be uttered without unspeakable pain.
But it is not always possible to get to know the historical personalities of the martyrs. I have had a first-class relic of the Seven Martyrs of Thailand hanging on my wall for over a decade, since the late Archbishop Lawrence Khai gave it to me as a gift. I still know nothing more about those seven human beings than you can read on this website, which is a pretty sanitized account. If history remembers anything else about them, it hasn’t been translated into English, at least that I can find. I feel it as a hole in my life, that these friends to whom and through whom I pray nevertheless remain strangers. But then again – so what? Have they not been genuinely “whitewashed” in the blood of the Lamb? Have they not set aside whatever eccentricities they wore in life to put on the robe of Christ? Is it not Christ whom they want me to see in them, and not themselves?
My bone of contention with Josh’s series is the fact that he chose not to differentiate Christian martyrdom from political martyrdom, though the two are in fact very different animals. The political martyr, who in death becomes a symbol for some earthly cause, has indeed been stripped of his humanity by those who seek to honor him. But the Christian martyr, who in death becomes a representation of Christ, has fulfilled his humanity. He has decreased so the Lord might increase. His faults, if they are known, can be instructive to us, can encourage us to remember that only actual, sinful humans become martyrs, not fictional, idealized ones. But if nothing is known about a Christian martyr except the fact of his martyrdom – isn’t that enough?
If the crux of Josh’s series is that martyrs deserve a more holistic, realistic treatment in art and the media than they usually receive, then to that, I say, Amen. But true Christian martyrdom cannot be cheapened by whitewashed depictions of the martyrs any more than cheesy crucifixion scenes can cheapen the glory of the Cross. They can only make the Cross – and therefore martyrdom – ever more necessary.
Nope – Christ’s glory is still not diminished.
[i] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2473
“…it’s long past time those of us in the West shed our false sense of security and do some soul-searching about Christian death. ” Amen, amen, amen.
Thank you so much for such thoughtful engagement – while it’s pretty obvious that we disagree on a lot of stuff, there’s so much here that I do agree with and am really glad that you brought up.
The ways that politics and political systems have intereacted with and influenced the way that we live our faith is deeply complicated and not always inherently problematic – for example, I’ve never really thought about how the fact that it’s a cross around our necks rather than, say, a lethal injection, noose or electric chair was purely an arbitrary political reality dependent on the time and place of Jesus’s earthly life. It’s a very cool thought.
I would say, though, that calling the desire for church/state separation a “prejudice” might not be the most accurate, in the sense that a prejudice is usually an unfounded or unjustified animosity towards something, and if we look at the roots of why people wanted that separation then we’ll think about the long history of the power abuse, politicization of spirituality and other complicated/negative effects of the church and state being too closely aligned.
You’re absolutely right in saying that it’s dumb to think that they should be separate in every respect, but it would be a bit disingenious of us to deny the very real negative aspects of having, say, a state religion. For example, a bunch of the stuff written in Parts I and II were about the fallout of having a particular religion associated with a people (being a political enemy of Spain might have been seen to be a legit thing in the Middle Ages, but by doing so you would have probably been seen as an enemy of Catholicism (see the mention of “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”). Or take the relationship between the modern Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church – the gov’t gives a lot of money to the church and in return uses the image of Orthodoxy as a support for both internal and foreign policy (from his stance on “the West” to military intervention in Crimea, East Ukraine and Syria”). Patriarch Kirill’s actions and comments have been very confusing to a lot of people on this count. There is definitely an ideal sweet spot that would be awesome in terms of having a leader of integrity in a country that allies itself with the faith, but that hasn’t really proved itself to be the usual case through history. More often than not, the opposite has tended to prevail.
Again, there are benefits to having the state and the church more closely aligned and I don’t want to discount that – there are plenty of people out there who are saying those things, but it’s just that I find that less people are willing to look at the very real crapshoot it can very easily become. It’s like the article you wrote about Louisianna: I as a person am more likely to see the negative aspects of cultural Catholicism and write about that, and so I wouldn’t be drawn to write the article that you did – but you wrote it and reminded me that there’s more to the situation than the things I normally dwell on. This is one thing I like about the Dappled Things blog team: there are so many people and so many different approaches all on one newsfeed. I just happen to be critical about different things than you would be, and together hopefully we point to a broader vision of how spirituality, art and culture interact.
I think that the fact that all of our posts interact within the context of a broader picture is helpful to remember: I think that the core of both yours and Roseannes responses to how I talked about martyrdom is the fact that I wasn’t writing about the whole picture. I wanted to engage, exclusively, with how the concept of martyrdom is expressed in art and now then that art can be used by different interest groups or political movements for interesting or problematic ends. I didn’t (and don’t claim to) be writing anything in terms of theology, and so of course Christian martyrdom has a completely different effect on the world than the deaths of those people on Tiananmen square. But, like I wrote on the comments to Part III, Catholics don’t have a monopoly on the word “martyr,” which refers (and correct me if I’m wrong, though various dictionaries back me up) to the death of someone for a principle or a belief. It’s not about whether it’s the “secular” definition or not – it’s the definition widely used, and it’s the definition that I ran with while writing these pieces.
“Christian martyrdom is not an act of political defiance, though the killers may often view it that way. Christian martyrdom is an act of mercy offered for the salvation of the ones who kill, as well as for the culture that bred them.” I agree with you here, but I would also say that then it’s possible that we interpret some deaths as Christian martyrdom when they might have been more of a “wrong-place-wrong-time” kinda deal. Not all martyrs were prepared to give up their lives, and I’m sure a great many people who died for the sake of the faith did so not out of a sense of freedom or holy resignation, but perhaps might have had resentment or hatred in their hearts for the people who did it to them. It doesn’t make them martyrs any less, but if we want to define “Christian martyrdom” as the act of relinquishing oneself up to death for the sake of God and the salvation of their killer’s soul, then it’s a good distinction to make.
But I’m not talking about Christian martyrdom as such – you’re right that in the articles I “chose not to differentiate Christian martyrdom from political martyrdom, though the two are in fact very different animals.” Because I wasn’t writing something to deal with theology or to edify the people who courageously surrendered themselves to grace with a willingness I hope to be given if one day I’m called on to do the same. You said it best yourself: “the crux of Josh’s series is that martyrs deserve a more holistic, realistic treatment in art and the media than they usually receive.” That’s all I wanted to talk about, because it’s on a website and blog where there’s already a whole lot of edification going on that’s pointed in the right direction. I just wanted to draw attention to the problematic and incredibly damaging ways that we relate to those edifying figures and, as a result, how we sometimes use them to do damage to the world around us. It just so happens that the ways/patterns that we use to portray and relate to Christian martyrdom in culture/art are pretty much the exact same ones we use with any other kind of martyrdom. And, in a sad and very, very humbling way, a queer film schooled us in terms of how we can do it better.
By the way, the stuff you write about Maria Goretti is absolutely incredible.
Josh, thank you for the thoughtful comment and for getting me started thinking about all of this in the first place. I certainly didn’t mean to sound like a proponent of state-sponsored religion. It’s just that, as an American surrounded by other Americans, I tend to see “The Separation of Church and State” presented as an inviolable holy doctrine that is used like a weapon to strip prayer from public schools and enforce secularism wherever possible. In this sense, it is a prejudice. But I completely agree that the official entanglement of the State with a particular religion has been historically the cause of way too much suffering and awfulness, and I certainly don’t mean to advocate for a return to any of that. I only mean to point out that Christians are called to see God working through every form of government, no matter how awful, because even the oppressive Roman occupation became the instrument of His will.
I understand why you chose not to differentiate Christian martyrdom from political martyrdom in order to engage the broader framework of how martyrdom is portrayed in art. I haven’t seen Milk, but I appreciate your analysis, that Christians can learn from a nuanced presentation of a different kind of martyr how to best portray our own. It’s an excellent point. But I also think Christians need to start insisting on the difference between Christian martyrdom and political martyrdom, for the sake of our own understanding as well as the world’s. There is entirely too much of both kinds of martyrdom going on in the world these days, and if Christians do not insist on the distinction, it will be lost.
I’ve never been quite sure what to make of the wrong place/ wrong time martyrs. In a sense, every martyrdom happens that way. Maria Goretti certainly didn’t ask to be knifed to death. Joan of Arc did everything she could, short of betraying her conscience, not to be burned. But they also had time to accept what was happening and make a decision not to betray their faith in order to stop it. To me, that is what separates a Christian martyr from a mere victim. God might not use the same definition… I honestly don’t know. But Jesus taught that the greatest love was to “lay down” one’s life, which to me implies the possibility of NOT laying it down must be available. It’s a question I struggle with.
I love having all of these different perspectives on the DT blog, too. It’s very eye-opening, and humbling to be a part of. A lot of the things people write about here (including you) teach me things I never would have learned about any other way.
I only just saw your comments over on the other post that went into a very lengthy definition of “martyr.” Language really is a lousy tool for communication, isn’t it? Sign me up for the plane trip to wherever for tea and cultural dialogue!
Oh man, let’s apply for every grant we can to get that plane cash. Or get insanely rich and start giving out said gratuitous grants. Does anyone you know know how to rob banks?
For some reason I don’t have the ability to edit my initial comment – there are glaring punctuation errors and it’s very nearly killing me.
Mea culpa, mea culpa.
Ha! I know that feeling very well. You rob the bank and I’ll fly to Russia. It’s a lifelong dream of mine, anyway…
With the full understanding that reports are still coming in, and much of what we think we know tonight may be disproven by the morning, I have four thoughts at the close of this dark day.