A Few Last Words

On April 6, 1252, two Dominican friars hurried along a deserted road. They were in hostile territory, populated by religious extremists who wanted them dead because of their success in convincing those under the sway of the extremists’ heresy to return to Catholic orthodoxy. Despite their precautions, the two were ambushed by hired assassins. One of the two, named Peter, died on the spot, but not before managing to write the opening line of the Apostles’ Creed in his own blood; his companion, named Dominic, died of his injuries a few days after the attack.

Less than a year later, St. Peter of Verona, also known as St. Peter Martyr, was canonized in the fastest papal canonization in the history of papal canonizations. One of the assassins, Carino Pietro of Balsamo, repented, confessed, and became a lay Dominican brother; eventually he was beatified. And what about Peter’s faithful companion, Dominic? So far as I know, his sacrifice has been largely forgotten, except in the context of recounting St. Peter’s martyrdom—perhaps because Friar Dominic did not die immediately and was unable to scrawl out the Credo in blood.

The story of Peter of Verona is a classic tale of martyrdom, containing all of the elements Catholics commonly attribute to the martyrs: We have the renowned holiness of the martyr (including miracles attributed to him during his own lifetime, not just after death); we have the clear hatred of the faith (Latin, odium fidei) of those who contracted with the hitmen to murder the martyr (although the hitmen’s motive may merely have been personal gain); we have the explicit witness to the faith by St. Peter (can’t get much clearer than sacred words written in your own blood).

Such a serendipitous confluence of all necessary factors for an indisputable Christian martyrdom may be one reason St. Peter was able to be canonized so quickly. Not all saints venerated as martyrs, either officially or unofficially, have had such a providential set of circumstances indisputably pointing to their glorious witness to Christ to the point of death.

The Maid of Orléans

St. Joan of Arc is often considered in the popular imagination to have been a martyr, mostly given the horrific nature of her death—burning at the stake after a sham trial that found her guilty of heresy. The trial included questions that clearly put Joan’s faith to the test:

The transcript’s most famous exchange is an exercise in subtlety. “Asked if she knew she was in God’s grace, she answered: ‘If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.‘” The question is a scholarly trap. Church doctrine held that no one could be certain of being in God’s grace. If she had answered yes, then she would have been charged with heresy. If she had answered no, then she would have confessed her own guilt. Notary Boisguillaume later testified that at the moment the court heard this reply, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.”

Nonetheless, despite her later rehabilitation and eventual canonization, St. Joan has never been officially enrolled as a recognized martyr, but is instead venerated by the Church as a virgin. One reason might be that Joan was tried by Church officials who allowed their strings to be pulled by their English puppetmasters, and therefore it cannot be proven that she died in odium fidei.

A Martyr for Purity

At the beginning of the twentieth century, we find St. Maria Goretti, the twelve-year-old girl who fought off rape by a neighbor’s son, Alessandro Serenelli. During the course of the attack, she was stabbed over a dozen times and died the next day in agony. Her brave defense of her chastity and her final words of forgiveness for her attacker, including her desire to meet her attacker in heaven, captured the popular imagination. Maria was beatified and canonized so quickly that her own mother was able to attend both liturgies, to date the only mother of a saint to witness her child’s canonization.

Surprisingly, given that the knife attack by Alessandro was perpetrated out of rage over Maria’s rebuff of his sexual advances and not out of clear odium fidei, St. Maria Goretti has been venerated as a martyr for sexual purity. At her canonization, Pope Pius XII stated:

Martyr on earth and angel in heaven, look down from your glory on this people, which loves you, which venerates, glorifies and exalts you. On your forehead you bear the full brilliant and victorious name of Christ. In your virginal countenance may be read the strength of your love and the constancy of your fidelity to your divine Spouse. As his bride espoused in blood, you have traced in yourself his own image.

Like Peter of Verona, Maria Goretti was granted the grace of living long enough and under the right conditions to make an overt witness to her faith. Where St. Peter used his final words to begin the Credo, St. Maria used hers to witness to the mercy and forgiveness of God.

The Prisoner of Auschwitz

Later in the twentieth century, we would see yet another form of martyrdom in St. Maximilian Kolbe, and this time an explicit debate over what constitutes Christian martyrdom.

Many of the ingredients for a classic case of martyrdom were present when St. Maximilian sacrificed his life to spare the life of another prisoner in Auschwitz. Like Peter of Verona, there was a renowned holiness during his lifetime, including a childhood vision of choosing martyrdom; there was clear hatred of Christians and other human persons by his killers (although the question of odium fidei was up in the air, as we shall see); and there was clear witness to the ideals of the faith, such as laying down one’s life for another.

Nonetheless, Maximilian was beatified as a confessor, not as a martyr, although he was given unofficial recognition as a “martyr of charity.” When it came time for his canonization though, Pope John Paul II simply chose to declare that St. Maximilian would henceforth be venerated as a martyr. By his own authority as pope, and overruling a commission established to study the matter, John Paul decided that “the systematic hatred of . . . humanity propagated by the Nazi regime was in itself inherently an act of hatred of religious [Catholic] faith, meaning Kolbe’s death equated to martyrdom.”

Shifting Realities

Against the backdrop of these controversies, Pope Benedict XVI, early in his pontificate, decided to issue some clarity. In a letter to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, Benedict both upheld the traditional elements necessary for the Church to recognize martyrdom and acknowledged shifting realities in a world in which anti-Christians have caught on to the fact that creating Christian martyrs is bad for their own interests:

The martyrs of the past and those of our time gave and give life (effusio sanguinis) [“shedding blood”] freely and consciously in a supreme act of love, witnessing to their faithfulness to Christ, to the gospel, and to the Church. If the motive that impels them to martyrdom remains unchanged, since Christ is their source and their model, then what has changed are the cultural contexts of martyrdom and the strategies ex parte persecutoris [“on the part of the persecutors”] that more and more seldom explicitly show their [the persecutors’] aversion to the Christian faith or to a form of conduct connected with the Christian virtues, but simulate different reasons, for example, of a political or social nature.

It is of course necessary to find irrefutable proof of readiness for martyrdom, such as the outpouring of blood and of its acceptance by the victim. It is likewise necessary, directly or indirectly but always in a morally certain way, to ascertain the odium fidei [“hatred of the faith”] of the persecutor. If this element [hatred of the faith] is lacking there would be no true martyrdom according to the perennial theological and juridical doctrine of the Church. . . . This is the constant teaching of the Church.

In other words, the persecutors may try to hide hatred of the Christian faith behind a smokescreen of other, non-religious agendas, but if that hatred for the faith can be determined to truly exist, then the Christian who willingly accepts death and witnesses to faith in Christ can indeed be declared a Christian martyr. That faith can be demonstrated either by explicit affirmation of the faith or by conduct that exemplifies the Christian virtues.

The Second Age of Martyrs

Which brings us finally to current events. For at least the last twenty years or so, Christians around the world have been targeted, persecuted, and executed because of their Christian faith. For an overview of this second age of Christian martyrs, I refer the interested reader to John L. Allen Jr.’s book, The Global War on Christians. As Allen put it in his introduction:

We’re not talking about a metaphorical “war on religion” in Europe and the United States, fought on symbolic terrain such as whether it’s okay to erect a nativity scene on the courthouse steps, but a rising tide of legal oppression, social harassment, and direct physical violence, with Christians as its leading victims. However counterintuitive it may seem in light of popular stereotypes of Christianity as a powerful and sometimes oppressive social force, Christians today indisputably are the most persecuted religious body on the planet, and too often their new martyrs suffer in silence (Introduction, p. 1).

Not only that, both the persecutors and mainstream commentators on the atrocities, who are more than willing to find excuses to turn away from the blood of the martyrs, are finding ways to obscure the reality of Christian martyrdom. Perhaps it should not surprise us that anti-Christian religious extremists cloak hatred for Christianity beneath contempt for Western nations. Perhaps it should not startle anyone that mainstream commentators readily agree that there is no religious persecution to see here—urging us to move along, move along.

But I think it should both shock and worry us when devout Christians join in the denial of Christian martyrdom—often enough on purely procedural grounds.

The Case of James Foley

As but one example of this phenomenon, let’s look at last month’s horrific execution of American journalist, James Foley, by the Islamic terror organization, ISIS. I have chosen to focus on James Foley’s story for two reasons: One, he was known to be a practicing Catholic; and, two, there is simply not room in a blog post to consider the stories of all who have died as he did.

We know something of how Mr. Foley must have acquitted himself in captivity because of a prior detainment in Libya that he underwent in 2011. After his release, he wrote to his alma mater, Marquette University:

I began to pray the rosary. It was what my mother and grandmother would have prayed. I said 10 Hail Marys between each Our Father. It took a long time, almost an hour to count 100 Hail Marys off on my knuckles. And it helped to keep my mind focused. [A colleague] Clare [detained with Foley] and I prayed together out loud. It felt energizing to speak our weaknesses and hopes together, as if in a conversation with God, rather than silently and alone.

We don’t have the same kind of firsthand information about his second capitivity, aside from a letter he asked a fellow inmate, about to be released, to commit to memory. All we really have is the terrible video of his execution in which Foley makes a statement, likely prepared for him, in which he purportedly blames the United States and his own brother (who is in the U.S. Air Force) for his death.

Following this unspeakable tragedy, Catholics took to the Internet to discuss whether or not James Foley met the requirements for Christian martyrdom. Like shopkeepers weighing product on scales, they balanced his known faith and prayer life against his final statement, and more often than not it was declared that he may have died bravely but did not meet the specifications for Christian martyrdom.

Not only was the days immediately following this horror not the time to be publicly debating such a thing; not only did none of these Catholics have the credentials to make such a determination—unlike Pope Francis, who is said to have privately expressed to Foley’s family his belief that Foley’s death was martyrdom—but the negative determinations seemed to focus solely on Foley’s last words.

The Theft of Final Words

I’ve wondered if the coercion Foley and his fellow captives have suffered that compelled them to follow the script given them to read was threats to harm those who remained in the terrorists’ control. Even if that was not the form of coercion used, it is possible these men may have thought that following the script could buy time for their fellow captives to possibly be rescued, even if their own deaths were now certain (which therefore could mean that they laid down their lives for their friends). And there have been hints of departures from the scripts. For example, I firmly believe James Foley’s use of the word beloved to describe his parents was his own insertion.

Nonetheless, it used to be that a condemned man was allowed to have his own last words. Even a monster like Henry VIII demanded only that St. Thomas More keep his remarks brief; he did not give More a script to follow before More’s beheading. These brutal, cowardly thugs of ISIS have stolen from these men not only their lives but also their final words.

In my opinion, we would do well to remember in such cases that we should not judge a person by the final words he is forced to speak at knifepoint—especially when, in not one of those words, does that person actually deny Christ. If we do, we only aid murderous anti-Christians, who will do whatever they can to accomplish their evil deeds while at the same time denying Christians the consolation and glory of the heroic witness of our martyrs.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins (Søren Kierkegaard).