The Catholic Church began compiling
“martyrologies” -- lists of saints, typically martyrs --
during the first centuries after Constantine. In the pre-
Vatican II breviary, a reading from the Roman
Martyrology, or what we might call the Catholic Book
of Witnesses, was an integral part of the Office of
Prime, the “hour” recited after sunrise. The day’s date
was given, followed by a reading of the names of the
saints commemorated that day, with information about
each saint’s origin and place of death -- and, if the saint
were a martyr, the name of the persecutor, a description
of tortures endured, and the method of execution. It was
a bracing way to begin the working day and a reminder
of Tertullian’s maxim that the blood of martyrs is the
seed of the Church.
It is somewhat ironic that the loss of Prime from the
Liturgy of the Hours -- and thus the loss of a daily
liturgical reading from the Roman Martyrology --
coincided with the greatest century of persecution in
the history of the Church. It’s a point well-established
but little appreciated within American Catholicism: we
have been living, and we’re living now, in the greatest
era of persecution in Christian history. More Christians
died for the faith in the 20th-century than in the
previous 19 centuries of Christian history combined.
And while the character of the persecutors has changed,
from the lethal heyday of the 20th-century
totalitarianisms to the first decades of the 21st century,
the assault on the Christian faithful today is ongoing,
extensive, and heart-rending.
Solidarity with the persecuted
Church is an obligation of Christian
faith. Reflecting on how well each
of us has lived that obligation is a
worthy point on which to examine
one’s conscience during Lent. And
that brings me to a suggestion:
Revive the ancient tradition of daily
readings from the Roman
Martyrology this coming Lent by
spending 10 minutes a day reading
John Allen’s new book,
The Global
War on Christians: Dispatches from
the Front Lines of Anti-Christian
Persecution
(Image).
The longtime Vatican correspondent for the
National
Catholic Reporter
and
CNN
’s senior Vatican analyst,
Allen has recently moved to the
Boston Globe
as
associate editor, where he (and we) will see if talent and
resources can combine to deepen a mainstream media
outlet’s coverage of all things Catholic, both in print
and on the Web. Meanwhile, Allen will continue the
Roman work that has made him the best Anglophone
Vatican reporter ever -- work that has given him a
unique perspective on the world Church, and indeed on
world Christianity. His extensive experience across the
globe, and his contacts with everyone who’s anyone in
the field of international religious freedom issues,
makes him an ideal witness to what he calls, without
exaggeration, a global war on Christian believers.
That witness includes, in his book, a continent-by-
continent overview of anti-Christian persecution, a
debunking of various myths about anti-Christian
persecution, and some counsel on what can be done to
support those who are literally putting their lives at risk
for love of the Lord and the Gospel. Most poignant for
Lenten reading, of course, are those parts of Allen’s
book that truly are a contemporary martyrology: his
telling of the stories of such martyrs of our time as
Shabhaz Bhatti of Pakistan, Ashur Yakub Issa of Iraq,
the Tibhirine monks of Algeria, and the pastors and
church elders who were crushed to death by a bulldozer
in front of their North Korean place of worship.
In pondering these cases, and the hundreds more
that Allen cites, one gets a new understanding of
“hatred of the faith,” that ancient odium fidei that
identified the deaths of martyrs. Odium fidei expresses
itself in many way, of course, not all of them lethal.
Allen’s close focus on those who really are at risk of
life and limb for the faith is a useful reminder that,
whatever the contempt orthodox Christians are called
to suffer today for fidelity to biblical truth in the
comfortable, decadent, and increasingly intolerant
West, others are being called to suffer far more. Their
witness should strengthen ours.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington,
D.C.
The
Catholic
Difference
Weigel
Rediscovering the Martyrology
The first reading for Mass on
the first Sunday of Lent this year,
taken from Genesis 3, deals with the
creation of human beings and their
subsequent fall from friendship with
God. Like a baseball coach who
compels even his veterans to re-
learn the basics of the game every
spring, the Church invites us, during
the spring training of Lent, to re-
visit the spiritual fundamentals. And
they are on no clearer display than
in this great archetypal story.
We hear that “The Lord God formed man out of the
clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath
of life.” The God of the Bible never despises matter,
for he created it, and everything that he made is good.
Our bodies are indeed made from the earth, from the
lowly stuff of atoms, molecules, and minerals. It is of
singular importance to realize that sin is not a function
of matter, not the consequence of our embodied nature.
God exults in our physicality, and so should we. But
we are more than mere matter, for God blew into us a
life akin to his own and ordered to him: minds that seek
absolute truth, and wills that desire goodness itself, and
souls that will not rest until they come into the presence
of the fullness of beauty. The tragedy of the secularist
ideology is that it denies this properly spiritual dimen-
sion of human existence, reducing everything in us to
matter alone and construing the deepest aspirations of
the heart as psychological quirks or wish-fulfilling de-
lusions. Thomas Aquinas said that the human being is a
sort of microcosm, for he contains within himself both
the physical and the spiritual. To know and honor both
dimensions of our humanity is the path of joyful inte-
gration; to overstress one or the other is, concomitantly,
a principle source of mischief.
The book of Genesis tells us that God placed his
human creatures in the midst of a garden and gave them
free rein to eat of practically all of the trees found there.
Unlike the gods of classical mythology, the God of the
Bible is not in a rivalrous relationship to human beings.
On the contrary, his glory is that we be fully alive, for
he made us solely for the purpose of sharing his joy
with us. This is why the Church Fathers consistently
interpreted the trees in the Garden as evocative of phi-
losophy, science, politics, art, stimulating conversation,
friendship, sexuality -- all the things that make human
life rich and full. And it is furthermore why puritanical
fussiness about pleasures both intellectual and sensual
is simply not Biblical.
The original couple was told to refrain from eating
the fruit of only one tree -- and thereupon hangs a rather
important tale. The tree in question is identified as the
tree of “the knowledge of good and evil,” which is to
say, a form of knowing that is the unique prerogative
of God. Since God is himself the unconditioned good,
he alone is the criterion of what is morally right and
wrong. According to the semeiotics of this story, there-
fore, the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree is the
act of arrogating to oneself what belongs in a privileged
way to God. It is to make of the human will itself the
criterion of good and evil, and from this subtle move,
on the Biblical reading, misery has followed as surely
as night follows the day.
Notice how wickedly and cunningly the serpent
tempted Eve: “God knows well that the moment you
eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like
gods who know what is good and what is evil.” The
basic sin, the original sin, is precisely this self-deifi-
cation, this apotheosizing of the will. Lest you think
all of this is just abstract theological musing, remem-
ber the 1992 Supreme Court decision in the matter of
Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Writing for the majority
in that case, Justice Kennedy opined that “at the heart
of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of
existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery
of human life.” Frankly, I can’t imagine a more perfect
description of what it means to grasp at the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. If Justice Kennedy is right,
individual freedom completely trumps objective value
and becomes the indisputable criterion of right and
wrong. And if the book of Genesis is right, such a move
is the elemental dysfunction, the primordial mistake,
the original calamity. Of course, the Supreme Court
simply gave formal expression to what is generally
See father barron, page 8
What is our fundamental problem?
Word on
Fire
Fr. Barron
6
Gulf Pine Catholic
•
March 28, 2014
