The horrific murder of Jews during the Mumbai Massacre illustrates the continuing problem of murderous anti-Semitism, but I think it necessary to also point out that day by day, around the world, Christians are suffering persecution for their faith:
Samuel Masih was a simple street cleaner. One day, while cleaning a garden in Lahore, the twenty-seven-year-old Pakistani Catholic was accused of deliberately piling garbage against the wall of a mosque. He was arrested and thrown in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured for his faith. While being treated for tuberculosis, which he contracted in prison, a police constable decided to earn a place in Janna’ (Paradise) by killing him with a brick-cutting hammer.
Thousands of miles away, on a beautiful mid-August day, thirty-two-year-old Fr. Jesus Adrian Sanchez was giving religious instruction at a school in the rural area of Chaparral (Tolima), Colombia. An armed man burst into the classroom, ordered him outside, and shot him dead.
Deep in the Brazilian rainforest, a seventy-three-year-old Sister of Notre Dame, Dorothy Stang, was used to living among people who wanted her dead. She had long been trying to protect peasant laborers from exploitation by logging firms and ranchers. One day, while walking to a meeting of poor farmers near the town of Anapu in the western Brazilian state of Parà, two armed men intercepted her on the path. She knew what they were there to do. Taking out her Bible, she began reading to them and, for a precious few minutes, they listened before opening fire. Sr. Stang was shot six times in the head, throat, and body.
These are only three of the more than 100 Catholics who bear the unique distinction of being the first martyrs of the twenty-first century.
According to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the official martyrology contains the names of 132 Catholics who have died for the faith since 2001. But this is not a complete list. Its 2005 report acknowledges that there are “many more possible ‘unknown soldiers of the faith’ in remote corners of the planet whose deaths may never be reported.”
Dying for Christ seems almost surreal to most Westerners. We live in a part of the world where Christianity rarely makes the news unless it is to be mocked or defamed. Otherwise, the media is strangely silent about modern Christian martyrdom. “Three things distinguish anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world,” said Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “First, it’s ugly. Second, it’s growing. And third, the mass media generally ignore or downplay its gravity.”
And that, also, doesn’t seem to count the large number of Protestant Christians who also suffer, and at times die, for their faith. While anti-Christians in the West concentrate on the crimes of Christians past (real and imagined), the fact that Christians are dying all the time merely for being Christian escapes notice. It is also, as noted above, something outside our frame of reference – we don’t know what to do with such information. Young liberals in the United States like to play at being rebels – tattoo’d and pierced and shouting obscenities, they think of themselves as being in the mold of Thomas Jefferson…the truth, of course, is that most of these youngsters would instantly kneel if someone really put them to the test of their convictions. A real rebel is someone who obeys the laws and is, indeed, a model citizen – but one who will not surrender on the crucial matters. For a martyr, you can take his money, take his property, take his physical freedom and degrade him in any manner you like – a true Christian will endure this with good cheer…but the moment you try to make a Christian abjure his faith, that is when the martyr kindly and politely and with love in his heart, refuses.
Fools in the west also like to think of Christians as being the weak – weak minded and weak willed people who use God as a crutch to mask their own failures and insecurities. The reality is that it is the non-believers who are weak – weak in mind and weak in will. Go tell the Christians of Darfur, Iraq, Pakistan, Vietnam, China, North Korea, etc that they are weak and you are strong, as you sit safe and secure in the United States.
In this Christmas season, we must keep in mind those among us who don’t break faith – be they the soldier on patrol in Afghanistan or the humble missionary bringing a bit of food to an unknown village in the backwaters of the world. It is these people who refuse to be broken and who refuse to follow the siren song of the modern world with its greed, cruelty, inanity and moral flabbiness who keep our society going. One missionary working among the poor of Liberia is worth 1,000 latte-sipping slackers coordinating the next anti-globalization protest in terms of what use they are to the world.
It is also important for those who would try to make Christmas non-Christian – those who war upon the deeply religious nature of Christmas – to understand what they are trifling with. You are not just messing with a holiday, but with the fundamental aspect of a faith which still commands enough love and loyalty to convince people that death is better than apostasy. We’re not mad that someone wants to tear down the Nativity scene – we’re mad that someone would have so little respect for those of faith that they’d gratuitously insult the faithful in such a manner.
A little respect goes a long way – and so the next time you run down your list of denigrations of Christianity, perhaps you could also run down the list of those who have died this year and in the past in service of God and their fellow man through their faith.
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