What’s behind martyrs in the modern day
On the first page of her thought-provoking book, Martyrdom, Catherine Pepinster puts the cases of two men. One, Edmund Campion, 41, was considered an enemy of the state. “I am a Catholic man and a priest,” he said. “If you esteem my religion treason, then I am guilty.”
The other, Khalid Masood, 52, originally Adrian Russell Elms, told his children in his last days that he was “going to die fighting for God”. His life ended on March 22 2017, after he had killed five pedestrians and left others with “catastrophic injuries” by driving into them on Westminster Bridge, and stabbed a policeman to death outside Parliament.
You might find someone who would call either martyrdom, but it is hard to think anyone would call both martyrs. Is the notion of martyrdom empty or harmful, then? I think not, and nor does the author, for 13 years the editor of The Tablet, a Catholic weekly.
No Catholic would want Guy Fawkes considered a martyr, she says: “Christian ideas of martyrdom rule out death in battle and engagement in any form of aggression.” I don’t want to complicate things, but what of the example of some VC under fire in battle who nonetheless carries the wounded to safety?
“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” is a verse you may see on many a war memorial. But this quotation from the Gospel according to St John also heads an overlooked letter (a motu proprio) from 2016 by the present Pope, which Pepinster usefully draws attention to.
He declares that those who “voluntarily and freely offered their life for others and persevered with this determination unto death” are worthy of beatification. Their behaviour would entail “heroic acceptance propter caritatem of a certain and untimely death”.
Central to Catherine Pepinster’s book is the idea of Christian martyrdom, related to a kind of offering of one’s life to God that might never be taken up (as it were) in a bloody way. Every Christian is, I think, a martyr, because earthly life ends and that death, not welcome as a process, finally assimilates one’s life to that of Jesus.
It is a bodily thing, to do with God having taken on human flesh, but nothing to do with being a man rather than a woman, for one of the author’s chosen patterns of martyrdom is that of a young mother with a little child, St Perpetua, in 203. The account of her jailing and refusal to offer incense to the Emperor is “the sole surviving contemporaneous journal written by a woman of antiquity”.
Nearly 1,000 years later, St Thomas Becket’s martyrdom on December 29 1170 was hugely influential and a cause of pilgrimage. His final hour imitated the Passion of Jesus. Yet most of us are vague about the quarrel between Henry II and the Archbishop that led the four knights to kill him.
One modern parallel that Catherine Pepinster details,
having visited Poland, is that of Maximilian Kolbe, who in Auschwitz gave his life for Franciszek Gajowniczek (who survived to see Kolbe’s canonisation in 1982).
The other is the murder in 1984 of the Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko, aged 37, by secret police, who threw his bound and weighted body into a Vistula reservoir. I was slow to appreciate at the time that Archbishop Józef Glemp of Warsaw had refused to support Popieluszko, hoping to placate the Communist government.
In any case, martyrdom does not imply hatred of the people responsible for the death. The way that the world goes means that if Christians behave as Jesus exemplified, martyrdom is only too likely to come, as greater numbers than ever before have found.