Martyrdom and the modern church
In the days since Father Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old French priest, was slaughtered at the altar by two jihadis, his murder has become a contested symbol in his country, continent and church. To many conservative Catholics, Hamel is an archetypal Christian martyr — killed in a sacred space by men motivated by hatred of his faith, dying with the words, “Go away, Satan!” on his lips. To cultural conservatives more broadly, he’s a potent symbol of the jihadi threat to Europe’s peace.
But within Catholicism there is also strong resistance to this interpretation. It starts at the very top, with Pope Francis, who has deliberately steered clear of the language of martyrdom — first describing the priest’s murder as “absurd,” and then using one of his in-flight news conferences to suggest that the killers were no more religiously motivated than a random Catholic murderer in Italy.
Meanwhile, amid calls of “Santo subito!” — “Sainthood now!” — two of the pope’s biographers, Austen Ivereigh and (in these pages) Paul Vallely, wrote essays warning against doing anything that might inflame interreligious tensions or otherwise play into the Islamic State’s bloodied hands.
In this narrative, which is also the narrative that many secular Europeans reached for, Hamel’s murder belongs not to the old iconography of a church militant under siege by unbelievers, but to the modern vision of a multicultural, multireligious society threatened primarily by ignorance and fear. So the appropriate response is to reassert the importance of religious tolerance, to highlight commonalities between French Muslims and their Catholic neighbors, to create a broad category of “peaceful religion” and cast jihadis outside it.
These dueling interpretations need not be mutually exclusive. In theory, it should be possible (for a pope, especially!) to plainly call Father Hamel’s death a martyrdom while also rejecting sweeping narratives about Islamic violence or religious war.
But there is clearly a point of tension here, a problem synthesizing old and new. An old-fashioned Catholic martyrdom may be possible in a multicultural, late-modern society. But there is still a sense in which it is not supposed to happen here.
Yes, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” — but that was in the premodern, not-yet-disenchanted world, in which superstition bred zealotry and privation made every civilizational encounter zero-sum. Now we have supposedly advanced beyond those divisions, and if violence or fanaticism still intrudes it’s because of technical and political failures — insufficient education, the misallocation of resources, insufficient dialogue, ideological manipulation — rather than deep theological divides. (Thus the pope’s insistence that the present jihadi wave has economic motivations but not genuinely religious ones.)
Such is the implicit perspective of post-Vatican II Catholicism — the church in which both Francis and the murdered Hamel came of age. It assumes that liberal modernity represents a permanent change in human affairs, a kind of “coming of age” in which religion must come of age as well — putting away exclusivist ideas in order to flourish in community with all mankind. To talk too noisily about martyrdom in this context is to mistake today for yesterday, to risk a slippage back into the fruitless religious struggles of the past.
But our today is not actually quite what 1960sera Catholicism imagined. The come-of-age church is, in the West, literally a dying church: As the French philosopher Pierre Manent noted, the scene of Hamel’s murder — “an almost empty church, two parishioners, three nuns, a very old priest” — vividly illustrates the condition of the faith in Western Europe.
The broader liberal order is also showing signs of strain. The European Union, a great dream when Hamel was ordained a priest in 1958, is now a creaking and unpopular bureaucracy, threatened by nationalism from within and struggling to assimilate immigrants from cultures that never made the liberal leap.
The Islam of many of these immigrants is likely to be Europe’s most potent religious force across the next generation, bringing with it an “Islamic exceptionalism” (to borrow the title of Shadi Hamid’s fine new book) that may not fit the existing secular-liberal experiment at all.
Meanwhile the French Catholic future seems like it may belong to a combination of African immigrants and Latin-Mass traditionalists — or else to a religious revival that would likely be nationalist, not liberal, with Joan of Arc as its model, not a modern Jesuit.
This future, God willing, will preserve the late-modern peace. But it promises something more complicated and more dangerous than the liberal imagination, secular and Catholic, envisioned 50 years ago.
Some of the nervousness about calling Hamel a holy martyr reflects the limits of that imagination. After all, it would have seemed all but impossible, in the bright optimism of the 1960s, that a young priest of the church of Vatican II should, in his old age, die a martyr’s death in the very heart of Europe.
But it wasn’t, and he did.
The European Union, a great dream when Hamel was ordained a priest in 1958, is now a creaking and unpopular bureaucracy, threatened by nationalism from within and struggling to assimilate immigrants from cultures that never made the liberal leap