Priests are martyred every day of the week. Why don’t we pay attention?
by Tim Stanley:
You hear it said that 2016 is an unusually crappy year. That’s Western privilege talking. Every year has been horrible for a long time in Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Sudan – the list is endless. It’s only in the West that a sense of vulnerability is new. And in many cases, we were never that secure anyway. We were just distracted.
As Damian Thompson writes, the murder of Christians in the Middle East is a regular occurrence. The slaughter of Fr Jacques Hamel, 85, probably made the headlines last week because he was killed in France. I don’t say that to downplay the horror. On the contrary. We each identify best with those who look the most familiar – and the idea of terrorists targeting the kind of church I regularly attend feels like an invasion of my own private temple.
That said, Christianity was made for this. It began with an act of self-sacrifice upon the cross. The word was spread through the example of slain evangelists – St Peter crucified upside down, at his own request, so that he wouldn’t imitate Jesus. It is a rare faith that rejects conquest by the sword not only as immoral but as a contradiction of the dictum that belief is a matter of conscience – that faith must be freely chosen. Ours is a very Jewish faith, a logical and intellectual faith that is routinely tested. The Israelites were stolen from their lands and left to wander the desert. The psalmist says: “Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord./ Lord, hear my voice./ Let your ears be attentive,/ to my cry for mercy.”
Christianity is a history of the rejection of violence, a progression towards peace. God told Abraham that it wasn’t necessary to sacrifice his son for him. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek. The Messiah’s death upon the cross is a sacrifice that washes our sins away, and the Lamb of God is offered in our stead. At the Catholic Eucharist, that sacrifice is re-enacted and the bread and wine are transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ (no wonder the Romans thought we were cannibals). Martyrdom means “to witness” and Jesus witnessed loneliness, pain and death. Christians who suffer thereafter are witnesses to the love of Jesus. Those who die because of their faith, such as Fr Hamel, are rewarded in Heaven.
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