A friend of mine recently spoke to a Religious who worked in the underground Church in China. This Religious says he has received reports of the total demoralisation of his confrères there at the agreement between the Holy See and Beijing. He was less dismayed before by the real prospect of martyrdom than he is now at the thought of how he is supposed to labour under bishops who were excommunicated, or are in the pay of the Communist Party.
Where there was an official and an underground Church in a region, the agreement will now automatically transfer legitimacy, power and members to the official Church. The communists know that this is a way to destroy the underground Church and replace it with something which is a lackey of this most oppressive regime. These communities feel as if they have been betrayed. The sadness my friend reports is immense. Rome simply has no understanding of the situation in China: that is the only explanation they can find to understand what has happened.
Actual martyrdom is, of course, the end of a process, not the process itself, which involves a long preparation of surrendering one’s will. It is not even really so much to do with being true to one’s principles– a “here I stand, I can do no other” moment – but much more the realisation that it is not I that live, but Christ who lives in me, and therefore to deny him would be a greater death than confessing him.
Only the wisdom which comes from Christ can discern aright and read the signs of the of the times, so that martyrdom is not about any powerful intellectual insight or combative temperament, but about love. You cannot read the signs of the times unless you love the One to whom all time belongs. Indeed, you can only read them if you have a great reverence for the past and what it teaches. It is the saints and particularly the martyrs who show us how to read our own times.
The rising number of Christians persecuted for their faith is surely the most significant sign calling us to understand the situation of the Church and the world in which we live. The wisdom of signing a concordat with a regime which, my friend tells me, is more centralised and brutal than Mao Zedong’s was because it has added the power of digital communication and surveillance to its arsenal of oppression, is something which we might debate from the point of view of pragmatism. In the end, the Church grows and is united not by concordats or realpolitik but by the blood of the martyrs.
Tertullian famously asserted that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. One of the most vivid illustrations of this is the execution of St Edmund Campion, who was hanged, drawn and quartered on December 1 1581. The young Henry Walpole was present that day, and was spattered with the saint’s blood. It inspired Walpole to leave England to study in Rome and from there he returned to the English mission in 1590, where he was arrested soon after landing at Flamborough. He was executed in 1595.
The persecution of Christians elsewhere in the world must be because God wants this age also to be metaphorically spattered with the blood of the martyrs. Like the blood with which the Israelites marked the lintels of their houses, the Church in the West needs to be saved from plagues of indifference, corruption and relativism and to recover a sense of wonder and awe at the gift of divine election.
We receive new life from blood in the most profound and literal sense when we celebrate the Mass and receive Jesus body, blood, soul and divinity; when we are present at the sacrifice which gives all martyrdom its meaning. The Eucharist must inspire us to recognise that we too must give something of our heart’s blood. This may not yet be in the actual event of physical martyrdom. It may be in more hidden and at times apparently meaningless or unnecessary sufferings, sacrifices and persecutions, many of which may come from a quarter we least expect.
But if our intention is the same – if it is to imitate the self-offering of Jesus for the love of his Father and the good of man – we can say with Edmund Campion: “Ye did not know how rare and precious goode it was to write those precious gifts in blood. So was the faith planted; so will it be restored.”
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