ABSTRACT
Christian – why should he not be a martyr? Certainly he was prepared for his death. We should not simply conceive of passively tolerating oneʼs death only in the manner we are used to in the case of early Christian martyrs brought before a court and sentenced to death. There are quite different ways in which the passive but intentionally accepted toleration of death can occur. Contemporary persecutors of Christians do not give their victims any opportunity to confess their faith in the style of the earliest Christian centuries and to accept a death to which they are sentenced by a court. But nevertheless their death in these more anonymous forms of contemporary persecution of Christians can still be foreseen and accepted just as in the case of the old-style martyr. And indeed it can be foreseen and accepted as the consequence of an active struggle for justice and other Christian realities and values. What is in fact strange is that the Church has canonised Maximilian Kolbe as a confessor and not as a martyr.* An unprejudiced approach would pay more attention to how he behaved in the concentration camp and at his death than to his earlier life and would see him as a martyr of selfless Christian love. In any case the distinctions between a death for the sake of the faith in active struggle for this faith and death for the sake of the faith in passive endurance are too fleeting and too difficult to define for one to have to go to the trouble of maintaining a precise conceptual and verbal apartheid between these two kinds of death. Underlying both is ultimately the same explicit and decided acceptance of death for the same Christian reasons. In both cases death is the acceptance of the death of Christ, an acceptance which as the supreme act of love and fortitude puts the believer totally at Godʼs disposal, which represents the most radical unity in action of love and of enduring the ultimate helplessness in the face of manʼs incomprehensible yet effective rejection of Godʼs self-revealing love. In both cases death appears as quite simply the perfect and public manifestation of the real essence of Christian death. Even when death is suffered in the struggle for Christian belief it is the witness of faith based on absolute determination springing from the grace of God, a determination that seeks to integrate the whole of existence up to and beyond death, in the midst of the most profound inward and outward powerlessness that the person concerned accepts with patience. This applies, too, to death in battle because, just like the passive martyr in the traditional sense, this fighter experiences and endures the power of evil and his own powerlessness in the experience of his outward failure. In this plea for a certain broadening of the traditional concept of martyrdom we can appeal to Thomas Aquinas. Thomas says that someone is martyr through a death that is clearly related to Christ if he is defending society (res publica) against the attacks of its enemies who are trying to damage the
Christian faith and if in this defence he suffers death (In IV Sent. dist. 49 q. 5 a. 3 quaest. 2 ad 11). Damage to the Christian faith as is opposed by this kind of defender of society can of course be concerned with a single dimension of Christian belief, because otherwise even the passive toleration of death for the sake of a single demand of Christian faith or morals could not be termed martyrdom. In this way in his commentary on the Sentences Thomas is defending a more comprehensive concept of martyrdom such as is proposed here. A legitimate ʻpolitical theologyʼ, a theology of liberation, should concern itself with this enlargement of the concept. It has a very down-to-earth practical significance for a Christianity and a Church that mean to be aware of their responsibility for justice and peace in the world.
