Catherine Pepinster Author Catherine Pepinster says new persecutions and old saints means martyrs still matter, writes Ruadhán Jones
The concept of martyrdom has a rich heritage in the Christian tradition, and an equally impressive list of martyred saints. As Christ gave his life on the Cross for all humanity, martyrs from Roman times to today have lived his call to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
But in recent years, the term has taken on a sinister connotation, explains Catherine Pepinster, formerly editor of The Tablet and now author of the book Martyrdom: Why martyrs still matter.
“I think in some ways there’s a need to reclaim martyrdom because I felt that the term has become somewhat hijacked in recent years,” she tells me. “There are certain terrorists who blow people up and kill themselves with people they targeted – suicide bombers, etc. – who let it be known to the people left behind that they viewed themselves as martyrs.
“It seemed to me that martyrdom was getting a bad press – I wanted to reclaim the word, as people who did very remarkable things. They weren’t about killing other people but were willing to sacrifice their own lives.”
In her book, Ms Pepinster seeks to reclaim martyrdom, retracing the development of the concept over the last two millennia and finally explaining why martyrs matter today.
Understanding martyrdom
In the modern West, martyrdom and martyrs seem a distant and alien thing. The word martyr has taken on a popular resonance which has robbed it of its original force. In newspapers and in conversations, being “a martyr for something” is almost a derisive phrase. Worse still, as Ms Pepinster points out, the term has been co-opted by terrorists. In order to explain why martyrs still matter, then, Ms Pepinster sees tracing the history of the term as vital.
Christian martyrdom is nothing like the modern popular understanding, Ms Pepinster argues.
“There’s no place in our pantheon for people who kill others – there are people today who would see themselves in that way,” she says. “If they die alongside others, they see themselves as martyrs, they have no interest in the innocent people that they kill. They are not people who should be using the term martyr for their own behaviour.”
She illustrates her point with an example from the Catholic faith: Guy Fawkes, famous for a failed plot to blow up the English parliament.
“He attempted to carry out that act because he was Catholic, but there was no way that the Catholic Church would see Guy Fawkes as a martyr,” Ms Pepinster says, “even though he was executed for what he did and what he did was rooted in his views as a Catholic… But that man is not a martyr, that man was not seeking self-sacrifice.”
Christian martyrdom
What then is the key to understanding Christian martyrdom? In order to explain it, Ms Pepinster returns to the past and the beginnings of the Church. From the early days, martyrs were an integral part of the Christian world. Martyrs such as Sts Peter and Paul or Perpetua and Felicity were upheld as great Christians for the sacrifices they made in the name of Christ.
For Christians, martyrdom is about self-sacrifice, giving one’s life for Christ and the Christian community”
The centrality of martyrs was such that “churches were linked to places of martyrdom and relics of martyrs… form part of the church”, Ms Pepinster explains. Martyrdom’s importance was “largely due to Christianity’s origins, that Christ himself died on a cross, sacrificed himself. And so this idea of that form of sacrifice – sacrificing your life – was a very dynamic thing in Christianity, right at the heart of it. From its early days, that idea of dying like Christ, of dying for Christ took off in Christianity.”
For Christians, martyrdom is about self-sacrifice, giving one’s life for Christ and the Christian community. Christians like Sts Perpetua and Felicity were remembered as great heroes not so much for their lives as for their deaths. In the martyr, death became a sign of life.
From the very start, then, Christian martyrdom embodied a subversive conception of what it means to win and to lose. This is exemplified perfectly in the history of the colosseum, the crucible in which a number of the Roman martyrs met their deaths. Fed to the lions or gored by bears, their deaths were a form of entertainment.
Intended, though it was, to be a degrading punishment, instead it became a site of valour. Later, it became a site of worship! In the 1740s, Pope Benedict XIV pronounced the Colosseum sacred ground, dedicated to the Passion of Christ, and a year later he erected a plaque to replace text painted on the walls many years earlier.
Writing in Martyrdom, Ms Pepinster says: “The ancient killing ground has become a symbol of life and mercy, its contemporary purpose now dramatically linked to the martyrs who went to their deaths, defying their executioners and looking to another form of life as their destiny.”
“I think what happened at the colosseum is very striking,” Ms Pepinster says to me. “The place was a kind of bloodbath, but it becomes a symbol of something else much more life-affirming.”
Development
Since these early days, the concept of martyrdom has seen a number of changes. The early definition, and one which has remained integral to the concept, was that one died as a result of hatred of the faith. Later, during the Reformation, martyrs such as Thomas More and Thomas Beckett were martyred not so much for their commitment to The Christ, as for their commitment to the Church, Ms Pepinster argues in Martyrdom.
By the 20th century, further new understandings of martyrdom were being proposed by theologians such as Karl Rahner:
“In the 20th century, the ideas grew that people should be honoured for the sacrifice of their lives, weren’t necessarily people who died for hatred of the Faith but because of some of the values of Christianity,” Ms Pepinster says.
“So you get the idea of being a martyr for justice, for example and in saying that I’m thinking of someone like Oscar Romero who died not so much because the people who killed him hated Christianity – they probably thought of themselves as Christians as well – but they hated his stand for the most vulnerable in society.”
Another martyr to whom Ms Pepinster devotes a good deal of time in her book was St Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish martyr. St Kolbe’s canonisation was controversial. He gave up his life to save a fellow prisoner in the concentration camp, but the question remained, did he die for the faith or was it an act of charity?
“For somebody like Maximillian Kolbe in Poland he didn’t die because his faith was loathed or hated, he died because he offered to sacrifice his own life in place of somebody else who was going to be executed in the concentration camp and he was seen by Paul VI and John Paul II as a martyr of charity, a martyr of love. He died for this loving gesture,” is Ms Pepinster’s conclusion.
Modern martyrs – increased persecution
Martyrs for Christ; martyrs for the Church; martyrs for justice; martyrs for charity. This serves as a rough outline of our developing understanding of martyrdom up until the end of the 20th Century. But today, Ms Pepinster asserts, “martyrdom has again become as much about hatred of the Faith as it was in the past. Recent years have seen a dramatic upsurge in the numbers of Christians killed because of their beliefs by those who do not share them”.
One region in which the title of martyr is applicable to all faiths is China, where persecution does not discriminate between faiths”
In Martyrdom, Ms Pepinster summarises the increasing, deliberate persecution of Christians around the world: in the Middle East; in North Africa; in China and elsewhere. Christians all over the world “have died because their faith has been loathed”.
“It has been hated as they say,” Ms Pepinster says. “We see that in France with the priest I write about, Jacques Hamel, who was slaughtered on his own altar by an Islamist terrorist. And now today this terrible attack in the basilica in Nice of people in the basilica praying, has been attacked and have lost their lives. I’m not saying that somebody went in their saying ‘I loathe Christianity’, or ‘I loathe Catholicism’, but there is a kind of hatred of certain values that Islamists are opposing with these very violent acts.”
One region in which the title of martyr is applicable to all faiths is China, where persecution does not discriminate between faiths. Ms Pepinster highlights the treatment of the Uighur Muslims as an example of this. Equally, however, persecuted Christians and martyrs continue in the tradition of martyrs resisting the imposition of totalitarian regimes.
“This conflict between the Faith and the state comes up a lot of the history of martyrdom,” she says. “It’s striking that many Christians died who were not prepared to accept or submit to totalitarian regimes. For some of those it meant not submitting to the Nazi regime and others to Communism. They believed in freedom and speaking out against those regimes.
“Just mentioning people I’ve researched when I was working on the book, Christian pastors who were told by the Chinese, they need to put CCTV in their churches,” Ms Pepinster continues. “In other words, the state wants to look at footage of who’s attending services and if they say no, they get arrested and taken away – they disappear.
“There are some terrible things happening in China. China has made accommodation with certain religions, there’s the Protestant Patriotic Church and there’s a Catholic patriotic Church – but you really do have to toe the line there. It’s a very difficult path to tread.
“I think that shows that unfortunately martyrdom and persecution are not things we’ve left behind us in the past, they’re very much relevant today.”
Why martyrdom matters
“Faith frequently involves sacrifice and courage of the highest order, and human beings’ capacity for love is tragically matched by their capacity for wickedness, even now, in the twenty-first century,” Ms Pepinster writes in Martyrdom. The increasing persecution of Christians is one of the reasons why Ms Pepinster believes martyrs and martyrdom is still so important today.
But it is not the only reason. Even if it were the case that only a handful of martyrs were being made, their example would still be vitally important.
“I also think martyrdom still matters because martyrs are people of integrity,” Ms Pepinster says. “They’re people of conscience, they stand up for what they believe in. I think that’s a very important thing for the rest of us to have people to admire. People who show us how to live. That’s why I think these people matter.”
Ms Pepinster strives to emphasise the impact of their sacrifice on their faith communities, and even on other faiths. Calling to mind the depiction of martyrs in great artworks such as St Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, she points out that they are often depicted as solitary individuals.
“They’re play- or scriptwriters, they’re looking for heroes,” she explains. “I think how somebody like Thomas More regarded himself is that in being a martyr, there’s not some individual, they are part of a collective body of faith. They are – they’re part of a community of believers and so what they do is not just about them it’s about their fellow believers as well and what they all believe in.”
Ecumenism
One of the final aspects of martyrdom Ms Pepinster wants to convey – one related to martyrs and communities – is the increasingly ecumenical nature of martyrdom.
Fortunately Christian denominations have come together much more, there’s much more of a connection between the different faiths”
Martyrdom isn’t something that is owned by the Catholic Church,” Ms Pepinster says. “There are other people who have died for their faith – Martin Luther King I think is a typical example of that. He belonged to a black, African American church. Now there are people who will argue that King was a political leader in America and people who wanted him dead for that reason.
“But it was evident to me in that case, from reading his speeches, that King rooted his fight for justice, his fight for Black African Americans to have more rights and to be respected and given dignity. All that came from King’s Christian belief.
“The Catholic Church doesn’t have ownership of martyrdom by any means and tragically at the time of the Reformation there were both Catholics and Protestants who died genuinely believing in their version of the Christian faith.
“Fortunately Christian denominations have come together much more, there’s much more of a connection between the different faiths. It’s important that we all recognise what happened and live with one another.”
Inspiration
The very ordinariness of the martyrs – people who were otherwise everyday members of society – can serve as an inspiration to those around them. In a world which often wants to abolish the notion of self-sacrifice, the martyrs symbolise a call to communities to unite and confront evil.
“I think one of the things that really comes through about the people I wrote about, whether it be people like [Polish martyr] Fr Jerzy Popiełuszko, who was alive in the late 1980s, or St Margaret Clitherow who was a butcher’s wife in the 17th century, that martyrs were often very ordinary people who find the courage to do something that’s really quite extraordinary,” Ms Pepinster says.
“When you’re faced with it, most of us – we have a survival instinct that kick in, the thought of dying, the thought of paying that kind of sacrifice is something that we need to overcome. These people were willing to pay that price.”
Martyrdom: Why martyrs still matter Catherine Pepinster is available in hardback and paperback nationally and online.
