Evangelization and Martyrdom

Getting our heads around the reality of sin, repentance, and relentless persecution.

Just after Thanksgiving I threw a temper-tantrum over decorating schemes.

My Advent Ideal: All the Purple.

My Daughters’ Advent Ideal: Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!

So two of the girls did as they do most Fridays after Thanksgiving, when I am safely lost in my post-festivities Introvert Stupor; they sneaked up into the attic, carried down decorations, and turned my living room red and green.

Naturally I did the mature thing. I sulked, I ranted, and then I waited until the elder had gone back to college and negotiated with her younger sister and we agreed: How about maroon?

That would have been problem solved, except that our dining table requires a tablecloth because it is not so much a table as a screwed-together frankentrain of tableness, and no vendors in my tablecloth price-point had maroon on offer.

I do, however, have the cutest, most persuasive teen-child in the known universe. As we sat on the floor of the discount store sorting through the mound of in-budget offerings (and maroon could not be had at any price), she deployed those puddling wells of deep brown eyes and said, “I really like this one.”

And I said: “Okay.”

And that is how I ended up with this for an Advent table:

In this picture:

• That field of bright red with the shiny gold Christmas Advent trees pretty much dominates the living-dining room.

• Yes, those snowflake coasters with red tea candles and the rustic (hush, we don’t call it other things we call it rustic) brass candlestick holding the gently-used Christ Candle in the center is this year's Advent wreath. We tend to wing it, and anyway I couldn’t find purple and pink candles this year, sorry.

• To the left are the chocolate coins St. Nicholas delivered to the family. He’s begun skipping the shoes and just leaving something on the table for everyone to share.

Not shown: Me, wondering how everything in my life led up to this day.

And that, readers, is the story of how we started commemorating the Martyrs of Advent.

---

I stared in awe of how my own children had led me to this point where I went to the store looking for an emergency re-purpling of my home and returned with more red not less, and I said to myself: Fine. If we are doing scarlet for Advent, then by gosh we’ll be honoring the martyrs.

Holier people at this point would be doing more, but in our case, it looks like this:

Standard info: Today’s date, saint or blessed’s name, death year, and then a location and, if needed, enough of a clue to help me remember who this person was. Red ink, of course.

What I do is every day (“every”) I go check Catholic Online’s list of saints for the month and click on names until I find a satisfactory martyr. I write it on a post-it note, stick it in the center of the blank picture frame there on the buffet holiday-display, and sometimes at dinner someone asks me about the day’s martyr.

So far this Advent we’ve thus honored:

November 27 - Bl. Matthias Kosaka & Matthias Nakano

November 28 - St. Andrew Trong

November 29 - Bl. Dionysius (Probably not who you’d guess, just FYI.)

November 30 - St. Andrew the Apostle (There are other choices, but it would just be wrong to not observe the day.)

December 1 - Bl. Anwarite Nangapeta

December 2 - Bl. Ivan Sleziuk

December 3 - St. Cassian of Tangier

December 4 - St. Theophanes

December 5 - St. Crispina (If you own the old four-volume Butler’s Lives, do read the acts of her matyrdom, or at least skim down to the last few lines and read those. Classic.)

December 6 - St. Peter Pascual

December 7 - St. Servus

December 8 - Break for the Immaculate Conception. Which fits with theme, if you think about it.

The remainder will be a surprise. For all of us.

---

So. The martyrs. I intentionally have tried to choose a variety of times and places and types of stories. And somewhere in this process I ran a few days behind and ended up doing three or four post-its in one sitting.

It was disturbing. Here I was looking at all these completely different times and places when just being Catholic was a death sentence. Any one martyr’s story you could write off as “maybe it was complicated.” But no. Time after time after time, innocent people are tortured and put to death.

And that, readers, leads to some important reminders for evangelists.

---

First: Sin is real. Whether we’re considering the victims of religious persecution or some of other horrific crime, there’s a tendency to ask whether the victim had some part in the conflict. This reaction is grounded in the reality that (a) sometimes human conflicts are complicated and (b) even if you are 100% innocent, it’s a good survival instinct to ask, “How can I avoid this happening to me?”

Sometimes you cannot avoid the evil. There are aggressors who will relent from their sins and those who will not.

This is reality.

---

Therefore, secondly, as evangelists we cannot always avoid persecution.

We should of course seek to proclaim the Gospel with peace and joy and compassion and mercy.

We should attempt to live our Christian life gently and kindly, whether we are in the majority or in the minority, in power or out.

We should certainly not mistake for “persecution” what is just ordinary people committing no sin at all, but they aren’t Christian so curiously they don’t practice the Christian faith.

But sometimes other people, whether they call themselves Christian or not, do sin. If the person is of goodwill, then pushing back and setting boundaries will lead to a mutually-acceptable compromise. People of goodwill, of any religion, desire to not harm each other.

Not everyone is of goodwill. Some people cannot bear for you to live according to your faith, even if you are quietly minding your own business and not bothering other people. Some people cannot bear for you to so much as speak about what you believe, or what you know to be right and wrong.

Those people will persecute anyone who pushes back at them — whether Christian or not.

Even though today’s topic is Christian martyrs, we Christians don’t actually have a monopoly on martyrdom. Plenty of non-Christians have suffered and died for standing up to bullies. Look around you, it’s happening even now.

---

I want to write about martyrdom, though, because if your life is like mine, you’ve been mostly living tablecloth Christianity. You do your best to pray, to worship, to live a moral life — but that Christian life is pretty darn comfortable. Yes, there are difficulties. No life is devoid of suffering. Much suffering has nothing, at all, to do with religion.

For many of us, though, coming from majority Christian-heritage nations, real religious persecution has not been a significant part of our own lives. Mostly we just struggle with bashfulness and uncertainty.

In that environment, we can start to believe that if we just do it right, we can proclaim the Gospel without stirring up animosity.

That is often true, but it is not always true. As Christians we are called to share the Good News in season and out. We need to wrap our heads around the reality that no matter how prudently we live, one day out-of-season might come.

---

This reality should fill us with awe and humility and prayers for final perseverance.

And on that last note, I want share these words of caution from Butler’s Lives about the Martyrs of Gorkum (July 9):

At this last moment, when already Father Pieck had been flung off the ladder, speaking words of encouragement, the courage of some failed them; it is a significant warning against judging the character of our neighbour or pretending to read his heart that, while a priest of blameless life recanted in a moment of weakness, the two who had been an occasion of scandal gave their lives without a tremor.

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Thurston & Attwater ed., 1956, Volume III p. 57. Source note: I’m unclear on whether Ave Maria Press still has this book in print. Looks like The St. Austin Press picked it up? If anyone in the readership knows the definitive answer, you can reply to any emailed newsletter from this substack in order to reach me, and I’ll update accordingly. Stick “Butler’s Lives” in the subject line so I can easily find your info.

(For the record, I’ve got nothing against the updated twelve-volume set — nor any particular opinion on it since I don’t own it — I just happen to enjoy the wry commentary in the 1956.)

Happy Advent!