Our age of martyrdom

Bl. Miguel Pro was but one of the thousands of martyrs who gave their lives for the faith in the twentieth century. Their stories are detailed in The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History by Dr. Robert Royal. In his newly released second volume, Royal details the stories of the martyrs of the twenty-first century. (Photo: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)

Robert Royal and I have been friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators for nigh on to four decades.

Dr. Royal is a gifted linguist, a serious Dante scholar, and a close student of modern Catholic intellectual life. For years now, he has edited The Catholic Thing, one of the few Catholic websites I unhesitatingly recommend. And on dozens of wonderful summer evenings, in the pre-9/11 days when Washington did not approximate an armed camp, we anchored the infield on the Ethics and Public Policy Center softball team, playing on the National Mall with the Washington Monument in center field.

To be sure, Bob Royal is a New York Yankees and New York Giants fan, which would not ordinarily endear him to me. But he earned a lifetime of tolerance when, within ten seconds of David Tyree’s miraculous “helmet catch” setting up the Giants’ win in Super Bowl XLII, he went full Elijah and sent me a text message reading, “There is a God in Israel!” 

In the run-up to the Great Jubilee of 2000, Pope John Paul II created a Commission on the New Martyrs, whose report suggested that more Christians had been killed in odium fidei (in hatred of the faith) in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen centuries of Christian history combined. Martyrdom, the pope knew, was not confined to the distant past and the Hollywood archives where films like The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators gather dust. Martyrs are all around us, today. A recognition of the martyrs of our time, John Paul hoped, would strengthen the faith of Catholics as we marked the two thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation.

Bob Royal made an outstanding contribution to the fulfillment of that hope with his book, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History, which was translated into several languages. There, readers not only met such famous figures as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St. Maximilian Kolbe, but also the martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, the martyrs who died during the communist subjugation of central and eastern Europe, the martyrs of Maoist China, and the martyrs of the Mexican Cristero uprising (including the noble underground Jesuit, Bl. Miguel Pro, who may have been the first martyr in history photographed at the moment of his death, when he shouted “Viva Cristo Rey!” as the firing squad’s bullets sped toward him). No continent, and no decade, was without its 20^th-century martyrs, and Dr. Royal’s book remains the gold standard for those who wish to learn, and learn from, that story of Christian heroism.

Now, Robert Royal continues his witness to the witnesses with The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century. Once again, he spans the globe, sketching the cruelties visited upon Christians in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and, yes, the West, where radical Islamists target Catholics and other Christians for no other reason than that they’re Christians. His nuanced chapter, “White (and Red) Martyrs in Red China,” should be required reading in the Vatican Secretariat of State when, it may be hoped, a root-and-branch re-appraisal of the last pontificate’s China policy is undertaken. Bob Royal is experienced enough and wise enough to know that there are no easy answers in China, where the border can be porous between the regime-approved Patriotic Catholic Association and the underground Church. But he also knows, as the Vatican diplomats should, that Xi Jinping is not interested in accommodating the Catholic Church, but rather in destroying it through a process of “Sinicization” that empties Catholic faith of its Christian content. Anyone who doubts that should consult the redoubtable Cardinal Joseph Zen — or ponder the witness of Jimmy Lai, who has now passed over 1,600 days in solitary confinement in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison.

The Virgin Mary’s Fiat — “Be it done unto me according to your word” — set the basic pattern of all Christian discipleship; the martyrs exemplify that pattern in its highest degree of nobility. For their self-sacrifice is the closest human beings can come to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, who, in obedience to the Father’s will, handed himself over to death and in doing so revealed the Resurrection — and the destiny for which God created us, which is eternal life within the light and love of the Trinity. For reminding us of this, Bob Royal has earned the gratitude of the world Church.

Even if he is a Yankees fan.