Monday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time
“They learned obedience from what they had suffered…” Hebrews 5:10
Today we commemorate three martyrs: Fabian (250 CE), Sebastian (300 CE), and Martin Luther King (1968 CE). Fabian & Sebastian were martyred only 50 years apart. King’s death 1,600 years later reveals that the age of the martyrs will not end until the Lord Jesus himself returns in glory.
This week features several who won the blessed palm branch. Agnes is tomorrow and Vincent is on Thursday. Saturday we celebrate the conversion of St. Paul, who was beheaded under Nero. This third week of January annually flows red with the blood of the martyrs.
In my childhood the dedicated Ursuline sisters regaled us with tales of the martyrs. One sister took it to extremes, bringing complaints from parents. She took fourth graders on a bit of a field trip to show them the particular outside wall of the school building where she imagined that she would be nailed by the communists when they ultimately invaded. Well intentioned, perhaps, but over the top for 9-year-olds. Sister was reassigned to motherhouse duties shortly thereafter.
Here in Dayton we recall martyr Dorothy Stang, SNDdeN. Sister Dorothy spent nearly four decades defending the rights of the poor while working to save the rainforest from powerful landowners bent on destroying it. On February 12, 2005, a few days after meeting with the country's human rights officials about threats to local farmers from loggers and landowners, she was shot by hired gunmen and left to die on a muddy country road.
What I found most intriguing about the martyrs as a kid was that they got the ultimate “get out of jail free card.” No purgatory for them, no matter their sins. Killed for Christ, they shot straight into heaven. “Now that’s the way to do it,” my naive self reasoned all those years ago. But in our earliest centuries the teaching church warned against actively seeking martyrdom, while at the same time making it clear that denying the faith only one time was the limit. No second chances for apostasy after that. After that, you’re on your own baby!
Still, ours is a faith of second chances. And third and fourth and fifth. Persecution in our culture and living the faith today is perhaps more complicated and at the same time more subtle. The arena filled with wild beasts no longer awaits us but the arena of everyday life does.
The palm branch was awarded to those who persevered in the purest sense of the word, for in Greek martyr translates to witness. Living the faith in the trenches of twenty-first century life, in a world that views us as foolish and losers, likewise requires resolve and courage.
As witnesses we remain and as witnesses we must always be.
—Timothy J. Cronin