The meaning of a martyrdom

But there is clearly a point of tension here, a problem synthesizing old and new. An old-fashioned Catholic martyrdom may be possible in a multicultural, late-modern society. But there is still a sense in which it is not supposed to happen here.

Yes, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” — but that was in the premodern, not-yet-disenchanted world, in which superstition bred zealotry and privation made every civilizational encounter zero-sum. Now we have supposedly advanced beyond those divisions, and if violence or fanaticism still intrudes it’s because of technical and political failures — insufficient education, the misallocation of resources, insufficient dialogue, ideological manipulation — rather than deep theological divides. (Thus the pope’s insistence that the present jihadist wave has economic motivations but not genuinely religious ones.)

Such is the implicit perspective of post-Vatican II Catholicism — the church in which both Pope Francis and the murdered Father Hamel came of age. It assumes that liberal modernity represents a permanent change in human affairs, a kind of “coming of age” in which religion must come of age as well — putting away exclusivist ideas in order to flourish in community with all mankind. To talk too noisily about martyrdom in this context is to mistake today for yesterday, to risk a slippage back into the fruitless religious struggles of the past.