Christianity is neither a faith untried by persecution nor is it unaware of the meaning of that word. And it has been said many times that the Church is built upon the blood of the martyrs. This is, in its own way, certainly and profoundly true.
Of course, saying this is not meant to detract from the higher truth
that the Church is really founded upon the Blood of Christ. Martyrdom is
really a share in Christ’s sacrificial love and it is Christ, not the
martyrs, who is the true bedrock of the Church. But if Jesus is the
foundation, it is the martyrs who are the bricks of the building.
Persecution has really been a fact of life for the Church from the beginning. If one were to skip the first several chapters of Eusebius’s History of the Church, the first properly researched history of Christianity, one would find the most remarkable accounts of persecution and the shining witness of the martyrs. Eusebius was a Bishop from Palestine who also attended the Council of Nicea convened by the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine. He had lived through the last of the ten general persecutions of the Church and had personally known both martyrs and confessors of the Faith. Among the fascinating accounts he records are the witness of Basilides, a pagan Roman Centurion, and Potamiana, a beautiful young woman at Alexandria, who gave their lives together for faith in Christ. It is well worth looking up in the easily-findable Penguin paperback edition.
Seventeen hundred years after the persecutions of the Roman Empire, Christianity is still regularly persecuted. It seems this is the way it will be until the end of time, and that is probably a good thing. Christians have never seemed to do very well at being Christian when they’re too comfortable. However, the persecutions also come in many shapes and forms and not only clothed in the garb of violence and brutality.
In modern society, persecution comes more normally in art, in literature, from the intelligentsia (and the pseudo intelligentsia, who want to be intellectuals, or believe that they are), from the media, from peer pressure, from the lynch mob of public opinion, even from the courts. Usually it comes in the form of open insult and misrepresentation of what Christianity is or believes, and especially in the form of constant marginalisation and public ridicule, aimed especially at the young. Think of Hollywood. This general cultural form of persecution is one which seems increasingly characteristic of the last several decades of life in developed nations such as Australia, throughout Europe and the United States. It also appears to be a symptom of societies and cultures rejecting their Christian patrimony after first having forgotten it.
It is in this light that the words of the-then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his 1995 book-length interview with Peter Seewald, Salt of the Earth, appear luminously true. The supreme duty of a Christian in today’s world, the Cardinal said, is to be counter-cultural. One imagines he said this, in part, because in societies such as ours it is the very culture which has become the main form of persecution.
However, the general shape of persecution morphs itself according to the circumstances that suit its own purposes. In many countries today, Christians are still persecuted in the oldfashioned way with violence, brutality, rape and torture among the usual tools of those who wish to destroy Christianity or Christians. In North Korea, where an underground Church is still believed by some observers to exist in some shape or form (but what that is, no-one knows), Christians are especially earmarked for the worst and most atrocious forms of violence. In the North Korean Gulag, run by the insane and psychotic leaders of that country, Christians are regularly led to the barbed wire fence of labour camps and then shot in the back. Camp guards receive higher than normal bounties for ‘preventing’ Christians from escaping. But shooting is relatively merciful. Christians in the slave labour camps of Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea are also tortured and beaten to death regularly, and often for sport.
In several states of India, Christians regularly suffer the persecution of mob violence at the hands of Hindus or Muslims. If they are unfortunate enough to live in an area where the legal system is controlled by one or other of these groups, they effectively have no recourse to justice or law because of factors such as endemic local corruption which mean that, for Christians, there is no law. In some parts of India, when mobs go on the rampage over insults or transgressions, real or imagined, Christians die by the hundreds or the thousands; children, women, fathers, mothers are beaten, burnt or hacked to death.
Pakistan, an official Muslim state, also often treats Christians with brutality and regularly threatens them with imprisonment or execution over spurious claims of insulting the Prophet or the Koran in cases which foreign journalists often note are more likely to represent trumped up charges brought as a way of settling vendettas. This surfaces far less in the media which is focused on the ongoing war in next-door Afghanistan. As in many other places, Christians in Pakistan usually have no law that can be relied upon. One could mention Saudi Arabia as well.
The above are just a few shorthand summaries of numerous examples of the suffering in blood that our brothers and sisters in Christ undergo because they believe the words Jesus spoke. In Australia, we have such a comfortable existence and rarely hear such things as prayers of the faithful praying for those who share our faith but whose daily reality is of suffering atrocities for believing in Christ. One wonders how many of us personally pray for these members of the Body of Christ, regardless of denomination. One suspects too few of us do. It is not enough to simply say ‘I’ll get round to it one of these days.’ We wouldn’t say that if the individual concerned was our own brother or sister. And here’s the thing: those who are persecuted for Christ really are our family, our brother, our sister.