By Cardinal Gerhard L. Mueller
Note: We are pleased that Cardinal Mueller, former Prefect of the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has found time to offer us these reflections, delivered this week in Rome, on the profound theology of martyrdom and also its practical consequences. Frankly, we can only do things like this thanks to friends like him, and like you. Tomorrow we will pause our campaign for the weekend. One more reason to make your contribution to TCT: TODAY! – Robert Royal
Note: What follows is an abridged version of the Cardinal’s presentation in Rome this week at an event to launch the Italian translation of Robert Royal’s book on recent martyrs.
The unity of the Church with Christ, her Head, and the truth of Revelation are manifested not only in the continuous apostolic Tradition of the depositum fidei, but also in following the Lord, Crucified and Risen. In the “farewell discourses” before His saving Passion, which will redeem all humanity from sin and eternal death, Jesus says to His disciples and to all Christians until His return: A servant is not greater than his master: if they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. (John 15, 20)
The truth of God’s eschatological Revelation in Christ, who is the only way to truth and eternal life, is manifested in the miracle of the steadfastness of His saints unto death, and even unto the bloody death of His martyrs and confessors. The Catholic martyrs of the twenty-first century are important not only for their historical interest, but because they also belong to the theological patrimony of the Church: they form part of the same mission of being the universal sacrament of the world’s salvation in Christ.
The martyrs of the first three centuries after Christ (from the beginnings to the attempt by Emperor Diocletian to extinguish Christianity completely) bear similarities to the desire to destroy Christianity characteristic of the atheistic and anti-human ideologies of National Socialism and Communism, and even of political (but pseudo-religious) Islamism and the neo-socialist wokism of our days. All of this highlights that martyrdom does not concern only persons who are simply victims for their firm convictions, but makes clear that every martyr is such because he is a witness to Christ, who is the Incarnate Word, the only Redeemer of humanity and the only mediator between God and men.
The devil is the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning, and the ideologues and leaders of totalitarian states have always been his puppets. Lies and death are, therefore, always the weapons with which the Evil One fights against the elect of God. The fact that Christianity remains the most persecuted religious community in the world is not due to contemporary civilization having relapsed into barbarism, but to the action of the Evil One.
Unfortunately, some Christians in the West continue to confuse their faith with the achievements of the Enlightenment, thinking that they can avoid the scandal and shame of the Cross before their contemporaries by defining Christianity only as a phenomenon arising from bourgeois and Christian civilization, with humanist and immanentist objectives.
If that were the case, the Church would only have the right to be recognized by any State or institution as a humanitarian aid organization, an idea that some information networks frequently cultivate and propagate.
The Church of Christ, however, has as its sole objective on its journey through time to follow God in Jesus Christ, the Master and Lord whom the world despises, persecutes, and shamefully executes as a criminal. This human-divine dynamic leads to a faith that overflows a world blinded by the temptation of power and enslaved by desires it cannot control.
This faith does not eliminate the natural fear of physical torture and psychological violence, of social exclusion and violent death, but these acts of human brutality cannot separate us from Christ, our Lord and Master, the Risen One, who conquered death, gave a glorious outcome to His Cross and, therefore, to all our crosses, granting each one of us the real possibility of clinging firmly to the consistency of the eternal.
This is, in fact, Christian spirituality: living in Christ and for Christ, in contrast to a religiosity made of narcissistic self-indulgence that frequently affects many sectors of ecclesial life.
As Saint Paul reminds us: I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8, 38-39)
And elsewhere he says: As for me, I will never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world! (Galatians 6, 14)
Martyrdom reminds us of several things, often forgotten and which some would deliberately wish to ignore: one cannot think of the Christian life without the Cross of Christ. Saint John Paul II, in his homily during the canonization of Edith Stein (Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), said: Many of our contemporaries would like to silence the Cross. But nothing is more eloquent than the silenced Cross! The true message of suffering is a lesson in love. Love makes suffering fruitful and suffering deepens love.
That is why Saint Paul, in his evangelizing activity, sets himself the commitment that his preaching not empty the cross of Christ of meaning. But we may ask: what do we have to learn from contemporary martyrs, who gave their lives as faithful witness to the truth and to the divine life?
The martyrs bear witness that one is not a Christian by adapting to the world. What is needed, instead, is the will to endure the “paradox” of being a Christian, as formulated by Søren Kierkegaard in his celebrated work Practice in Christianity. The Danish philosopher maintained that, in a self-sufficient world and in the face of ideologies opposed both to God and to man, it is necessary to be witnesses to the truth of God and to the new and eternal life in Christ, since Christ Jesus was, during His earthly life, persecuted and crucified for that reason.
I would like, therefore, to set forth briefly some central points.
I. The paradox of the curse.
The Cross, a radical sign of condemnation and curse imposed by the legal system, becomes, thanks to Christ, a sign of redemption and a source of blessing through faith. To the foolish Galatians, as Paul calls them, “bewitched” by false preachers, the Apostle reminds them of Christ crucified. And therefore he contrasts faith in the mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ with the temptation to found daily life on the works of the law: I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2, 19-20)
II. The paradox of humiliation.
From a sign of total and atrocious humiliation, so terrible that it could not be inflicted on a Roman citizen, but only on slaves, subversives, and foreigners, the Cross will become a sign of glory. As Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, it is a hidden glory. Indeed, it could be said that, the Cross being a clear symbol of the κένωσις, of the “emptying” that began in the Incarnation and reaches its culmination in the death of the Savior, it will be a veiled but real instrument of glorification.
III. The paradox of defeat.
The Cross marked the defeat of Christ in the eyes of those who worked to condemn Jesus; but also in the eyes of those who, like His disciples, were so disturbed and shaken, perhaps even very disappointed, that they abandoned the Master. The insults of the passers-by and the mockery of the chief priests and the scribes go far beyond the usual forms of mocking a criminal and humiliating him. Yet, instead of a defeat, the death of Christ marks a conquest: it elevates the Cross to a symbol of victory.
IV. The paradox of death.
The atrocious sufferings to which Jesus was subjected end in His death. The sacrifice of Christ, His death, is one of the central themes of the Christian proclamation. The evangelists recount the facts with precision, not only to highlight the drama of His long agony, but above all to underline an incontrovertible objectivity that the Synoptics express with a single word: “expired.”
However, the Cross of Christ also marks the passage from death to life. The Passover of the Lord is at the heart of the missionary activity of the primitive Church and of the preaching of the κήρυγμα: I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15, 3-5)
The Cross is, therefore, the symbol of a new stage, the door to resurrection and life. Baptism, therefore, which grafted us into Christ, made us partakers of the mystery of His passion, death, resurrection, and rebirth to a new life.
V. The paradox of enmity.
The Cross is a sign that puts an end to the enmity between God and humanity. The hostility created by the experience of sin, in which we all share, ends with this defeat. Jesus traces a path of perfection for His hearers, inviting them to love their enemies, to pray for their persecutors, to do good to those who hate them. The death of Christ introduces a profound transformation of the profaned and broken relations between God and the human creature. It is an act of reconciliation that from that moment will also define, and must characterize, the action of the Church. The Cross thus becomes the symbol of a new humanity reconciled with God and with itself.
VI. The paradox of “foolishness.”
What the world may consider fortune, ingenuity, and personal affirmation, in the economy of salvation constitutes no advantage if it deforms or damages our capacity to follow the Messiah. On the contrary, placing trust in the things of the world will be synonymous with foolishness for man, who thus remains unable to grasp the essence of his contingent existence, always marked by fragility and transience.
Saint Thomas Aquinas speaks of the caecitas mentis (“mental blindness”), which corresponds to a “title” that Jesus attributes to the scribes and Pharisees, blind guides who claim to see, a blindness and foolishness that afflicts the chief priests and the elders of the people, not only making them incapable of recognizing the Messiah, but pushing them to the decision to put Him to death.
In the eyes of the world and according to human logic, the act of Jesus’ total self-giving on the Cross, His refusal to defend Himself three times (Sanhedrin, Herod, Pilate), could not be considered an expression of wisdom. But it is precisely there that divine wisdom was manifested. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Since, in the wise design of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who have come to believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified. (1 Corinthians 1, 17-25)
VII. The paradox of the scandal of the cross.
As we have already mentioned, death on the Cross was considered an infamy. The crucifix, therefore, was regarded as something infamous and accursed. Paul knows this well, but he also knows that it contains a genuine provocation that challenges the dominant notions of scandal and foolishness. What is scandalous to the Jews and absurd, or even foolish, to the Greeks is—for those who have understood the meaning of the Cross and believe in Christ crucified and risen—a unique reason for pride: As for me, the only thing I will boast about is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (Galatians 6, 14)
Let us remember: to contemplate the Cross of Christ means to learn to know the Savior, the great shepherd of the sheep, of whom we are ministers. Whoever wishes to remain firm, in mind and heart, in this clash between the civilization of love and the inhuman culture of death, between Augustine’s Civitas Dei (City of God) and the Civitas Diaboli (City of the Devil), between the confession of faith and hatred of the faith, should become more familiar with the martyrs and confessors of our time, who are living witnesses of what it means to be followers of Christ.
About the author
Cardinal Gerhard L. Mueller was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017. Pope Francis appointed him a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura in June 2021. The Cardinal is the author, most recently, of The Pope: His Mission and His Task, translated from the German by Brian McNeil.