Martyrs are considered martyrs because they were killed out of their persecutors’ hatred of the Christian faith (odium fidei). Beyond this classical criterion, however, there has been a direction towards its theological rethinking.
Oscar Romero, ignored by Vatican authorities for a long time despite universal clamor after his murder by government forces in El Salvador, has been recently raised to the altars. His murderers did not kill him because they hated the Christian faith. They too could have been Catholics themselves. No, he was killed because he stood up for the rights of the poor and the downtrodden in his diocese, a position which clashed with the interests of political and military powers. For this, he is named a martyr – the “martyr of the Church of the Second Vatican Council”, as Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the postulator of the cause of his beatification, called him…
What I would like to argue is the recognition of non-heroic martyrs, persons not as heroic as Oscar Romero or Martin Luther King, Jr., persons who at first were not actually resolved to joyfully offer their lives for the faith like the martyrs of old who were said to be singing while being led to arena where the lions wait.
Their lives could not even be considered as full dedication and lifelong witness to the mission of Jesus culminating with their deaths. Their lives may were very ordinary; and their violent deaths were not as resolute, even hesitant. If they were given a chance to escape, they probably would. But their dedication and fidelity to their loved ones and neighbors were ultimately non-compromising.
For this, they met their violent deaths. José Ignacio Gonzáles Faus describes these martyrs as “witnesses to love”, “killed by the hatred of love”. Ignacio Ellacuria calls them “crucified peoples”. I call them “martyrs at the margins”…
If martyrdom is understood as following the cross of Jesus, then those who die as victims of the present socio-economic and political arrangements – the crucified people – are martyrs themselves, “Jesus martyrs”, to borrow Sobrino’s term. The scandal of the death of crucified peoples goes back to the scandal of Jesus on the cross and further back to the Suffering Servant. “It is precisely the reign of sin that continues to crucify most of humankind,” Ellacuaria writes, “that obliges us to make real in history the death of Jesus as the actualized Passover of the Reign of God.”
This attempt to rethink the notion of martyrdom is intended to make sense of what many people call “senseless killings” in populist regimes of our times. I would like to consider that these simple people among the socially excluded did not die in vain. Beyond the narratives of “elite martyrs”, they did not die in the name of grand narratives of fighting for justice and heroic causes of universal importance.
I would like to say that there is a great Christian sense in ordinary expressions of love, of small narratives of everyday justice, of everyday lives of fidelity among the simple and the ordinary. They all met their violent deaths they would have wanted to escape but did not in the name of charity and solidarity.
[Fr. Pilario’s article which is published in the book “Put Away your Sword: Gospel Non-violence in a Violent World”]
Father Daniel Franklin Pilario, C.M., is the President of Adamson University in Manila. He is a theologian, professor, and pastor of an urban poor community on the outskirts of the Philippine capital. He is also Vincentian Chair for Social Justice at St. John’s University in New York.
