The Church of Silence
May 18, 2000
Unlike
most spiritual leaders and moral teachers, Jesus of Nazareth
offered no formula for worldly happiness and social order. Just the
opposite: he told his disciples to take up their crosses (an image he used
well before the Crucifixion) and to expect suffering. He warned them that
the world would hate them as it hated him: it was their destiny as
Christians.
After the conversion of the Roman
world under the Emperor Constantine, a Christian civilization arose and
the age of martyrdom seemed to be over. Most Western Christians still
think of that period as a thing of the past, a venerable but remote phase of
their history.
But the most intense persecution of
Christianity occurred not in the Roman Empire, but in the twentieth
century, especially in the Communist world. A large part of this story,
hidden and ignored, is told in a new book by Robert Royal, The
Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century (Crossroad
Publishing).
It is
hard to tabulate or even estimate the number of Catholics and other
Christians murdered by modern tyrannies. The figure certainly runs into
the tens of millions, though it isnt always easy to distinguish
between those killed specifically for their religion and those killed for
other reasons, ethnic and social. But contrary to recent slanders, the Nazis
as well as the Communists regarded the Catholic Church as their mortal
enemy.
After World War II,
Communisms triumph in Catholic Central Europe the bitter
fruit of the Anglo-American alliance with the Soviet Union
brought ferocious assaults on Catholics. Yet, as Royal observes,
surprisingly few renounced their faith even in the face of torture and
death.
The measure of these
Catholics courage is suggested by part of one Jesuits
summary of the tortures they suffered in Albanian prison camps:
Most of them were beaten
on their bare feet with wooden clubs; the fleshy part of the legs and
buttocks were cut open, rock salt inserted beneath the skin, and then sewn
up again; their feet, placed in boiling water until the flesh fell off, were
then rubbed with salt; their Achilles tendons were pierced with
hot wires. Some were hung by their arms for three days without food; put
in ice and icy water until nearly frozen; had electrical wires placed in
their ears, nose, mouth, genitals, and anus; burning pine needles placed
under fingernails; forced to eat a kilo of salt and having water withheld
for 24 hours; boiled eggs put in their armpits; teeth pulled without
anaesthetic; tied behind vans and dragged; left in solitary confinement
without food or water until almost dead; forced to drink their own urine
and eat their own excrement; put in pits of excrement up to their necks;
put on a bed of nails and covered with heavy material; put in nail-studded
cages which were then rotated rapidly....
As Royal, a Dante scholar, remarks:
The sorrowful litany shows an inventiveness in torture surpassing
the punishments that Dante, one of the great human imaginations of all
time, displayed in writing his Inferno. No less
horrible than the sheer conception of these torments is the fact that men
were found who could be paid to inflict them without fainting.
Yet the martyrs not only died
willingly, but often died forgiving and blessing their killers, in the very
spirit of Christ. Royal recounts similar stories amazing,
sickening, inspiring from Russia, Ukraine, Mexico, Spain, Germany,
Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Latin America, China, Korea, Vietnam, Africa,
and elsewhere. Christs warnings are still being borne out.
Why hasnt all this been told
before? Its not surprising that the liberal Western media should
ignore it; what is very surprising is that American Catholics have ignored
the plight of their brethren. But prosperous American Catholics are a
self-absorbed lot, too obsessed with contraception and women priests to
spare much thought for those who are far worse off.
As the brave Romanian Bishop Iuliu
Hirtea put it before his death in the 1970s: It is not we who keep
silence here. It is not we who are the Church of Silence, but the members
of the Church in the free world who are the real Church of Silence, for
they do not speak on our behalf.
Joseph Sobran
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column
Return to SOBRANS home page
|