Martyrs of the Ordinary

In this meditation, Fr. Peter Armenio reflects on the witness of the early Christian martyrs, whose courage and fidelity helped spread the faith throughout the world. While most Christians today are not called to shed their blood for Christ, we are all called to be martyrs in the original sense of the word: witnesses who make Jesus Christ present through our lives.  

Drawing from the teachings of St. Josemaría Escriva, Fr. Peter invites us to embrace the "martyrdom of the ordinary" through daily self-giving, fidelity in prayer, and love for those around us. 

Listen and reflect on: 

• The witness of the early Christian martyrs 
• The meaning of martyrdom today 
• Daily self-giving and sacrifice 
• Making Christ present through ordinary life 
• Love as the mark of a disciple 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel intercede for me. Lord, as we come before you, we ask you to help us imitate your role models that you've presented to us. And those are the protagonists of the writings after the four gospels. The first history of the church booklet, which is the Acts of the Apostles. The actual writer was Saint Luke, but the author was the Holy Spirit. It's the word of God. The first history of the church was written by the Holy Spirit. And the rest of the New Testament, the epistles of Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint James, Saint Jude, Saint John, are formative letters written to a cluster of the first disciples of the disciples, the early Christians of the Gentile world, barring the letter to the Hebrews, which was more aimed at the Hebrew-Jewish world. And that world in Ephesus or Colossae or Philippi or Rome consisted of forty families dispersed throughout those cities, which were geographically much smaller than the cities we know today. And those letters were read in liturgical gatherings or fraternal gatherings at a bigger house, and someone who knew how to read would read those letters. And there'd be presbyters, not all of them were priests, and they would elaborate on those writings of St. Paul and the four Gospels of our Lord, which at first were handed out orally, committed to memorization. A lot more memorizing was going on in those times than now. And so the inspired word of God is intimately associated with those early followers of our Lord. At the end of June, the church commemorates the Roman martyrs. Roman martyrs can be restricted to Rome itself, the city of Rome and its environs. But also you can make a case Roman martyrs would apply to the North African world, the Gallic world, the Mideastern world, because the Empire embraced a major portion of Europe, modern-day Europe, North Africa, Middle East. And that is very relevant today because if the Catholic Christian, or even non-Catholic Christian, could identify themselves with a certain time period, since I'm old enough to say, not the time period of the early 60s or the 50s or the 40s, I'm not that old, or the 19th century, or the 12th century, or the 8th century, or the seventh century. But those first three centuries of the church's history when the church was Pope, bishops, priests, laypeople. And in those years, those early years of the church's history, I'm thinking of I'd have to really make do my research, but I'm morally certain it's up there if not, the earliest document after the New Testament, the writings of St. Paul are older than the gospel, some of them anyway, is this anonymous letter to Diagnatus, who's the recipient, and it spells out the lifestyle of those early Christians, and emphasizes that they are, like everybody else, same kind of dress wear, regional accents, same lines of work, same problems, same issues, though there are certain distinguishing properties. The most salient is charity with everyone, including those who hate them, as the letter goes. And maybe I'm reading into it a little bit too much, but I'm imagining the author giggling a little bit because he says they actually are chaste. And just judging by the tone, that that wasn't it's normal to be chaste, but normal doesn't mean common. And basically that was emphasized it wasn't common. And he specifies that they stayed with one wife. They didn't exchange wives. I guess that's one of the aberrations of that time. And he says, what's most incredible is that these ordinary people in neighborhoods, same lines of work, will actually die for the founder of Christianity. If it comes to that, they will have the courage to sacrifice their very lives, in many cases, with unbearable tortures and loss of human life under frightening conditions. Historians of the church characterize those first three or four centuries at most, as the age of martyrs. In what sense? Well, they took a while to become Christian. That's where OCIA, which was previously RCIA, I'm sure the letters will change in the future, but anyway the content is the same, learning your faith, that it took a while to become a Christian officially sacramentally, because the elders and the priests want to make sure that the candidate for baptism knew what she or he was doing. Most likely they would not survive. In many cases they did, but in a lot of cases they didn't. All you needed is a family member tattling on you, a neighbor reporting you, or a census of the neighborhood of the city, and that would do you in. Popes didn't stand a chance. Virtually they were all martyrs, not literally, bishops, priests, because they were more out in the open. And does that have a certain relevance, that age of martyrdom? Obviously it does. All the saints, all the martyrs do have personal and practical bearing on our own lives, especially when the great majority of martyrs were ordinary people. Again, there was no religious orders there, and there was a relative scarcity of priests, bishops. Many times they would land in prison and be executed because uh the methodology of the authorities of that time was to cut off the head of Christianity, do away with the hierarchy. And if you caught a Pope or a bishop in the Colosseum or the amphitheater, he would go and die a grisly death in front of 100,000 people if it's the Colosseum in Rome, hence the Pope's conducting the stations of the cross in the Colosseum. It's the locale for many, many martyrs. Some of them are listed in the first Eucharistic prayer. Half of the second list in Eucharistic Prayer One are teenage girls. So back to the Roman martyrs. In those days they saw, just to give a little bit of a context, martyrdom as a sacramental act, even though there are seven sacraments, so those are the sacramental acts when they're administered. But why was martyrdom described as a sacramental act? What is a sacrament? What's a sign that has a real spiritual effect instituted by Christ, to give the Cliff Note version? And what would happen is these people were normal. You were arrested and thrown in these unsanitary, stuffy, uh, packed jails with some degree of, at best, discomfort, and usually some element of torture. And the torture would be a grisly death, all sorts of horrible ways of dying. And the normal reaction was a panic attack. And if that was a member of your family, the family would be shattered. Your sense was, can I actually go through with this? And with everything that goes along with it, even leaving family behind and work behind and all that. And obviously, everybody's praying for that person in the Acts of the Apostles. When Peter was in prison, they were all clamoring for him, and they clamored for any Christian who was in prison, because it was, on a certain level, pretty bad news for the family, for the friends, for the church. And then eventually, at the hour of truth, they would die in a heroic way. At times singing psalms with joy, with incredible courage that is supra-human and superhuman. Supreme beyond human and supreme, heroically human. And it was a sacramental act because it was crystal clear that at the moment of truth the Lord intervened, Jesus intervened in a very extraordinary way. It was called a sacramental act because it was a beautiful sign that the Lord gives us the grace to be witnesses. And the witness of dying for your faith in public, which softened the people in those uh areas surrounding the place of execution, whether it's Lyon, whether it's Rome, whether it's the many cities mentioned in the New Testament. Now, we're not in an age of violent martyrdom where we're arrested and tortured and hanged. I mean, that's happen. But that being said, St. John Paul said that the age of martyrdom that has surpassed every other age, and maybe the other ages combined as well, is the 20th century, where that's the century with the most martyrs, which has spilled into the 21st. But again, what practical bearing does it have for us? Well, let's look at the word martyr. It's really a Greek word originally, and martyr doesn't precisely mean spilling your blood for the faith. It means being a witness of your faith. And what's the common denominator between being a witness under normal circumstances, at home, at work, in any kind of social gathering, and spilling your blood and dying for the faith? Both cases witnesses making Jesus Christ very real for others. That's what it means. And amid a time of severe persecution, St. Jose Maria jots down in the way, it's one of the aphorisms, I think it's number two in the way, that and he puts it in the third person because I don't know who who he was referring to, but now I do know because there's been research done. They said about him, even though you wouldn't know it unless you would read from other sources that commented on the background of these aphorisms in the way, that during the Civil War or around that time, uh someone who exchanged some words with Saint Jose Maria exclaimed, This man reads the life of Jesus Christ. And Saint Jose Maria piggybacks on that experience, and he writes the following May your behavior and your conversation be such that everyone who sees or hears you can say, This man or this woman reads the life of Jesus Christ. The contents can be summarized with one Greek word, and that Greek word is martyr. And in the way of the cross, in one of the points of meditation, Saint Jose Maria talks about two kinds of martyrdom. And one kind, which is the martyrdom that is collectively understood, dying for your faith. He experienced that kind of martyrdom, even though he wasn't exactly executed or killed, but he was running, literally running for his life during the Spanish Civil War, that had killed, annihilated seven thousand priests and religious. That's equivalent to three, more than three, I would say, big dice in the U.S. Could be Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. That's a lot of priests in a population at that time in the 30s, probably of 25 million people in Spain, maybe less. And St. Rosemir had a certain reputation among the young, among university students, and they were going after him as well. And unfortunately, any loss of human life is unfortunate on a certain level. They thought they had executed him. And for the rest of his life, he included that priest in his mass. There was a time when he was in seclusion, in hiding with a group of other people in an attic in a building in Madrid, and these militia, because half of Spain was controlled by the communist regime, and they went after all the priests, burned down churches and convents, and executed as many people as they could. Summarily, no trial, no nothing, captured them, brought them to the park, and fired away literally. And if you go to the churches in Madrid, you'll see frescoes of actual young men, seminarians, priests who were executed. I went on a pilgrimage with some seminarians, and we stayed at different places, and every place had memorials of martyrs and frescoes in the church on the wall behind the altar of actual young men, priests who were executed. It was tough to see after a few times. And so he was he was a young priest amid that situation and in hiding. And again, he was hiding in an attic, and he heard the militias going up the stairs, casing each floor, and he finally told the people near him, he wasn't dressed as a priest. He was he said, Listen, we we may get executed. I'm a priest. I could hear your confession. Um, because this would be a good time to do it, because this doesn't look good. As we were coming up the stairs little by little. And for some reason they never went into the attic, which would be the first place you would look, but they never there, so he survived that. And he was always running for his life, he was always in hiding. So, in other words, uh, with this convoluted background, he knew what it was like to be martyred, in the sense that he was waiting to be captured because these militiamen were going up the stairs, and it was just a matter of time before they went to the attic and caught them and brought them outside and fired away. And he says here that he more or less experienced the two kinds of martyrdom, or more precise, he says there's two kinds of martyrdom. And again, he's never refers to himself, but when some of those points of meditation refer to him, even though no one would know at the time. After many years, when research would be done, they would realize, well, he's the genesis of that point. And so he he's exper he says there's two kinds of martyrdom. One is to actually die for your faith, and the other kind of martyrdom is to die for Christ, to give yourself to Christ, to die to yourself day in and day out, amid the ordinary life, the ordinary activities that characterize the life of a lay woman or a lay man, married or single. And he said, if he compares those two, because he experienced the first one, is close to it anyway, he says, for him, the martyrdom of the ordinary, of the day in and day out, total self-giving of oneself, is the more heroic life to give to the Lord, even though we're not gonna sneeze or underestimate the value of actually dying for your faith. And he's basically saying you've got to die your for your faith continuously amid work, amid family life, amid suffering that comes your way, amid fidelity to prayer. And so, yes. We're called to be martyrs in the sense of witnessing that Jesus is very real. We notice if we read it in the Greek, I'm thinking of Acts one, chapter eight, verse eight, excuse me, where the Lord literally gives his marching orders to his disciples before he ascends into heaven. And he basically says the following you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses, in parentheses, martyr. You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, where the faith begins, the holy city, the city of the redemption, and in Judea, the province in which Jerusalem is located. And in Samaria, enemy territory. Jews and Samaritans don't associate with each other. In Samaria, and to the very ends of the earth, witnesses, and what is that witness? Jesus spells it out more precisely in the Last Supper that he raised the bar that, with all due respect, is literally impossible to reach. Then why does he establish that bar? Because we could approach it. And with God's grace, we can approach it. We get close to it. And witness or martyrdom is in function of how close we get to this bar, which is that he mentions at least three times. Love as I have loved. You gotta go way beyond, which is tall order to begin with, love neighbor as self. Love as I have loved. And in that way, they will know that you're my disciples by the love you have for one another. What kind of love for one another? As I have loved. I'm thinking of an incident with St. John Paul. Now, as an elderly priest, I have plenty of real-life experiences that I'm not that hard up for anecdotes, but in my early years I was. And those early years overlapped with the early pontificate of the great Pope St. John Paul. And an older priest friend recommended that I read, I don't know if it's still in existence, Catholic Digest, because I was saying, listen, I need more stories to tell. So, well, tried Catholic Digest. And you know, I'm flipping through, and some of the articles are pretty interesting, others are cheesy as they say today. And then one was on an encounter with John Paul in Miami when he came to Florida, you know, many years ago now. And this woman was carting her friend around with a wheel in a wheelchair. Her friend was crippled or in her legs. She had some disability, or she got into an accident or whatever, but she was in a wheelchair and she was crippled. And she had want to kill two birds with one stone, get close to the Pope, and with her friend in a wheelchair, that was more attractive to the Pope because he was always very deferential towards the sick, the infants, uh, anyone who was undergoing a significant suffering, he was attracted like a magnet. And um, lo and behold, he approaches the woman in the wheelchair and her friend who's carting her around, wants to say something, but she's so moved by his presence that she's paralyzed and can't say anything. She's speechless and she's crying. And the Pope blesses her, traces the crucifix on her forehead, and um says, God bless you, my daughter, and moves on. And the article was based on the way he looked at the woman, the friend, not the woman, the wheelchair, well, both. And you know, significant-size article describing that when the Holy Father looked at her and she explained why she was paralyzed in speech, he said, I'm not exaggerating, but it was the look of Jesus Christ that she felt intense love through those penetrating eyes of John Paul. And I was involved with World Youth Day in Denver, and we don't have time for me to give a detailed narrative, but again, that martyrdom, that witness making Jesus real, I felt like St. John Marie Viennae without the prefixes of ST, period. I never heard so many confessions in my life, started Wednesday morning, on a Wednesday morning finished Saturday afternoon, and it was almost around the clock, uh, with very little sleep, very little food, and trying my best to do my liturgy of the hours and spend time in prayer myself. How do we live that martyrdom of the ordinary? It's little tiny martyrdoms. I'm using some ideas of St. Jose Marie and Friends of God in the homily in the footsteps of Christ, where he gives some concrete examples on how to be a martyr of the ordinary. He says, being punctual at your established time for mental prayer, quiet time, and to be faithful to the amount of time you've established. It can be half hour, it could be 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes. And then you show up and you do it on time. No matter how unless it's an emergency, it's non-negotiable. That the rosary is said with heart. There'll be distractions, it depends on each person's power of concentration. It means turning work into a colossal act of adoration. It's not the same as mental prayer, but similar, nevertheless, that the medium of prayer is giving God the best I have. And I do it out of love for Him. I want Him to get the best out of myself. Never everyone can be objectively the best, but I'm going to try to make it better. And I'm going to be on top of my game in terms of giving first family and friends every day, not just in isolated fashion or disjointed fashion, that they kind of notice that this man or woman reads the life of Jesus Christ. There's a warmth there, there's an affection there. They are recipients of a special kind of love. And St. Rosa Maria says in point 917, the way that our colleagues should feel their hearts on fire or moved by the kind of love. Now that takes self-giving. And it has to be it's rooted in piety, and it's going to mass often. It's spending time before Mass in front of the Blessed Sacrament. It's having a good list of self-denial. It's, as St. Pope Francis says, that we could fall into the spiritual illness of spiritual Alzheimer's where we forget Jesus' doctrine on the cross. It means accepting traffic jams, people who may not like us that much, mishaps during work, fatigue, sickness, being in a low mood, whatever it is, and that we embrace that cross and offer it up, and that we try to lead a moral life, that we live custody of the eyes, custody of the heart, custody of the imagination. And, you know, in a given moment, not really heroic, I wouldn't think it would be excessive to say it's martyrdom. But if I live in these small self-giving ways, the accumulation of those deeds of love, it's not neurotic minutia, but deeds of love in little ways. Okay, now I am a witness that Christ is real amid the ordinary. I'm a martyr of the ordinary. Well, we go to that double martyr, the blessed mother, who from the beginning gave herself totally to embracing God's plan, God's will, and acted completely for the glory of God through her son Jesus Christ. And then by compassion, she died on the cross with her son, watching him die a grisly death, undergoing the ultimate shame and humiliation of a crucifixion and death. We pray to Mary, our refuge, our hope, queen of martyrs. Mary, pray for each one of us so that we're enlightened to embrace a martyrdom of the ordinary, and if it's ever God's will, a martyrdom of the extraordinary. I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations you've communicated to me in this meditation. I ask your help in putting them into effect. My Immaculate Mother St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel.