Lives broken, lives donated. For the salvation of all

by Gianni Valente

Another year comes to an end. And this year too, the stories of Catholic missionaries and pastoral workers killed in the last 12 months, gathered and published by Fides Agency, give a glimpse of the mystery and treasure hidden in the lives taken away in a bloody manner while serving brothers and sisters in the world, following Jesus.

There are distinctive features that mark the lives of Jesus' witnesses donated to the point of shedding blood. Distinctive signs like the one recalled a few days ago by Pope Francis, on the day in which the liturgy of the Catholic Church commemorates Saint Stephen, the first martyr. The Acts of the Apostles tell us that he prayed for the salvation of his executioners, while they were stoning him. Even today - the Pope added - those who bear witness to Jesus do not allow themselves to be "killed out of weakness, nor to defend an ideology, but to make everyone share in the gift of salvation. And they do this primarily for the sake of their killers... and they pray for them".

The Russian Saint monk Silvanus of Mount Athos described "the love for your enemies as the only true criterion of orthodoxy". And Blessed Christian de Chergé, Prior of the Trappist monks who were martyred in Tibhirine (also cited by Pope Francis on the feast day of St. Stephen), in the text written as his spiritual testament, foreshadowed his possible martyrdom and addressed his unknown, future murderer calling him a "last minute friend", and asking "may we find each other, happy “good thieves” in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both".

The witnesses of Jesus who died slain can embrace their own executioners with their offered lives as a pure gift of grace, a reflection of their own gratuitous configuration to the passion of Christ. Certainly not out of a voluntary effort of "self-control".

This year too, as so often happens, the majority of missionaries and pastoral workers killed were reached by death while they were immersed in the ordinary action of their works and days. Among them, to give a few examples, volunteer François Kabore was killed in Burkina Faso while leading a prayer meeting, in an assault by an armed group that slaughtered 14 other companions praying with him. While Marcelo Pérez Pérez, an indigenous parish priest in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas (Mexico), was killed on Sunday morning as he was returning home after celebrating mass. These events occurred in a warp of daily life far removed from exhibitionism and heroic poses, a web of relationships from which they were torn by unmotivated brutality.

With their sacrifice - another connotation that distinguishes them - witnesses of faith, starting with those who lose their lives at the hands of others, do not bear witness to themselves. They are strangers to what the Greek professor Athanasios Papathanasiou, during an ecumenical conference at the Monastic Community of Bose, had described as the “narcissistic” counterfeit of martyrdom and witness, which instead of confessing Christ out of attraction, in self-forgetfulness, becomes self-referential, conceiving and presenting witness as an “enterprise of self-justification”.

Every confession of faith offered to the point of giving one’s own life does not occur as a heroic human act, but only by the power of the Holy Spirit. In every authentic Christian dynamic, no one can confess the gift of faith and bear witness to Christ except in the Holy Spirit. And Christ himself bears witness to this in the Gospel, when he exhorts the disciples not to worry about what to say when they are brought before the courts “for my sake”, because “it will be suggested to you at that time: for it is not you who speak, but it is the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you”.

To commemorate the missionaries and pastoral workers killed each year is to acknowledge and celebrate this incomparable mystery of gratuitousness. And it helps to free oneself from all the counterfeits that place the suffering of the baptized under the stigma of fear, or of revenge against any enemy. And when slogans and campaigns on persecuted Christians do not allow a glimpse of this treasure, this dizzying dynamic, they risk confusing and increasing forgetfulness.

The Church of Rome, in the Jubilee Year that has just begun, will also remember them with gratitude, the witnesses of faith who gave their lives following Jesus. And gratitude will become prayer, supplication to ask for salvation for all. Starting with the multitudes today annihilated in the new exterminations and the new Massacres of the Innocents of the ‘World War in pieces’. (Fides News Agency, 30/12/2024)

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