~ by Fr. Jack Bentz, SJ

In order to become a certified martyr in the Roman Calendar of Saints you have to die for the faith and other people must recognize this to be the case. And the rest is luck and paperwork. So we think of the great martyrs of our tradition starting with St. Stephen being stoned while St. Paul stands about holding the coats. This was only the beginning.

Martyrdom caught on quickly in the Christian tradition and continues on to this very day. We have moved from rocks to tomahawks to automatic rifles but the end seems the same– faith filled people dying because of Christ.

The Jesuit tradition has its own set of martyrs with the number being added to with a bloody regularity. Some of these martyrs are remembered by name with the rest of them are designated by the “and companions” tag following the headliner. So we think of St. Paul Miki and companions (February 6), St. Edmund Campion, St. Robert Southwell and companions (Dec 1) and coming up soon — St. John de Brebeuf, St. Issac Jogues and companions (October 19). So a couple of big names capture the attention for a historical moment in Japan, England or North America and then the “and companions” is the designated space for everyone else who suffered and died in the same era or even in the same day. This is the space for you and me.

These three sets of martyrs died while serving a fragile, new, or embattled Catholic people in countries unfriendly to the faith. In North America Jesuits were serving the Huron people while being killed by a neighboring tribe, in Japan they were being crucified while trying to plant a Japanese Catholicism and in England, while serving an underground Catholic church made illegal by the state. All these deaths were in defense of the faith, and they are just the tip of the iceberg made up of all Christians who die in the faith, their lives a witness to the mission of Christ in the world.

The North American Martyrs were dying for the faith even before they got on the boat to the new world. They began dying when they gave themselves to Christ as Jesuits. Parts of their precious selves died in order that a greater desire to serve would live in their hearts. This desire got them into the Jesuits, saw them through their studies and found fulfillment in learning how to serve a foreign people in a foreign land. This desire to give everything and not to count the cost drove them to learn new languages, how to manage a canoe, to eat anything, and to love people very different from themselves. This was the middle phase of their martyrdom begun in the Old World and ended in the new one.

Finally, these French Jesuits were killed in a variety of horrible ways. But the tomahawk in the back of the head and the sharpened mussel shells that sliced off the body parts were only killing what was left of men already mortified by lives of service. What was being finally snuffed out was the very last part of the candle flame; a light that had been burning brightly since being ignited by Christ. And this is the pattern for the “and companions” as well. This is our pattern now.

Becoming a Christian martyr is unavoidable once we are lit up by Christ. We will burn away in service to the people who are crying out for light. We are constantly called to become a light that leads people to the full redemptive light of Christ in our world.