On the Monday after Easter, Pope Francis gave a brief talk to the many pilgrims gathered at St. Peter’s Square in Rome. He chose that moment to highlight, once again, the disturbing reports of the persecution and the martyrdom of Christians and Catholics in recent months, often at the hands of ISIS and Islamist extremists.

Speaking to the crowd and to the world, the Holy Father called for the protection of our brothers and sisters who are persecuted, exiled, murdered or decapitated for the sole reason that they are Christians.

He went on to say, “I urge the international community not to stand by silent and inactive before such an unacceptable crime that constitutes a worrisome deviation from the most basic of human rights. I truly urge the international community not to turn its eyes away.”

If we have followed the news, we know what Pope Francis is referring to. Several weeks ago, there were the photos of the 21 Christians about to be beheaded on a Mediterranean beach. Arabic speakers noted that on the corresponding video, the martyrs could be seen saying, “Jesus Christ” and “Jesus is Lord.”

Last week, 147 Christian students at a school in Kenya were separated from their non-Christian classmates before they too were killed.

Martyrdom can seem to be something far removed from our daily lives. We may have been taught the stories of our martyred heroes of faith from centuries ago, saints like Peter and Paul, or Joan of Arc or even in the last century, Maximilian Kolbe.

The stories are inspiring. Those saints refused to compromise with the pressures of this world in order to maintain their faith and practice as followers and friends of Jesus Christ. In the end, they shed their blood and gave their lives rather than betray the truth that is Jesus.

The danger for us and for the world is that we can easily become complacent, especially in a time and place of material abundance and societal secularism.

We can see not just martyrdom but the underlying question of putting Jesus at the center of our lives as a distant and abstract question. If there are challenges to faith in God or to the moral life that comes from living as God wants, there can be the temptation to seek compromise with the truth.

If the societal pressures become too great, rather than witness we can try to privatize our faith. And in the end, if all else fails, we can just go along because, well, it was just too difficult to stand alone in times like these.

The words of Pope Francis and the most recent examples of martyrdom should give us reason to ask for the grace to be strong in our resolve to follow Christ. It is quite possible that those recent martyrs neither sought nor expected the test of faith that they encountered. But Holy Week and Good Friday remind us that as Jesus suffered and died for us, we may be called to suffer for Him, and even to give our lives.

The Church has always had martyrs and we should not seek to distance ourselves from that element of faith.

The Holy Father is also reminding us that we are a part of a Church that is universal. Among other things, it means that we are spiritually and truly united with our fellow believers throughout the world.
Those Christians on the beach or in Africa are a part of us. They have a right to expect our prayers and spiritual union with them. Pray that all of those undergoing the test of martyrdom accept the grace to be faithful until the end.

Those martyrs also remind us of the costs of our own fidelity. We may not, at least not yet, be called to witness to Christ to the point of blood in our own beloved country. Still, the martyrdom of faith is offered to us as well.

The challenges to our faith, and to our practice of our faith, especially as they relate to religious liberty, are themselves deeply serious matters that share the underlying element of intolerance that we are seeing elsewhere in the world.

In the coming years, we are likely to see increasing pressures from government and society to compromise with our faith, especially in areas of cooperating in redefining marriage or providing health services that contradict morality, even including abortion services.

In effect, we can expect our own challenges about how deeply we are committed to following Christ.

The world and the Church need witnesses to the truth. The witness of those recent martyrs was just such a testimony. We would do well to think about those new saints, and to ask their intercession for our own courage and fidelity.