Why totalitarian regimes make so many martyrs

Catholic Herald, 06 August 2020

The martyrs of 1945 demonstrate that the killing of Christians is not a utilitarian matter for totalitarians.

The history of the Church is written in the blood of the martyrs. Amongst that white-robed army the class of 1945 wrote some bold lines. As the coronavirus put paid to many of the 75th anniversary commemorations of the end of World War II, an ancillary consequence was that some of the most inspiring Catholic martyrs of that year have not had the recognition they deserve.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the bright­est witnesses of Christian resistance to 20th-century totalitarianism, was a Lutheran rather than a Catholic, but his famous death illustrates much about that year. Bonhoeffer was killed when the war was already lost. There was no strategic point to his death; it was a matter of inflicting cruelty upon religious believers for the sake of it.

Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenbürg on April 9 1945, just two weeks before American forces liberated the camp, three weeks before Hitler’s suicide and a month before V-E Day. The Nazi regime knew it was defeated, yet it inflicted a terrible blow on the Christian Church; imagine what Bonhoeffer would have contributed to the reconstruction of the German soul after the war.

On the other side of the world, Blessed Peter To Rot died in July 1945, killed by the Japanese a month before their own surrender. Blessed Peter was a catechist in his local parish in Papua New Guinea. Under Japanese occupation the foreign missionary priests were expelled, so Peter was put in charge of keeping the parish as vital as was possible without priests. He did so with creativity and courage, first openly and then clandestinely after the Japanese banned all religious services.

The Japanese decreed that the island­ers should return to polygamy, which they had abandoned when they became Christians. Peter staunchly defended Christian marriage, the vocation he lived as a husband and father. He was imprisoned in early 1945 and killed by lethal injection in July. His killers, like those of Bonhoeffer, knew that they had already lost the war.

Another martyr, Rolando Rivi of Italy, was killed as a sign that fascist totalitarianism would give way to communist totalitarianism. The regimes would change, the martyrdoms would continue.

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