(New Beginnings, No. 8)
When the history of the Christian Church in the twentieth century comes to be written, it will be known as the century of the martyrs. More people died for the Christian faith in the twentieth century than in any other century of the Church’s history. Usually, when we hear of persecution of Christians for their faith, we think of the early Romans suffering under the Emperor Nero in the amphitheatre. But the truth is that it is a lot closer to our time and place than that. Those who died for the faith were mostly ordinary men and women, but their number included bishops, priests, monks and nuns.
The former Soviet Union was the most repressive of all regimes in its attitude towards the Christian faith. ‘Historians estimate that 35 million Soviet and East European citizens died at Communist hands – including half of the 260,000 priests and 250 of the 300 bishops belonging to Russia’s Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate alone.’ (Jonathan Luxmore, “The Quiet Saints of the Gulag”, The Tablet, 27 May 2000, p.708.) Not all of those were Christians, and those who were did not all die because of hatred of the faith.
Pope John Paul II, in his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, of 11 February 1984, on the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, wrote, ‘This glory must be acknowledged not only in the martyrs for the faith but in many others also who, at times, even without belief in Christ, suffer and give their lives for the truth and for a just cause. In the sufferings of all of these people the great dignity of man is strikingly confirmed’. (n.22)
Mexico, although it has a large Catholic majority, persecuted the Church in the nineteen twenties and thirties under President Calles. Graham Greene touched on this in his novel, The Power and the Glory. Mexican legislation laid down that every State of the Federation should determine the number of priests empowered to exercise the ministry, in public or private. In the State of Michoacan, one priest was assigned for every 33,000 of the faithful, in the State of Chiapas one for every 60,000, while in the State of Vera Cruz only one priest was permitted for every 100,000 of the inhabitants.
A much more severe persecution took place in Spain during the civil war from 1936 to 1939. In that war, 13 bishops, 4,184 diocesan priests, 2,365 male religious and 283 nuns died for the faith. This figure was quoted recently by Pope John Paul II during a ceremony in Rome during which he declared 233 of them Blessed. (See The Tablet, 17 March 2001, p. 389.)
In World War II, about 2,000 Catholic priests died in Dachau concentration camp near Munich in the south of Germany. And Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, said in 1941, when it looked as if Germany would win the war, that, when the war was over, one major task which remained for Germany was the destruction of the Catholic Church.
Between 1994 and 1998, 499 Catholic priests, religious brothers and sisters were murdered in various countries around the world. (Mondo e Missione, quoted in The Far East, May/June 1999.)
The organization, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, publishes regular reports on the persecution – with varying degrees of severity – of Christians at the present time in as many as 17 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. It can be contacted at: – Christian Solidarity Worldwide, P.O. Box 99, New Malden, Surrey KT3 3YF, England.
For more information, read Robert Royal, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: a comprehensive world history, Crossroad Publishing Company, USA, 2000. ISBN 0-8245-1846-2.