Martyrs and the death penalty

Sixtus II, Pope and Martyr, whose martyrdom is celebrated on August 7th

A few days ago, Katherine pointed us to a Commonweal article by B.D. McClay which suggested that Maria Goretti's death, originally presented to the faithful as a sort of heroic sacrifice in defense of virginal purity, has the potential to take on new and unexpected meaning in the wake of the scandals of the sexual abuse of children.  Could the communion of martyrs do the same regarding the death penalty?

Unless you go to daily mass or pray the Liturgy of the Hours, or happen to have an interest in the topic, the church's veneration of its martyrs can slip under your personal radar.  Martyrs pop up on the Roman Calendar throughout the year, but never on Sundays.  If you are old enough to remember the days when the Roman Canon was the only Eucharistic Prayer used in the Roman Catholic mass, you know that it contains two canons of martyrs; when I was a kid, the truncated versions of those lists usually were prayed, leaving the martyrs between the brackets remembered only in the print of our missalettes.  And now that other, shorter and allegedly more form-correct Eucharistic Prayers are available, the Roman Canon, now known as Eucharist Prayer I, is rarely if ever prayed at Sunday mass, at least in the places where I worship. 

But the cycle of martyrs marches on year by year.  They watch over us, even when we don't acknowledge them.  In some cases, including most of the martyrs in the Roman Canon, not much of their lives is even remembered or known except that they died - or to be more precise, were put to death.

Based on my extremely brief, perfunctory and inexhaustive survey of the list of martyrs, there are two major sets of circumstances in which martyrs have been killed:

• They are killed by mobs: this would apply to St. Stephen, the first martyr (and traditionally remembered as a deacon).  As it happens, that mob was lead by Saul, later known as St. Paul, whose remark in Romans 13:4 frequently is cited by Christian death penalty proponents (although, to be fair, that remark is in support of the other main category, death by civil authorities).  If we use a definition of martyrdom that is expansive enough to encompass someone like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, then we might also expand our notion of mob action to include assassinations by a mob of one who took the law into his own hands
  
• They are killed by civil or religious authorities.  This, it seems to me, is by far the more common method of martyrdom.  In the New Testament, all of the other deaths I can think of  (John the Baptist, Jesus, the two thieves to the left and right of Jesus, the Holy Innocents, James) were ordered by civil or religious authorities.  The same is true, we're told, of St. Paul, the other martyrs in the Roman Canon, including today's martyrs - Pope Sixtus and his deacon companions - and other martyrs as various as Thomas More, Paul Miki and Charles Luanga

Martyrs traditionally are remembered for their heroic deaths: for choosing to die rather than renounce their faith.  They are exemplars of the Christian view that our faith is the pearl which we should be willing to give up all our possessions - even our lives - to possess. 

In light of Francis's recent revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it may also be worth reflecting on the fact that most martyrs also are victims of the death penalty: most of them have been put to death by the decree of a ruler or a government.  What's more, it seems to me that it's intrinsic to martyrdom that the martyr's death strike us as undeserving.  That notion of undeserving is worthy of further exploration: it points to gaps between our intuitive (dare we say natural-law?) notions of justice and the state's definition of justice.  But for now, let's leave it that a martyr's death at the hands of civil authorities is an abuse of power.

The development of Catholic teaching on the death penalty has been along the trajectory of human dignity: John Paul saw state-sanctioned executions as further enabling a culture of death; and now Francis has taught that they are a violation of our human dignity, because all humans, even those who commit heinous crimes, have the gift of life, and that gift from God is good.  Thinking about the martyrs, whom we might describe as victims of unjust death penalties, might help us appreciate that all humans have a right both to life and to religious freedom.  The latter is ordered to helping us to get to know God, neither constrained nor coerced by human governmental power.  Violating either right is a gross violation of human dignity.  The martyrs may have important lessons to teach us about our contemporary world.