Question 10.169

10.169 In November 2014, on returning from a journey to Lebanon, you posed a particularly difficult question: “Why is it possible for God to allow the children who are most faithful to him to be massacred, even to make a painful offering of their lives?” How are we to understand this question?

The martyrs are the sign that God is alive and always present among us. His merciful love is manifested visibly and tangibly in Jesus Christ, who promised never to leave his Church and those who have chosen to follow him faithfully: “Behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20). Now his presence is tangible in his persecuted disciples: ” ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting’ ” (Acts 9:4-5). The martyrs are not only the physical presence of Jesus in a hostile world that is impervious to the Gospel; they are also man’s most radical response to God’s love. Indeed, there is no greater proof of love than to give one’s life for those whom one loves. God really gave himself for us, even unto death. It is through death that we respond truly and totally to God’s love.

In Deus caritas est, Benedict XVI wrote forcefully: “In the Old Testament, the novelty of the Bible did not consist merely in abstract notions but in God’s unpredictable and in some sense unprecedented activity. This divine activity now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it is God himself who goes in search of the ‘stray sheep’, a suffering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form” (DCE 12).

Today again, in the cruel deaths of so many Christians who are shot, crucified, decapitated, tortured, and burned alive, this “turning of God against himself” is accomplished again for the uplifting and salvation of the world.

According to statistics published by the Pew Research Center Study in January 2014, in one-third of the 198 countries where surveys were conducted, serious persecutions against Christians were reported. Many of those who profess allegiance to Christ are being persecuted throughout the world. Many historians even say that half of all the Christian martyrs in the history of the Church were killed in the twentieth century.

But the blood of Christian martyrs speaks a different language from that of Abel (Heb 12:24). It demands neither vengeance nor punishment, but tells of forgiveness and reconciliation. The martyr is a witness to love and an example of faith for those who are open to the God of mercy and truth. This explains the unexpected success in France of the film Des hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men), which tells the story of seven Cistercian monks from the monastery in Tibhirine who were massacred in March 1996.

Besides, how can we not admire the words of the last testament of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Pakistani Catholic politician who was killed because of his faith in March 2011? He wrote: “High-ranking positions in government have been offered to me, and I have been asked to put an end to my battle, but I have always refused, even at the risk of my own life. My response has always been the same. I do not want popularity, I do not want positions of power. I only want a place at the feet of Jesus. I want my life, my character, my actions to speak of me and say that I am following Jesus Christ. This desire is so strong in me that I consider myself privileged whenever-in my combative effort to help the needy, the poor, the persecuted Christians of Pakistan-Jesus should wish to accept the sacrifice of my life. I want to live for Christ, and it is for Him that I want to die.”

We get the impression that we are hearing again about the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, who came to Rome to suffer the worst outrages, ground up by the teeth of ferocious beasts.

Similarly, I cannot forget the faces of Shahbaz Masih, aged thirty, and of his wife Shama Bibi, who was twenty-four, who were burned alive, thrown into a kiln where bricks were being baked, on November 4, 2014, in the province of Punjab, in Pakistan, leaving three children, and while Shama was pregnant.

Shahbaz Masih and Shama Bibi died in silence, as holocausts offered up to the God of Love. But the victims’ silence does not justify guilty indifference with regard to the fate of thousands of Christians who die every day. How can we ignore the sorrowful cry of the prophet Isaiah: “The righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart; devout men are taken away, while no one understands” (Is 57:1)?

While Christians are dying for their faith and their fidelity to Jesus, in the West, men of the Church are trying to reduce the requirements of the Gospel to a minimum.

We go so far as to exploit the mercy of God, stifling justice and truth, so as to “welcome” homosexual persons-as the Relatio post disceptationem from the last Synod on the Family in October 2014 puts it-who “have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community”. Moreover, this document goes on to say that “the question of homosexuality requires serious reflection on how to devise realistic approaches to affective growth, human development, and maturation in the Gospel, while integrating the sexual aspect.” In fact, the real scandal is not the existence of sinners, for mercy and forgiveness always exist precisely for them, but rather the confusion between good and evil caused by Catholic shepherds. If men who are consecrated to God are no longer capable of understanding the radical nature of the Gospel message and seek to anaesthetize it, we will be going the wrong way. For that is the real failure of mercy.

While hundreds of thousands of Christians are living each day filled with fear, some are trying to keep the divorced and remarried from suffering: they would feel discriminated against if they were excluded from sacramental communion. Despite their ongoing state of adultery, despite their state of life that testifies to a refusal to abide by the Word that raises up those who are sacramentally married to be the revelatory sign of Christ’s Paschal Mystery, some theologians want to grant admission to Eucharistic Communion to the divorced and remarried. The divorced and remarried took it upon themselves to transgress Christ’s command: “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19:6), and consequently they are forbidden to receive sacramental communion; to abolish this prohibition would clearly mean the denial of the indissolubility of sacramental marriage.

Aline Lizotte, a renowned theologian and director of the Karol Wojtyła Institute, correctly argues in L’Obéissance du Christ et le mystère de piété: “The truth of the conjugal union is practiced only within a marriage involving a stable union of one man and one woman, whose expressed public consent implies a radical communion of the gifts of both with a view to handing on the mystery of the person in offspring. Within Christ’s Church, other forms of sexual union, even if they include elements that enable them to resemble sacramental marriage, are, objectively speaking, obstacles to the fullness of conjugal life as it is willed by the Creator and affirmed by Christ. For a baptized person, to say that a de facto union, concubinage, or merely civil marriage can objectively be positive elements leading toward sacramental fullness is to try to rewrite the history of salvation backward!”⁸

Today there is a confrontation and a rebellion against God, a battle organized against Christ and his Church. How is it comprehensible that Catholic pastors should put doctrine to a vote: the law of God and the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, on divorce and remarriage, as though from now on the Word of God and the Magisterium had to be sanctioned and approved by majority vote?

Men who devise and elaborate strategies to kill God, to destroy the centuries-old doctrine and teaching of the Church, will themselves be swallowed up, carried off by their own earthly victory into the eternal fires of Gehenna.

At the next Synod on the Family, what path would we be trying to take if we separated worship, law, and ethics? In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger already wrote: “In the ordering of the covenant on Sinai,. . . there is an essential connection between the three orders of worship, law, and ethics. Law without a foundation in morality becomes injustice. When morality and law do not originate in a God-ward perspective, they degrade man, because they rob him of his highest measure and his highest capacity, deprive him of any vision of the infinite and eternal. This seeming liberation subjects him to the dictatorship of the ruling majority, to shifting human standards, which inevitably end up doing him violence. … [W]orship and law cannot be completely separated from each other. God has a right to a response from man, to man himself, and where that right of God totally disappears, the order of law among men is dissolved, because there is no cornerstone to keep the whole structure together.”/

The West urgently needs to set its sights on God and the Crucified Lord, to look “on Him whom they have pierced”, to rediscover their trust in and their fidelity to the Gospel, to overcome its weariness, and to stop refusing to hear “what the Spirit says to the Churches”, even if they are African. …