The Blood of Martyrs Is The Seed of Christians

Martyrs of the 20th Century--
Great West Door of Westminster
Abbey

This past Sunday I noticed a middle-aged man get up and storm angrily out of Church when the priest mentioned the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, bishop of San Salvador, who was murdered while saying Mass in 1980.  Though Father did not mention that the Archbishop was murdered by American-backed forces in the Salvadoran army, the very mention of the Archbishop and his upcoming beatification obviously stirred the memory of this gentleman and triggered his anger.  It was particularly surprising as our parish, while somewhat heavier than we would like with us “late middle-aged” folk, is pretty liberal, both politically and religiously.   But the mention of the murdered Archbishop, as the preacher was saying, is a reminder that the age of martyrdom is not over. 

Over the great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London, the gothic niches have been filled with statutes with the “Martyrs of the 20^th Century.”  Archbishop Romero stands among them.  In addition to Archbishop Romero, the Catholic Church is commemorated with the memorial to Saint Maximillian Kolbe , the Polish Franciscan who, in 1941, voluntarily took the place of another prisoner in a starvation cell at the Nazi Auschwitz Concentration Camp. 

The Anglican Church is represented by Manche Masemola, Archbishop Janani Luwum, Wang Zhiming, Lucien Tapiedi, and Esther John.  The Orthodox Church is represented by the Grand Duchess Saint Elizabeth of Russia, and the Protestant faith by the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoffer and the Baptist, Dr. Martin Luther King. 

Martin Luther King, of course, is familiar to us Americans as the great preacher and apostle of non-violence who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 until his murder by a white racist in 1968.  Just as attempts were made to tarnish the reputation of Romero by his foes both in El Salvador and here in the United States, King was subjected to character assassination by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI who wanted Americans to think that the preacher was a Communist agitator in an effort to discredit his objectives of an America in which there was an equal opportunity for all regardless of race. 

The Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia was a German Princess who married into the Russian Royal Family and converted to Orthodoxy.  (Her younger sister also married into the Romanoffs—married Nicholas II and became the Tsarina Alexandra.)  Elizabeth’s husband, the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei, was assassinated in 1905.  The young widow sold her jewelry to fund a convent of Orthodox nuns who worked among the sick and poor.  She herself headed the convent as its Abbess.  She was arrested during the Revolution and like her sister, the Tsarina, was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.   

Manche Masemola was a young South-African woman murdered by her own family in 1928 for converting to Christianity from the traditional tribal religion.  Esther John similarly was murdered in the Pakistani Punjab region in 1960 for having converted from Islam to Christianity.  Archbishop Janani Luwum has a story much like Archbishop Romero’s.  Luwum was primate of the Anglican Church in Uganda and spoke out against the reign of terror in Idi’ Amin’s Uganda just as Romero had spoken out against the death squads in El Salvador.  He was arrested and died in police custody.  When the body was released to the family, it was riddled with bullet wounds.  Some present claimed that Idi Amin had personally shot and killed the Archbishop. 

Dietrich Bonheoffer was a German Lutheran Pastor who, with other Lutherans formed the “Confessing Church” when they found that the official Lutheran Church was collaborating too closely with the Hitler Regime.  Although already in prison by the time of the 1944 plot to kill Hitler by placing a bomb in the conference room where the dictator was meeting with his staff, Bonheoffer was connected with the would-be assassins.  He was hanged on April 9, 1945—just a few weeks before the fall of the Nazi regime.  

Lucian Tapiedi was a Papuan New Guinea Anglican lay evangelist who was killed during the Japanese invasion of that Island during World War II. 

Wang Zhiming was a Chinese Protestant brutally murdered during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” in 1973  in a stadium before a crowd of 10,000 (mostly Christians) in an attempt to terrorize Christians to give up the practice of their faith.  These ten figures from different parts of the Christian family alert us to the sufferings of Christians today.  Christians in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, India and other countries often hold on to their faith at the cost of their lives. 

When I lived in Rome, I always attended a very special prayer service each Holy Week sponsored by the Community of Sant’ Egidio to commemorate those men and women who in the 20^th and now the 21^st century have laid down their lives for their faith.  We too should remember them—the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.  

Franciscans of the Immaculate--Saint Francis 3

The Crucifixo of San Damiano

which spoke to Francis

In looking at Saint Francis and the lay hermit movement out of which his Franciscans developed I think we can identify seven characteristics.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->1.     <!--[endif]-->Centrality of Christ.  The lay hermit movement of the 13^th century was Christocentric in its spirituality which is to say that they were focused exclusively on Christ as the organizing program of their spirituality.  The Gospels provided them with a direct encounter with Christ who was the only path to the Father.  There certainly was a tender love for the Blessed Virgin  Mary and an admiration for the saints, especially the apostles,  but it was Chris and Christ alone who was their model. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->2.     <!--[endif]-->In their love for Christ, they consciously copied the life of Jesus and his apostles and used the example of the early Christian Community as described in Acts 4 as their model for their own communal life. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->3.     <!--[endif]-->Their identification with Christ was rooted in a deep appreciation of his humanity and in particular with his poverty and his suffering.  Especially for Francs, but certainly for all the lay hermits of the time, the key to imitating Christ was to emulate his poverty.  Poverty was not only the rejection of such luxuries as fine habits and the best of food and drink, but was a rejection of the privileges that came with being identified with the institutional Church.  Francis and others rejected living in monasteries choosing instead only the shabbiest of dwellings.  Clerical titles and honors were rejected in favor of all, even the priests, being called “Brother.”  No distinction was made between the ordained and the non-ordained in their communities or in their ministries to the laity other than in the administration of the sacraments.  In other words, they rejected the hierarchical aspects of the institutional Church and even when they were required to accept the office of bishop or cardinal they maintained the strictest marks of poverty and humility. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->4.     <!--[endif]-->Their rejection of living in monasteries was also due to their commitment to be like the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head—homeless wandering was an essential characteristic of the lay hermit life.  Francis insisted that the hermitages and simple “convents” (as opposed to monasteries) where his “lesser brothers” (Friars Minor) lived be owned by others and only given to their use so that, if others judged them unfaithful to their vocation, they could be expelled.  They were to own nothing, either individually or collectively. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->5.     <!--[endif]-->Lay hermits imitated Christ in their solitary prayer.  While some lay hermit groups, and Francis’ brotherhood was one of them, prayed the Divine Office together, the heart of their prayer was solitary discourse with God in their cells or other abandoned places during the night.  Jacques de Vitry, a Belgian Bishop met Francis and his hermits at the papal court in Perugia in 1216 and mentioned how they “retreated to their hermitages at night to spend the night in prayer.” 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->6.     <!--[endif]-->Lay hermits were not cloistered as were monastic hermits such as the Carthusians. They rejected most monastic practices because their vocation was quite essentially different than the monastic vocation. Rather they were expected to have a ministry among the sick and especially lepers, as well as widows, orphans, the disabled, and the poor.  They also reached out to sinners and those alienated from the Church. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->7.     <!--[endif]-->Finally, in imitation of Christ and the Apostles, Francis and other lay hermits preached the Kingdom of God—a life of discipleship, a new way of living out the Gospel in one’s daily life.  The Kingdom of God is not about what happens after we die—and that was never the emphasis of Francis’ preaching—it is about living in this world under the authority of the Gospel.  The Kingdom of God is putting into practice the teachings of Jesus in our daily lives.  Francis understood this. 

The Franciscans of the Immaculate carry on the Franciscan Charism in several respects.  They live simply and without luxury.  They reach out and encounter ordinary people and particularly those on the fringes of our economic structures.  In their fervor as a new community they certainly reject many of the material comforts to which some religious have accommodated themselves.  On the other hand there are significant ways in which they differ from Francis and the Franciscan tradition.  Their approach to Christ is through his Immaculate Mother and their spirituality is more “Marian” than Chistocentric.  In this regard they follow the example of Saint Maximilian Kolbe more than Francis.  They also, while maintaining a fairly austere life, have kept many of the monastic trimmings that had crept into Franciscanism (and other mendicant orders) through the centuries after Trent and especially in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Their prayer is primarily liturgical/ceremonial rather than solitary and contemplative and their liturgies are, despite their general poverty, given to some degree of splendor in ritual and the accouterments.  Their emphasis is more on teaching the Church than preaching the Kingdom and they are considerably more enamored of the institutional model of Church than the kerygmatic model of Francis.   All of this is perfectly acceptable of course but it indicates that they are more disciples of Saint Maximilian Kolbe than Francis of Assisi and their model of religious life is more based in 19^th century romanticism than the 13^th century evangelicalism of Saint Francis. 

What will happen, as it most usually does in religious life, is that as some of the Franciscans of the Immaculate study the Franciscan charism the group itself will make certain corrections of course to being them more into what we might call “Franciscan Orthodoxy.”  Hopefully in that process they won’t lose the fervor and commitment to simplicity that marks them.  If they can move beyond their attempts at a literal emulation Saint Maximilian to become disciples of Francis, they could be a real leaven for renewal in the Franciscan family.  

Franciscans of the Immaculate--Saint Francis

In my last post I wrote that I would next write about Saint Francis so that we can look at the Franciscans of the Immaculate and see whether they draw their inspiration more from Saint Maximilian Kolbe or from Saint Francis.  To give the spoiler, while I have great respect for this new Congregation I think we will see that they are not Franciscans at all—at least in spirit—but disciples of the Polish Saint who was a martyr of charity at Auschwitz.  And that is not a bad thing at all, it just doesn’t make them Franciscans.  Let me say too, to be fair, while academically I am somewhat of an expert on Franciscanism—my doctoral studies focused on religious movements in 13^th-14^th century Italy—I am not a Franciscan and have no right to say that this person or movement “belongs” or doesn’t “belong.”  Nevertheless, I do know something—more than most—about Franciscanism.

Francis was born in 1181 in Assisi, the only child (as far as we know) of Pietro di Bernardone.  He was baptized Giovanni (John) but nicknamed “Francesco” (Frenchy or Frenchman) by his father—some sources saying that his mother was French.  Pietro de Bernardone was a successful cloth merchant.   Now cloth—the import/export for resale of silks from the Levant, the manufacture of wool, the weaving of brocades and velvets—was the dot.com of the thirteenth century which is to say it was the expanding and lucrative market in which fortunes were made and lost.  Pietro was very successful and the Bernardones were secure in the upper middle class.  Now “upper middle class” is a tricky term; in those days the term was not only financial or even primarily about wealth.  They were bourgeoisie because while they were rich they were not noble.  Many families of the bourgeoisie were richer than the old nobility.  The old nobility had their wealth tied up in land—the urban merchant class had liquid wealth—money and goods for sale.  It often grated on the wealthy that they were not noble and they affected the external signs of nobility—inventing coats of arms for themselves and giving themselves pretentious titles.  They often gave large donations to churches to build family chapels containing burial vaults as the nobility built funerary chapels in cathedrals and monasteries. 

Francis and his friends liked to affect the practices of the old landed families.  When he was about twenty Francis and his friends joined a military expedition against the neighboring town of Perugia.  Francis and his buddies, all spoiled children of parents with too much money to use it wisely, equipped themselves (or their fathers equipped them) as “knights” with horses and armor and set themselves for the glory of war.  What fools.  For all their fancy stuff, these guys were no more knights than they were Martians.  They were the spoiled brats of pretentious families who, unlike the sons of the nobility who were bred to fight, were clueless about the science of warfare.  It was an ignominious defeat and Francis and some of his friends were taken prisoner.  They were lucky they weren’t killed.  They were held for ransom.
About this time Francis became seriously ill.  Some sources imply it was a result of the conditions in which they were held prisoner, others that it was independent of that and was after Francis returned home.  While the illness had physiological dimensions, it seems to have primarily been a nervous breakdown.  Francis’ personality changed drastically during this illness and a slow recovery.  The former party boy became a loner.  He lost his interest in the fast-track lifestyle of his friends.  Instead he began to haunt an old chapel which had fallen into ruins just outside the city walls of Assisi.  He spent long hours wandering through the meadows and orchards that surround Assisi but he always seemed to end up back in this chapel.  It was there that he heard the crucifix speak to him one day: “Francis, rebuild my church that is falling into ruins.”  Obviously, he thought, the church of which Christ is speaking is this chapel of San Damiano and so slowly he began piling up the fallen stones and mortaring them back into place.  Francis, on his rambles through the countryside came into contact with those people who live on the margins of society.  The beggars and the homeless were not permitted to spend the night within the city walls and they slept in barns and sheds or in the open fields.  Probably some sought shelter in the same ruined chapel he was starting to rebuild.  And then there were the lepers.  They were not permitted in the city walls even in the daytime.  They were total outcasts,  picking through garbage for food or old clothes.  Francis began to tend to the sick.  Lepers repulsed him but he knew that they were very image of the crucified—the least of his brothers and sisters to whom Jesus had referred in the Gospel of Matthew. 

We all know the story of how Francis, when confronted by his father for his having given away not only his possessions but some of his father’s wealth, took off his clothes and laid them at his father’s feet and then, naked, turned to the bishop who quickly had him dressed in an old tunic of patched cloth.  This story has long been misinterpreted however.  Francis was not merely renouncing his patrimony to become a beggar but he was embracing a vocation to a particular form of religious life common in those days called “lay hermits.”   Lay hermits were men—the status was limited to men which is why Clare, when she wanted to embrace the same lifestyle had to go to live in a monastery of nuns—who lived in poverty under the protection of the bishop.  They had to be accepted into this status by the bishop but where then given a habit that identified them as hermits—a tunic, usually of mid-calf length, a belt, and a hooded cape called a capuce.  Once accepted by the bishop they had the “right” to beg alms.  They also could preach—not canonical sermons—but what we would call “witness talks” about what the Gospel and teachings of Jesus meant to them.  Lay hermits were not cloistered but usually lived outside the towns or villages where the migrant people and lepers lived.  They often were given the custody of rural chapels or lived in the ruins of monasteries or old barns.  They dedicated themselves to prayer and to this witnessing to the gospel as well as to the care of the sick.  Lay hermits were very common in the 13^th century and not only the Franciscans, but the Carmelites and Augustinians, as well as the Servites, have their origins in the lay hermit movement.  Francis was you quintessential lay hermit.   More on this in the next posting. 
 

Franciscans of The Immaculate--and Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, OFM Conv.

Let me write a bit more about the Franciscans of the Immaculate—or rather let me compare and contrast their two sources of inspiration—Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe OFM Conv.  and Saint Francis of Assisi.
Raymond Kolbe was born January 8 1894 in a section of Poland then occupied by and ruled by Russia.   His father was an ethnic German (and the name was Kolb) and his mother, Polish.  He had three siblings, only one of whom lived to adulthood.  His father was arrested and executed by the Russians shortly before Maximilian was ordained a priest because he, the father, was involved in the movement for Polish independence and nationhood.  From his childhood Raymond was inculcated with a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Kolbe and his elder brother, Francis, in 1907 fled Russian dominated Poland to Lvov in the Austrian ruled Polish Ukraine where they entered the novitiate of the Conventual Franciscans.   Kolbe was sent on to study in Rome where he earned doctorates in both Theology and Philosophy.
During his time in Rome he witnessed a massive demonstration by the Italian Freemasons against the Church and attacking the Pope, Pius X, personally.  Demonstrators filled Saint Peter’s Square—then part of Italy—with blasphemous banners and shouting obscene slogans.  All this needs to be put into the context of Italian independence and the virulent anti-Catholicism of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian George Washington, a Mason and freethinker who hated the Church and papacy.  Italian Freemasons were a noisy minority more inspired by a hatred of organized religion than the principles of Freemasonry, but for Kolbe the Freemasons became the bogeyman of evil attempting to destroy the Church.
This experience of Freemasonry in Italy led Kolbe on his return to Poland to organize the “Militia of the Immaculate,” a movement of Polish laity to combat the influence of Freemasonry.  The battle with Freemasonry became the organizing principle of Kolbe’s life.  Don’t misunderstand Kolbe’s conservativism— Kolbe was a thoroughly modern man and used the modern media in his battle against Freemasonry.  He opened a publishing house that printed catechisms and other instructional materials as well as devotional tracts, he had a daily newspaper with a quarter million readers, and a monthly magazine that had a million subscribers.  He also used the radio in his attempts to reach an audience.  He had two passions: for the Blessed Mother and against Freemasonry.   
Unfortunately, Kolbe and other anti-Freemasons often slid into anti-Semitism.  European Freemasonry in the late 19^th and early 20^th century included many secular Jews precisely because Freemasonry advocated an intellectual and scholarly freedom of thought that more conservative religious voices—orthodox rabbis as well as Catholic theologians—feared.  Freemasonry was the voice of secular intellectualism and embraced the ideas of Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Ingersoll, Einstein and others.  By no means were all Freethinkers Jews but secular Jews were prominent among Freethinkers and this undermined the hopes of many Poles not simply for an independent Poland but the restoration of Catholic Poland, and not only Catholic Poland but a Marian Poland. 
Anti-Semitism is woven into the Polish Catholic culture going back for centuries.  It is not that many Catholic Poles did not have good relationships with their Jewish fellow Poles. (One cannot say neighbors because for the most part Jews and Gentiles lived in separate communities, even when in the same cities and there was not much contact between Christians and religious (orthodox) Jews.  One of my favorite sites in Krakow is Kazimierz, the old Jewish Quarter.  When one goes there now one sees the desolation created by the Holocaust: the elegant synagogues now museums of a vanished, slaughtered, culture.)   Nevertheless, many Polish Catholics and many Polish Jews, at least among those who were integrated into mainstream Polish society, were friends.  Jerzy Kluger and Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II, were boyhood friends and that was not unusual.  But in the Polish tradition there were stories and legends and songs of the blood libel, there were depictions in stone and stained glass of Jews murdering Christian children, bedtime stories and campfire tales made Jews out to be bogeymen and monsters.  Kolbe was not conscious of this flaw in the culture and often reinforced it in his attempts to discredit those he saw as enemies of the Church. 
Kolbe’s work brought the Conventual Franciscans to prominence in Poland and the number of vocations enabled them to open missions in Japan where Kolbe served for several years in the 1930’s—but his publishing work was too important for him to be away for long.  Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for—among other things—sheltering Jews in his monastery.  He was sent to Auschwitz. 
Now Auschwitz was actually four main camps and 45 satellite camps.  Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz I.  This must be differentiated from Auschwitz II or Birkenau which was primarily an extinction camp where prisoners were normally held only until they could be gassed.   Auschwitz I was primarily for long-term prisoners.  While, there are exceptions Jews normally were marked for extinction; Poles were held in Auschwitz I and kept for forced labor.  The two camps, by the way, are remarkably different.  While Birkenau was a massive complex of wooden barracks in which those Jews were held who were not to be gassed immediately but worked to death, wooden barracks that were no more than huge shacks that did not even keep out the cold and which held hundreds of slave-prisoners, Auschwitz I was an orderly village of well-built brick structures which housed the prisoners.  In Auschwitz I There were trees and stone-lined avenues among the barracks.  It was by no means a pleasant place but it wasn’t the architecture of despair and death that marked Birkenau.  Of course most of those sent to Auschwitz II or Birkenau were gassed immediately.
In Auschwitz I Kolbe was put to work as were the rest of the prisoners.  He was only there about five months when three prisoners escaped.  As a warning to other prisoners, ten men were selected to be put in a starvation bunker where they would die a slow and painful death of hunger.  One of the ten, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out “O, my wife, my children!”  Kolbe stepped forward and asked to replace the family man. 
Kolbe lasted two weeks without food or water.  He kept up the courage of the other prisoners by singing with them and telling them stories as well as giving them the reassurances of our Christian faith.  Finally he alone was left alive—barley alive.  A nurse was sent into the cell to give him an injection of Carbolic Acid. It was August 14^th, the vigil of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 
Kolbe’s canonization was not without controversy.  Anti-Semitic passages from his magazine and newspaper were cited.  John Paul II was passionately determined to advance the cause of his fellow Pole however.  The anti-Semitic tone of some of his writings needs to be balanced against his actions which not only show no trace of animosity towards Jews but a recognition of the human dignity of all people regardless of race or creed.  The anti-Semitism found in Polish culture was woven into his personality much as racism has become part of the warp and woof of American culture.  It is a reminder to us all to be very critical of our cultural assumptions and examine our own words to see when they betray prejudices of which we are not consciously aware.  Paula Deen isn’t the only racist in America.  Far from it. 
Kolbe was devoted to the Virgin Mary and is devotion to her can be said to have marked his spirituality far more profoundly than his Franciscanism.  While they are not, of course, mutually exclusive, in our next entry we will look at Saint Francis and see what he brought to the Church.  The Franciscans of the Immaculate are far more disciples of Maximilian Kolbe than they are of Francis of Assisi.  That is not a problem but it needs to be noted.