On Martyrdom.

Years ago, back when I went to the YMI day retreats, one of my group leaders asked us if we knew what it meant to be a martyr. Me, always the over-achiever, raised my arm high and proclaimed that it was someone who died for their faith. The missionaries laughed at me. "Not in America!" they proclaimed.

And I think they are right. The idea of feeding Catholics to lions, or burning them to death as was the fate of the Ugandan martyrs, seems highly unlikely. The American character is too averse to such open persecution, and the evil too blatant, to really grab hold in this country. So what does martyrdom look like in America?

(And you are fooling yourself if you think there aren't American martyrs. The world cannot simultaneously hate the Church and tolerate Her presence. A sinner hates nothing more than the guilt of his sin, and cannot help but harbor a grudge against those who reinforce that guilt by denouncing the sin.)

About once a year, a priest from Vladivostok, Russia, makes the tour of Orange County, preaching at parishes, and asking for support for the missionary work in Russia, undoing the evils of the Communists. He tells the story of what happened to the Church in Vladivostok at the beginning of the Revolution. Most of the city's inhabitants were Orthodox—too many to openly persecute—so the Soviets simply bombed the churches. One Easter Sunday, in front of all the faithful, they simply closed the Orthodox churches, save one, and blew them up, to be rebuilt for The Party's use. The Catholics were not so lucky. They were a small minority, and the Communists saw no reason to try and tolerate them. Catholics were simply rounded up and executed, and the city didn't notice much difference.

So there is strength in numbers. It's hard to imagine a relatively peaceful country killing off a fifth of its inhabitants (or even a twentieth, if we only count those who meet the bare minimum requirement of weekly Mass attendance). 60 million (or 15 million) is a lot of graves to fill. But the tactics of the Soviets may lend an insight. If there are too many to round up, simply keep them out of their churches.

Of course, even the American government closing churches is a bit too much to take seriously. But a literal shutting of doors is not necessary, and probably not even desired by the secularists. Instead, the tactic will be to keep them in their churches. Shut the doors with the faithful inside.

"Leave your religion at the church door," I suspect, will be the descriptive phrase for the age to come. If the world can't keep people from being religious, it can at least try to keep religious people from being in the world. And this is the persecution that we are already seeing.

It has been going on for some time now. First, it started with simple slogans and popular arguments stating that religion had no place in the public sphere. "You can't legislate morality" and "keep your religion off my body" have been popular sayings longer than I can remember. While, at this point, there was no state attempt to enforce it, the mindset that religion was something that should remain in church was circulating amongst the people, and gaining momentum.

And—oddly or not, depending on your world view—the mind set caught on, even with religious people. More and more, I heard religious people claim that they could not involve faith with their daily public lives. President Kennedy forswore any desire to allow moral teachings from influencing his political (and, apparently, personal) decisions. John Kerry claimed that he could not take what was "an article of faith" and turn it into law.

Of course, this view that faith should not influence public life is simply absurd. The six-word response to Kennedy's insistence that politicians should not accept instruction from religious leaders is simply "Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior." John Kerry's "article of faith" only works for certain definitions of "faith", or does he not believe that "all men are created equal?"



Thank God that William Wilberforce did not abide this notion that faith should be locked away from the light of day.

From there, it would not be long before religion became restricted from public life, in law as well as in thought. It started with same-sex marriage. Just a few years ago, the city of Washington D.C. threatened to cut off the Catholic Diocese's necessary public funding if they did not cater to same-sex couples. And last year, the Catholic charities of Illinois announced that they could no longer afford to provide adoption services, and would be shutting down those operations, because the state required that they adopt to same-sex couples if they wished to receive public funds.

Of course, the argument went that, so long as the services received public funds, they had to play by state rules, and there is a certain logic to this. "So long as you live in my house, you follow my rules," no matter how grossly unjust those rules are.

But with the new HHS mandate, the government's open persecution of the Church has reached a bold new high. The government isn't requiring certain practices if the Church wishes to receive federal money. They are requiring certain practices if the Church simply wants to stay in business. The mandate requires that any Catholic agency that employs non-Catholics must pay for health insurance that covers contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs—all of which are very well known to be contrary to Catholic teaching. Catholic schools, universities, hospitals—just about anything other than the parish office (and even that, in some cases) will be required to pay for these things.

I think what angers me even more than the blatant violation of the establishment clause is that there are those so blinded by their perverse world views that they see this as a move by a brave government to put a meddling Church in Her place. I pride myself on being open-minded enough to see how others arrive at their views (no matter how ignorant they may be), but I admit I am utterly flummoxed at how people can be so willfully blind as to turn this around 180° degrees, and not see the open, blatant, and obvious violation of first amendment rights. How does "forced to pay for something you find gravely immoral" become "kept from forcing your beliefs on others"? The bishops were not asking for a ban on contraceptives. They were not asking that health insurance be prohibited from covering it. They were not asking the no one else provide contraceptive and abortifacient coverage, let alone free coverage. They simply asked that they be granted the right not to be forced to do something they find immoral. And yet the willful blindness of some individuals locks them into their twisted and anti-factual world.

So where does this lead? What's the end game here?

Well, note what happened to the Catholic adoption services in Illinois (and the UK, for that matter): the bishops were forced to simply shut down. Stop their charitable services. Remove themselves from the public sphere.

That is the end game.

The Prince of this world does not need the Church gone; he just needs it to be irrelevant. The Church's mission is to "go out to all the world, preaching the good news." To thwart her mission, you don't need to shut her down. You just need to remove her influence from the world.

Sibelius and Biden, being "catholics" themselves, know full well that the bishops cannot and will not commit these grave sins of assisting in abortions (which, they know, is excommunicable). So that leaves them (so the Church's enemies hope) with only one other choice. Bow out. Get rid of the schools, universities, and hospitals. Some will be shuttered, some will simply become secular (I'm guessing Notre Dame will be renamed University of His Majesty, the God-King Barack H. Obama I). But the end will be the same. Remove the Catholic Church from the public sphere. Leave your faith at the church door.

And this takes us to the picture of the American Martyr. The bishop who stands up to the oppressive, anti-Catholic government. The churchman who refuses to leave his faith at the door, and carries Christ with him into the world, and suffers mockery and contempt for it. These martyrs will not be like the martyrs or the Roman Empire or Uganda. Their martyrdom will be more subtle. No blood will be spilled, but crowds will still turn out to watch it (can you say 24-hour news channels?). Their martyrdom will be cheered, with other "catholics" cheering the loudest, in the front row (betrayal is always an inside job). I would not be surprised if many, if not the majority, of those cheering the president God-King on would also cheer if he were to throw Cardinal-designate Dolan in jail, for refusing to comply with the mandate. Even that seems extreme for our American character, but the thing with slippery slopes is you tend to pick up speed fast.

While I hate to be hopeless, I don't know what hope there is, save for the ultimate, assured victory of Christ. Of course, there are the obvious possibilities. If enough bishops, schools, universities, and hospitals simply refuse to follow the mandate, the government may deem enforcement not worth it. There is also the possibility the Supreme Court may actually see reason and toss the whole thing as a gross violation of separation of church and state. Or perhaps a man who doesn't hate the Catholic Church may be elected (donate now!).

In any case, this is the turning point of the American civilization. To quote Mark Shea, "I don’t worry that the Church will survive persecution in the US. I do doubt that the US will survive persecuting the Church."