EASTER 2015
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| Names of some of the nearly 150 victims of the Garissa University massacre - from Faith to Jacinta, from Peter to Philomena, a constellation of Christian names |
Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
April 8, 2015
The stars of 148 new martyrs are shining
brightly in the firmament of the Church. The young Christian victims of Islam, last
Holy Thursday in Kenya, must not be pitied, but envied as they were given the
immense grace of martyrdom.
They are martyrs inasmuch as they were Christians
killed by Allah’s soldiers. What makes a martyr such, is not the violent death
in itself, but the fact that it was inflicted in hatred of the Christian Faith.
It is not death itself that makes the martyr, says St. Augustine but that their
suffering and death be ordered to the truth. Not all of the victims of a persecution
may be called martyrs, [but] only those who meet death at the hands of killers
who hate the Faith.
The martyrs of the University campus in
Garissa, join the countless legions of witnesses to the Faith that have been
massacred over the last two centuries by the persecutors of the Church. The
first genocide of modern times was conducted by the French Revolution. At least
438 religious, nuns and simple lay folk are already venerated as “blessed” and
for the other 591 the processes are now in course for the recognition of their
martyrdom “in odium fidei”. We can
add the Spanish Civil War’s holocaust to this (1936-1939) where 1,512 were beatified and 11
canonized, but the number of victims at the hands of the anarchists and
communists is in the tens of thousands.
On October 13th 2013 at Tarragona in
Catalonia, 522 people killed in hatred of the Faith, before and during the
religious war in Spain, were beatified. It was a ceremony with the greatest
number of Beatified – 522 – and surpassed the one held in Rome, in St. Peter’s
Square on October 27th 2007. Their names are added to the
innumerable martyrs of communism, secularism and now by Islam, in countries all
over the world.
We need to have the courage to name the
killers. Silence continues on the events that have been going on for some time
now: a systematic, planetary Islamic persecution against Christians. After the
episodes in Kenya, Pope Francis read this beautiful prayer: “In Your
face – struck [spat upon and disfigured], we see our sin, in You we see
our brothers and sisters, persecuted,
decapitated and crucified for their faith in You, before our very eyes and
often with our complicit silence.”
Antonio Socci, who has often denounced
the “complicit silence” of the highest ecclesiastical authorities, writes in
Libero: “We are waiting for Pope Francis,
from that [Vatican] window, with all of the prestige he enjoys in the media, to
awaken the powerful of the earth, mobilize his diplomacy and let everyone hear the
cries of grief and pain from the persecuted Christians; may he indicate
continuous prayers from the entire Church, may he launch a great humanitarian initiative for these persecuted
Christians.”
The appeal appears to have been picked
up by Ernesto Galli della Loggia who proposed to the Italian government, from
“Il Corriere della Sera” of April 5th , a fundraising project directed
at all Italians and all of the Nation’s public and private institutions, to
raise the funds necessary for a large dispatch of goods to help the persecuted
Christians. All of this however is not enough, when there is a war raging. We
need to acknowledge that there is a war of religion in act against Jesus Christ
and His Church, fought in the name of the Koran’s Surah which says: “Kill the infidels wherever you find them. This
is the recompense for the unbelievers.” (2,191). This war was not waged by
Christians, but has been taken up against them. Why don’t the Western
governments fight it? The answer is that the West shares the same hate the
persecutors have against their own Christian roots.
Western
secularism not only processes, persecutes and ridicules those who defend the
natural Christian order of things, but it also practices mass genocide. Monsignor
Luc Ravel, Bishop of the French military forces, affirmed:
“We find ourselves having to choose which side to be on; we find ourselves arming against manifest evil without taking a position against the [more] devious kind. The Christian senses that he is caught in a pincer between two ideologies: on the one hand, one that makes a caricature of God which ends up despising man; on the other hand, the manipulation of man which ends up despising God. On the one side, there are the declared and identified adversaries: the terrorists of the bomb, the vindicators of the prophet; on the other side, there are the undeclared but well-known adversaries: the terrorists of thought, promoters of secularism and idolaters of the Republic. In which camp are Christians to be placed? We don’t want to be taken hostage by the Muslims. But we don’t even want to be taken hostage by the conformists either. The Islamic ideology has murdered 17 victims in France. But the ideology of the conformist has 200 thousand victims each year in the wombs of their mothers. Abortion intended as a fundamental “right” is a weapon of mass-destruction.”
The hate the West nurtures for the
Church and Christian Civilization is the hate for its own soul and identity. “The West’s self-hate – wrote Benedict XVI –
can be considered only as something pathological” : the West is open to and
full of comprehension for outside values, “but
it no longer loves itself; it now only sees what is shameful and destructive in
its history, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.”
Today the West rejects the values upon
which it built its identity and simply chooses the destructive heredity of the Enlightenment,
Marxism and Freudism. The gender theory represents the latest intellectual passage
of the mind’s disassociation from reality which turns into a pathological hate
for human nature itself. Andrea Lubitz by crashing his Airbus into the Alps
with 150 passengers, is the expression of this spirit of self-destruction.
Suicide is an extreme but coherent expression of the depressed West: a state of
mind where the soul sinks into nullity, after losing all reason to live. When
absolute relativism is professed one is only self-fulfilled in death.
The slaughter in Garissa is not a
“senseless brutality” , just like the German pilot’s suicide is not an act of
pure madness. These destructive or self destructive acts, have their own
aberrant logic. The depression of the apostates from Christianity corresponds
to the exaltation of the fanatics of Allah: the equilibrium in the world was
broken when it turned its back on Christian principles. And the same
preternatural impulse moves the homicidal fury of Islam and the suicidal
nihilism of the West. The prince of darkness, being unable to make himself God,
wants to destroy everything of God as well as everything resembling Christian
Civilization. Without this diabolic infestation it is
difficult to understand what is happening in the world. And without an Angelic
intervention it is impossible to combat a battle which had its first action at
the moment of creation, when the Angelic front was divided into two forces
perennially in opposition throughout the history of the created universe.
The message of Fatima sees Our Lady preceded
and accompanied by Angels. And those who have read the Third Secret will
remember the tragic vision of a great cross where at its foot the Pope is also
killed : “Beneath the two arms of
the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in
which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls
that were making their way to God.”
As it
was at the very beginning of Christianity, the blood of Christians is the seed
of rebirth in history and of victory in eternity.
[A Rorate translation by contributor Francesca Romana]
