Rorate Caeli

Easter 2015: In Kenya and around the world, Martyrs, Martyrs, Martyrs, and more Martyrs
- Roberto de Mattei

EASTER 2015
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]