One of the challenges to believing that God’s will is always present is observing the world of growing irreligiosity, violence, terrorism, and atheistic ideologies around us. The divine plan is clearly beyond the human ability to comprehend. The belief that God is in control of all things challenges the rationality and secularism of our world, and seems to social media, the academic world, modern science, and popular culture ludicrous.
God requires our faith even and especially when the majority don’t believe in, or refuse to accommodate, Divine Providence. Throughout most of the past 500 years of American history, Roman Catholics have faced anger, resistance, violence, discrimination, and loss of inherent rights. The most courageous, the most convinced of God’s will, were those willing to die for their beliefs—the martyrs.
Martyrs are “witnesses” to God’s Providence, so much so that they often intuitively anticipate their own deaths at the hands of disbelievers and oppressors. Martyrs are faithful believers who offer their lives for the sake of Truth, knowing that God’s will orders all things, including in their own lives.
For the first three centuries of American history, martyrs were typically the missionaries bringing the Gospel to indigenous peoples; some were receptive, some were not, and when they weren’t, violence resulted.
During the past two centuries, society, culture, and technology has produced a modern mentality that eschews God and His Providence, professing instead that humans are the ultimate expression of the evolution of life. Modern ideologies besides Darwinism include Marxism, the belief that material forces dominate a godless world; behavioralism, the belief that humans are inherently irrational, dominated by the subconscious mind; and relativism, that truth depends on the whims of the individual. With such ideologies holding sway over most of the world, it’s an easy task for the government to assume the role of God and demand obedience and worship from the masses.
Since such governments are often oppressive to opposition and in control of powerful armies, those who stand up for God oftentimes accept God’s will that their lives be a witness to His Providence.
What happened to Mexico during the nineteenth century, in the wake of independence from Spain, illustrates this. The Mexicans identified the Catholic Church with imperialist Spain, and the decades following independence saw increasing restrictions on the Church’s influence. Constant political conflict between liberals and conservatives led to economic, social, and cultural instability—and one of the casualties was Christian morality.
Benito Juárez, leader of the Liberal faction, fought against the power and influence of the Catholic Church. Liberals had the wealthy and educated backing them against the vast numbers of uneducated peasants who retained their faith, not giving in to modern ideologies. Oppression of Catholics erupted into the Cristero War in the early twentieth century. Mexico’s 1917 Constitution upheld earlier governmental acts seeking to bring secularism to the Mexican people.
The Church was not silent during these years when modernity was taking over the world. Vatican I, for example, proclaimed:
Everything that God has brought into being he protects and governs by his providence, which reaches from one end of the earth to the other and orders all things well. All things are open and laid bare to his eyes, even those which will be brought about by the free activity of creatures.
Vatican II almost a century later provided an incisive assessment of modernity: “Never before has man had so keen an understanding of freedom, yet at the same time new forms of social and psychological slavery make their appearance.” The Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on the Persecution of the Church in Mexico accused the Mexican government of trying to rid the Church from Mexico, depriving it and its people of basic rights, such as the right to worship freely.
A wonderful, insightful portrayal of the conflict between government and religion in twentieth-century Mexico is Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The book evokes the life of an unsuspected martyr, known only as the “whiskey priest,” a drunkard and scoundrel who accepts an unanticipated role of supporting God’s will in providing the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, for oppressed people, while continually fighting against his own sense of unworthiness and terror of being caught and executed.
Opposite him is the Lieutenant, a fervent atheist who supports government repression, and who is infuriated “to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God,” believing himself in “vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, [and] of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.” The Lieutenant stops at nothing to capture the whiskey priest and halt the sacraments from providing the Mexican people with a hope beyond the secular power of the government.
The priest’s terrified acquiescence to God’s will in performing the sacraments finally leads to his capture and martyrdom. The book wonderfully assesses what happens to a society in which the rational, secular state forbids religious beliefs and functions, and the people become numb and dead inside. To fight this, martyrs sacrifice themselves.
A historical example to support’s Greene’s fictional portrayal is Jose Sabás Reyes Salazar (1883-1927). A native of Jalisco, Mexico, Sabás was ordained in Tamaulipas, a barren, harsh land where he served until government persecution forced him to flee to Tototlán, Jalisco, where he again faced persecution in delivering the sacraments to the faithful. He was a priest during the presidency of Plutarcho Calles, whose administration oppressed Catholic worship on pain of imprisonment and death.
Fr. Sabás realized that continuing to deliver the sacraments in secret would result in personal disaster, but he could not resist God’s call. Federal troops in 1827 entered the town searching for Catholics; Fr. Sabás took shelter in the home of one of the families he served. When the troops entered the home, Sabás, to prevent the family from suffering on his behalf, came out of hiding, knowing that his capture would result in torture and death. He conformed to the will of God, praising Him as the torturers and executioners slowly took his life away.
Another example of priestly martyrdom occurred in Guatemala only a half century ago. Stanley Rother (1935-1981) was a small-town Oklahoma boy turned priest and missionary to a small village in Guatemala in the late 1960s. He served for over a decade as violence increased during the Guatemalan Civil War. He knew that his life was in danger, writing his bishop in 1980:
The reality is that we are in danger. But we don’t know when or what form the government will use to further repress the Church. . . . Given the situation, I am not ready to leave here just yet. There is a chance that the government will back off. If I get a direct threat or am told to leave, then I will go. But if it is my destiny that I should give my life here, then so be it. . . . I don’t want to desert these people.
There is no more compelling proof of the power of faith and belief in God’s goodness and the rightness in conforming to His will than Rother’s simple statement: “so be it.” In it, we hear echoed the fiat of the Virgin, “Let it be done unto me,” and the words of Christ in the Garden, “not my will but yours be done.”
God, the supreme Being, gives life and demands life. Who are we to deny our existence to our Creator when He calls for it?
Image from Wikimedia Commons
