[CatholicHerald] Fr Jacques Hamel died a martyr’s death. Of this there can be no question. The 85-year-old priest was at the altar offering the sacrifice of Mass, the moment in which the Church makes present the sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood for the salvation of the world, and his blood was literally mingled with that of Christ. The savagery of the attack has left the secular world, and many in the Church, stunned. While there is a natural human revulsion to such crazed brutality, the Church was founded on such acts of bloody witness to the faith.As Damian Thompson rightly pointed out for the Herald yesterday, what appears as an almost unimaginable horror in La Belle France is, tragically, a reality of daily Christian life for those living in Iraq and many other places in the Middle East. I say tragically; any loss of human life is surely a tragedy, but what the Church has proclaimed, from the moment of its foundation, is that the martyr’s crown is glorious. The willingness to receive death for the faith, rather than to deal it out, it the counter-intuitive core of the Christian witness of radical love, and what sets it apart from the pagan religions against which it was first proclaimed. One of the earliest legends concerning the conversion of St George is that, as a soldier in the Imperial Court, he converted after witnessing a Christian accept a sentence of death rather than recant their faith. This, he is supposed to have observed, is true courage to shame any soldier.
When Oscar Romero was beatified last year, many thought his cause was long overdue. Here was a man who had been killed in the very act of saying Mass, surely this was a martyr’s death. Others were more sceptical, not of the late Archbishop’s courage or holiness, but of his prudence by continuing to appear in public despite knowing the great risk of being killed for having spoken out against the violent oppression of the people; the question was asked: was his murder was really in odium fidei, or if it was more personally directed? Wherever you happen to be on that question, there is no such doubt in the case of Fr Hamel: he was killed simply and solely because he was a priest, in a church, offering Mass. The emerging accounts of the murders having preached their rationale from the altar immediately before or after martyring the priest only underscores the immediacy of their hatred for the faith.