The murder of the 21 Coptic Christians in Libya by ISIS has raised the issue for Catholics as to whether we can acknowledge them as martyrs as the Copts have done. The SSPX and the Josias blog, for instance, contend that the Copts are heretics and schismatics. The Josias asks if a Copt being murdered by a militant anti-Christian “for his Christian profession, would... suddenly... [be] a good Christian? Would it gain him entry into heaven and blot out his sins?” First, are Copts actually heretics? After the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the Copts, with other Oriental churches, were cast out as monophysite heretics. As so often happens, the argument was more about vocabulary than substance. The Copts formally rejected monophysitism, but they explained their orthodox view of the two natures of Christ with a vocabulary different to Chalcedon’s. However, the issue is dead. In 1988 the Catholic and Coptic Churches issued an Agreed Statement which affirmed the orthodox understanding of Christ. After another agreed Christological statement, in 1994 with the Assyrian Church of the East, it became possible for members of either Church to receive Communion in the other under certain conditions. Could not the same arrangement could be made with the Copts? Yet perhaps we can be bolder yet. When I discussed these martyrs with Graham Hutton, chairman of Aid to the Church in Need, we addressed Pope Francis’s recent reference to an “ecumenism of blood” that unites Christians. He has not developed it theologically, which leaves the way for theologians to take this up and run with it. So we took this ecumenism of blood a little further in light of the ancient doctrine of baptism by blood, which holds that the unbaptised who die for Christ are baptised by their death. So could it be possible to speak of an absolution by blood, by which a Christian’s dying for Christ would absolve any grave sins, even those of schism or even heresy? Pope Francis implies this when he said a few days ago that...