A priest who played an important role in my spiritual formation used to tell us: “You cannot truly say that you love Jesus if you are not prepared to die for him. Do you want to be a martyr? We should all desire to be one.”
Of course, he was trying to provoke us into reflecting on our spiritual dispositions. In the Catholic tradition, no one seeks martyrdom; indeed, most of the saints who died as martyrs would have insisted that they were unworthy of such an honour. What this priest meant was that martyrdom is not merely a relic of the past, but a reality that remains possible today. Should that moment ever come, would we be ready to choose God above all else?
