Dear Editor, The brutal murder of Fr Jacques Hamel while celebrating Mass in northern France is one Catholics must reflect on with care.
In your report on the murder’s repercussions among French Catholics (‘French Catholics in fear after Islamists kill priest at Mass’ IC 28/07/2016), you quote Fr Aidan Troy as saying that “attacking a man as he celebrates the Eucharist has set a new low”, as well as papal spokesperson Fr Federico Lombardi’s description of how Pope Francis condemned the murder as an act of “horrific violence”. According to other reports I have seen, the Pope has also described the murder as “absurd violence”.
It is striking, and peculiar, that neither Fr Troy nor Pope Francis seems to have described the murder as a martyrdom, especially since it seems clear that Fr Hamel is a martyr by the Church’s oldest and most straightforward definition. Indeed, comparisons with other priests slain at the altar, notably St Thomas Becket and Blessed Oscar Romero, make this all the clearer. St Thomas and Blessed Oscar were murdered because of how their Christianity was expressed, the former defending the Church’s rights as they were then understood, and the latter because of his public condemnations of the violence then rife in El Salvador.
Fr Hamel, on the other hand, was killed for no reason more elaborate than that he was a Christian celebrating the act that is, as the Council puts it, “the source and summit of Christian life”. In this his martyrdom recalls those of the many early Christians who Nero threw to the lions or tied to poles to burn as human candles lighting the streets of Rome, or the many thousands of Middle Eastern Christians who have been slain since the deposing of Saddam Hussein in 2003 destabilised the whole region.
Why delay in recognising the reality of Fr Hamel’s death?
Yours etc.,
Richard O’Connor,
Lucan, Co. Dublin.