ated him from the erroneous physiology of his birth. Modern tormentors tend to prefer the slow and agonizing spiritual death to the quick and painless physical one.
Thinking over the Christian martyrs in all of their awe-inspiring diversity, I sometimes find it fun to speculate: for which Christian principle would I prefer to die? Transubstantiation? The Trinitarian formula? It is easy to lose oneself in a kind of holy envy of generations past. Even St. Thomas More, though no stranger to tawdry political realities, was ultimately able to offer his life as a testament to the authority of Rome. We for our part are most likely to suffer over sex, since that is the place where the enemy has now concentrated his forces in the battle for souls. It is a thoroughly unedifying subject, even to those of us who understand the significance of this skirmish in the larger war over the normativity of nature. By comparison, a good, impassioned fight over Christology would be a breath of fresh air.
Like all good soldiers, however, we must accept the assignments given us, without complaining that we would prefer to be set in a different part of the battlefield. It is not our prerogative to choose the hill on which we would prefer to die. But we may rest assured that defending the integrity of the faith will never, in the long run, turn out to be a trivial effort. Like the Japanese martyrs before us, our witness may teach our children that it is our individual willingness to fall that ultimately makes our Church indestructible.
Editor’s note: The image above is a detail from a monument in Nagasaki, Japan, depicting 26 Christians, including two teenage boys, martyred in 1597.