Martyrs have always been honoured by Christians, as indeed by Muslims and Jews. Faith mattered enough to them that they preferred to be faithful than to save their lives. It also mattered enough to their enemies for them to kill because of it.
The Greek word for martyr can also be translated as witness. Throughout Christian history people have honoured the memory of the martyrs. In confused times, too, when people feel that their fellow Christians have been seduced by the softer options offered by the prevailing culture, they have stressed the importance of giving witness.
Evocation of the martyrs can brace the hearers to resist hesitations and reservations and to cut through complexity. They are invited to speak boldly, uphold the simple truth, defend the Church, and bear cheerfully with the opposition and mockery that this might entail.
Yet martyrdom itself is not simple. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, for example, some 13,000 Catholics were among the Christians killed because they were Christian. But for their killers, the faith of their victims was just an incidental aspect of the reality they hated.
For them religion was irremediably tainted by its Western origins. The West was responsible for the humiliation of China by colonial powers, for the enforced opium trade with its corruption of Chinese addicts, and for the economic rape of a defenceless China.
The Boxers killed Christians because they were Western, because they adopted Western ways in the practice of their religion, and were the religious arm of a barbarous culture.
Respect for Christian martyrs must take account of this ambiguity. It certainly does not lessen the respect in which people killed for their faith should be held. They do indeed point out what matters in all human beings: the inalienable value of each human being and their right to respect for their security and their conscience.
For Christians they also point to the strength of a hope that trumps the natural fear of death. These qualities of martyrdom transcend the ambiguous context in which they were killed.
The ambiguities of the context do not reflect on the martyrs but on the flawed communities to which they belong. That is why members of those communities must reflect on the