Testimony of Hope by Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan

Author:Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan [Van Thuan, Francis Xavier Nguyen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Martyrs of charity

I would like to remember for a moment the "kingdom of the wretched," as one deportee called it, the prison camp in the Solovetsky Islands of Russia.

One detainee remembered an image of love in the midst of that hell:

Uniting their efforts, a Catholic bishop who was still young worked together with an emaciated old man—an Orthodox bishop with a white beard, ancient in days but strong in spirit, who energetically pushed the load.... Any of us who would one day have the good fortune of returning to the world, would have to testify to what we had seen here and now. What we saw was the rebirth of the pure and authentic faith of the early Christians: the union of Churches in the persons of the Catholic and Orthodox bishops who participated unanimously in the duties, united in love and humility.

This happened in Solovetsky, "alma mater" of the Soviet prison camps. John Paul II said: "Perhaps the most convincing form of ecumenism is the ecumenism of the saints and of the martyrs. The holy communio sanctorum (communion of saints) speaks louder than the things which divide us."

Among the martyrs of Soviet Communism, we can remember only a few faces. Many of the names are known only to God. The Orthodox Metropolitan Benjamin of Petersburg, martyred in 1922 after a trial based on false accusations, wrote this before his execution:

Times have changed and now we have the possibility of suffering for the love of Christ—sufferings both from our own people and from foreigners. Suffering is hard and heavy, but according to the measure of our suffering, divine consolations superabound. It is difficult to cross...this boundary and to entrust oneself totally to the will of God. But when this happens, man is filled with consolation, he no longer feels these terrible sufferings....

These terrible sufferings did not weaken the many witnesses in the Nazi camps. Even there, love was lived, as demonstrated by the life of St. Maximilian Kolbe, patron of the difficult twentieth century. He did not consider his own survival to be the supreme value of his life—"strong as death is love" (Song 8:6). The inhumanity of the concentration camps—that terrible underworld, school of hate and annihilation of the person—did not suffocate that love which is strong to the point of martyrdom. "Many waters cannot quench love," continues the Song of Songs, "neither can floods drown it" (8:7).

A multitude of martyrs spoke languages different from those people among whom they died—the missionaries who did not leave their communities at the moment of danger and who died while other foreigners escaped. Missionary martyrs whose fear did not extinguish love. Martyrs of love. In 1995, six members of the Sisters of the Poor of Bergamo died in the Ebola epidemic in the Congo. Despite the danger of infection, the sisters that stayed chose to remain behind in order to take care of the sick. Others arrived to help them. They all died. One of them, Sr. Dinarosa, was asked: "Aren't you afraid, being always in the midst of the sick?" She responded: "My mission is to serve the poor.

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