“I have Tears and Hope”: Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

On the evening of the first of August, 1996, the Dominican Bishop of Oran in Algeria, Pierre Claverie, was murdered by a bomb placed in a side-road near his house. He had been warned many times about the danger of remaining in the country, especially since an underground group of Muslim terrorists had begun deliberately targeting people like himself. But he chose to stay. In the days after his death, against the wall near the place where he and his driver had been blown up, the local people placed flowers and small written tributes in his memory. Among them was a card from a young Algerian woman called Yasmina. On the card she wrote: “Ce soir, mon Pére, je n’ai pas de paroles. Mais j’ai des larmes et de l’espoir”. (“This evening, Father, I have no words. But I have tears and hope.”) Because these words are both heart-broken and hope-filled, I can think of no words more fitting to use as a title for this paper on martyrdom. “I Have Tears and Hope": Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century.I say “tears”, first, because looking back over the last one hundred years, one soon comes to realize that perhaps no other century in history has witnessed the death and martyrdom of so many people, or has seen so much systematic and deliberate torture of the innocent. And, added to the usual tragic circumstances associated with martyrdom, a vast number of people in the 20th century, found themselves caught up helplessly between the two great opposing ideologies of Fascism and Communism.