The Anchoress

The 21st Century martyrology expands. Check out this very disturbing story at Gates of Vienna:

The Assyrian International News Agency reports the latest atrocities against Christians in Iraq:

Father Alexander was beheaded on Wednesday.

But there is more bad news: Father Adris Hanna sent the following information:

The Bishop in Mosul wrote me an email tonight and told me that the funeral will be held in Mosul tomorrow. Christians are living a terrified life in Mosul and Baghdad. Several priests have been kidnapped, girls are being raped and murdered and a couple of days ago a fourteen year old boy was crucified in the Christian neighborhood Albasra. I have also spoken to a group of nuns that were robbed and treated brutally on their way between Baghdad to Amman in Jordan. The murder of father Paulus is the final blow for Christians, and now only hell is expected for the Christians of Iraq. [All emphasis mine - admin].

Dymphna points out that Iraq is a complicated place we are only just beginning to understand. Please go read her whole post.

The slaying of Christians has commenced in many parts of the world, quietly - the press doesn’t really cover it, much. Killing Christians is not as interesting as provocative gay IM’s sent by (hiss) Republican congressmen…heck, dead Christians are only marginally more interesting to the press than the shysterism of (rah) Democrat Senator Minority Leader Harry Reid, in which - as near as we can tell - the press has no interest at all.

The 21st century will see an expansion of the Christian martyrology. Much of it is going unseen, in places we never think about, but some of it is becoming known. The priest in Turkey killed over Danish cartoons which “insulted” the prophet, Muhammed. Sr. Leonella, killed in Somalia, possibly because of a speech by Pope Benedict which angered millions who never seemed to read the thing. Of course, she may not have died because of Benedict’s speech. The elderly nun already required the protection of bodyguards because cowardly people hated the fact that she worked to help the helpless. “I forgive, I forgive,” murmered Sr. Leonella, as she died.

Only last week we watched the Amish community bury 5 of its daughters, and we heard how the eldest child asked to be killed first, hoping to buy time to save the others. Of course they are martyrs - they may not be martyrs to an ideology or a theology, but their victimhood was directly connected to their innocence, and to their faith-founded pacifism. And maybe that’s something we need to talk about. The evil propelling their murderer forward was an evil that preyed upon those little girls specifically because a victory over them seemed “easy,” because of who and what the girls were.

I suspect that what we are seeing is not merely a resurgence of a specifically “Christian” martyr-mood. Daniel Pearl was killed for being a Jew who trusted, and who actually wanted to give sympathetic hearing to his murderers. Film director Theo Van Gogh was brutally killed because he trusted that the right to free expression still trumped everything else.

To trust is an innocent - some would say naive - thing. But innocence lives in a Godly place, and so does trust. We are watching innocent people of all faiths Christians, Jews and Muslims (particularly Muslim women) fall under a sword which increasingly overshadows all nations no matter how innocent, no matter how trusting, or how “sensitive.” We are also watching the evil which devalues life in its beginnings, and at its end and whenever it doesn’t “contribute” to society, have an unimpeded frolic in innocent blood. Like Anita Ekberg in the fountain in La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life!), the evil opens its arms and lets the blood wash over it. It poses, smiling as though it has done precisely the thing that needed doing.

The evil, manifesting itself under religious or secularist auspices, is feeling fiesty and emboldened. But dark can never overpower light.

Still, things are going to get worse, before they get better. There are problems in Iraq and they are complicated and they necessitate some re-thinking, perhaps. But the goings on in Iraq are not isolated, and I don’t think this priest beheading, this crucifixion, these rapes, have anything at all to do with the war on the ground, and a great deal to do with the supernatural war no one wants to talk about. Perhaps.

Good people are being slain all over the world, either by pious monsters or by impious darklings who have accepted spiritual oppression and thus lost their way. To some it might look like only the secularists are “safe.”

Uh-huh. For the moment.