STYLES IN MARTYRDOM

By John T. Elson

THE sudden flight of Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty from his "exile" in the U.S. embassy in Budapest marks the end of yet another chapter in the history of the cold war (see story opposite). To anyone old enough to recall the dark presence of untempered Stalinism in Eastern Europe, Mindszenty was, and is, a stirring, heroic, tragic figure. To many people, he remains a symbol of the ultimate incompatibility of Communism and Christianity, of the righteous intransigence of a man of God before godless men. Others would acknowledge his courage and tenacity but add that Mindszenty is also a stiff-necked, ancien regime autocrat, out of step with the present mood of the church he has sought to serve. Still others might say, with some justice, that his proud stand was a wasteful expense of spirit, since in the end it changed nothing and accomplished nothing. sb Thus some questions arise. Is Mindszenty a genuine martyr, a living lesson for the Christian world? Was his safe, if uncomfortable self-imposed imprisonment the moral equivalent of a saintly sacrifice or an act of stubborn self-indulgence? (If he wanted real imprisonment or, conceivably, death, he could quite easily have walked out of the embassy into the custody of the ever-present Hungarian secret police.) Is he a witness to the permanence of principle or just another solitary figure that history has bypassed?

Any answer depends upon how one understands the term martyr. The word itself means witness, and in the standard dictionary sense, it refers to someone who has given or at least risked his life in order to testify to the truth or relevance of the Christian faith. In the early church, the term was applied to anyone who preached the good news of Christ despite obstacles or threats of persecution; only in the second century did martyrdom take on the connotation of dying for the faith. Somewhat later, the church came to accept a "white" martyrdom as well as the "red" martyrdom of death --meaning the surrender of something personally cherished for the love of God.

From the viewpoint of hagiography, the martyr is the ultimate Christian hero, the most noble of saints. Sociology, with a cooler eye, sees him as something else: a special kind of social deviant. As Sociologist Robert K. Merton points out, the "historically significant nonconformist," his own definition of martyr, often risks his life for a variety of motives, some noble, some not. There are cases, he notes, in which martyrdom may be little else than "an expression of primary narcissism" or "a need for punishment." Like Camus's Rebel, or Peter Viereck's "unadjusted man," the martyr is one who ultimately refuses to act according to the accepted norms of his society. He is psychological kin, in short, to both the gadfly and the criminal.

Martyrs still play an important role in the spiritual life of the church, even in an age when the cult of saints is heavily de-emphasized. Only last year the church (not without stirring up some anti-ecumenical feelings) canonized 40 English and Welsh martyrs who died for the faith during the Anglican Reformation. Martyrs, moreover, remain inherently fascinating. The wit and gentle wisdom of St. Thomas More shines across the centuries, even filtered through stage melodramas and screenplays. Protestants, of course, do not canonize their religious heroes; if they did, their list of saints would surely include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the brilliant Lutheran theologian who was executed for his role in the anti-Hitler conspiracies. Without formal sanction, the word martyr has been applied to quite a number of modern heroes: Camilo Torres, the Colombian ex-priest who was killed by government forces after he joined a band of Marxist guerrillas, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Berrigan brothers. In an age when many once sacred terms now have secular connotations, martyrdom has been attributed to men of uncertain faith or none at all: Malcolm X, for instance, a dissenter from the rigid dogmas of the Black Muslims, or that inefficient picaresque revolutionary, Che Guevara.

Many Christians who would apply the word martyr to the Berrigans are less enthusiastic about bestowing the same accolade on Mindszenty. The reason is not the comparative quality of courage involved but the politics of the matter. To Catholic liberals, the Berrigans simply have a better and more noble cause to suffer for than Mindszenty had. That may or may not be true, but the problem points to the reality that politics and spiritual decisions, in cases of martyrdom, are often closely intertwined. Even the assorted virgins and bishops who were fed to the lions for the entertainment of Roman citizens died political deaths; their refusal to acknowledge the imperial deities was an offense against the state. Presumably the pagans who burned and tortured missionaries thought of these noble martyrs as unwelcome cultural imperialists.

From this perspective, it is quite clear that Mindszenty's suffering and self-exile were also political acts, as was the Berrigans' illegal burning of Selective Service files in protest against the Viet Nam War. Without demeaning the spiritual zeal of the brothers, it can be argued that the cardinal is somewhat closer to the classical tradition of martyrdom than they are. Father Dan and Father Phil were imprisoned for breaking the law on behalf of what has become a quite popular cause, even a fashionable one. Yet more often than not, martyrs have died for unfashionable, even oldfashioned, causes. Thomas More, for instance, represented the old order of the papacy as set against the progressivism of Henry VIII's new religious establishment; although St. Thomas was personally popular, his Romishness was not. sb In Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, someone suggests that More was probably a saint because of "his willful indifference to realities which were obvious to quite ordinary contemporaries." The true martyr, in short, is not a realist in the eyes of men, although he may well be so in the mind of God. Mindszenty. it can be fairly said, fits the pattern. His resistance to Communism may have once been a popular cause--although perhaps more so outside of Hungary than within. His self-exile in the embassy may have begun as a necessity, but he stubbornly refused to retreat long after it became realistic to do so, and he remained steadfast in his single-minded sense that this was God's will for him until the Pope commanded otherwise.

There is much to be said for Christian realism: after all, the church could not have survived all these centuries without accommodating itself, sooner or later, to the tide of politics. But a living faith also needs its unpredictable, even irritating witnesses: men and women who will not cut and run in times of stress, who will stand up for unpopular and unrealistic causes in the name of Christ. It may be realistic now to say that the sacrifice of Cardinal Mindszenty is irrelevant. But one should not assume that history will necessarily find it so.

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