This is not how Christians in the West expect martyrdom to be. The murder of a priest in the middle of Mass seems like it should entail an intensely personal narrative. One like the story of Thomas Becket, who made an enemy of the king and his knights, or of Oscar Romero, who did the same with the Salvadoran state. We don’t expect martyrdom to seem random, impersonal. In odium fidei is the letter of the law, yes, but we expect at least a little in odium personae. We have that luxury in the modern West, to presume individuality, while our Roman memory of mass persecution lives on in the Middle East.
I’m at First Things, writing about public religiosity and the martyrdom of Fr. Jacques Hamel.
Catherine L. Addington 