The Voices of Blood
Gaughan, Norbert F
In Brief The Voice of Blood: Five Christian Martyrs of Our Time, by William J. O'Malley, S.J., Orbis Books, $7.95,195 pp. "Lives of Saints," as with so many traditions, have fallen on hard days....
...The fifth, Jesuit Father John Bosco Bernier, was killed in Brazil...
...They died, assassinated for a political cause, because the black guerrillas '' wanted their own country...
...Nero never dies...
...But they tell us more about the newer faces of evil and power in our day...
...The tales of "Five Christian Martyrs of Our Time," presented by William J. O' Malley, S.J., fit that pattern...
...True...
...His only crime: a defense of the rights of the poor...
...The missionaries were seen as enemies of the revolution so they died...
...It is almost illegal to be a Catholic in our world...
...Black guerrillas, angry against their own people because they cooperated with the white ruling class, killed these men...
...It is dangerous to be a Christian in our world...
...Pious niceties and hortatory expositions of other times presented the protagonists as pallid, unrealistic...
...unwilling, in a way, saints...
...The priest died in an unknown place, his life almost unknown, made known by his death...
...he changes faces...
...A Jesuit pastor, Father Rutilio Grande, is an unlikely prospect to challenge the military government of El Salvador (this was before the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero...
...The Jesuits had come to serve the blacks in a non-political way...
...Unlikely martyrs...
...he was assassinated by out-of-uniform policemen...
...NORBERT F. GAUGHAN...
...The priest said it well in his sermon...
...Of French descent, he was Brazilian, who was undistinguished in minor Jesuit offices and ended up in the Brazilian backwaters...
...Three other martyrs of the Gospel were English Jesuits in Rhodesia: Fathers Christopher Shepherd-Smith, Martin Thomas, and Brother John Conway...
...Now we have stories of anti-heroes, unwillingly dragged to confrontation with the totalitarianisms of today...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 2
