During two millennia, the strategy of the persecution and the assassination of believers has been recurring, with times of relative peace and times of surprising violence. In the 20th Century, the Holy See tabulated a total of 13,400 martyrs, witnesses of the faith. The century of persecution and of martyrs has continued being a sorrowful reality, but at the same time glorious, for our faith. And it always completes this phrase of Tertullian, one of the first Christian thinkers: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of new Christians.” The certain thing is that during twenty centuries the Church of Christ has buried and continues to bury its persecutors, with their emperors and their ideologies, meanwhile the Church has remained and will remain alive.
We are, thanks to God, very far from the conflicts that provoked such war. There are isolated acts that have happened in the last years, and although the panorama may change, in principle the horizon appears to be relatively calm. Today, most can go to Mass in peace, without feeling threatened nor insecure.
But the calm also has its dangers, more subtle, less evident, but equal in strength. It does not kill the person, but kills the faith, because the calm makes us sleepy, it anestetizes us, it weakens us, it converts us into comfortable Christians: Christians of the chair and television, Christians of great and self-centered banquets, Christians of Sundays without God, of complements without commitment, of comfortable faith and without action, Christians of those that prefer to follow Christ in a 4×4 y not carrying a cross.
In calm times, we need to remember this petition that the Apostles gave to Christ, upon finding that their faith was weak and small: “Lord, increase our faith! No the faith of the creed, nor the faith of dogmas, but the faith made alive, the faith that applies itself to the ordinary, the faith I need each day in order to move mountains, if it were necessary, or to move trees and plant them in the sea. The sufficient faith that does not allow us to be overcome by discouragement, through laments or through weakness. The necessary faith in order to be able to see clearly in front the road of life.
The faith, by definition, that permits me to hear the voice of God from above all the voices of the world.
Undoubtedly we encounter before a moment in which the Religious value is not spoken so much in the market, in that which the scenes change quickly and imperceivably. And we cannot ask: in the coming future, immediate, before ten or twenty years: Will there be a place for the Church? Will there be a place for faith?
In 1950, a famous writer and Italian thinker, Roman Guardini, diagnosed the situation of the time with a phrase: “The loneliness of the faith (in the future) will be terrible.
The great danger that threatens our faith in the actual times is not the Emperor Nero nor is it Osama Bin Laden. The great danger of our times is the Easy Spirit, mixed with hardness, loss of time, closed off, weak that forces us to seek easy and immediate solutions to the difficulties of life forgeting God. Although for this one has to believe in the power of amulets, of magic of esoteric secrets, hidden logic, of cards and spiritism, including satanism.
The interest for all this type of thing has grown spectacularly, in the youth and in those not so young. It offers of all type encounter a fertile ground in the life of many, characterized by a profound loneliness, through difficult family situations, or through the incertitude before the future. The loss or the accomodation of the faith converts us into easy victims of manipulation, because God eliminating God from our horizon, whatever also prophet can occupy his place.
Therefore, in these times of calm that has touch us, it is good also to ask as the Apostles did with humility: “Lord, increase our faith.”
José David Bogado
translated from Spanish