To die for marriage is to die for Jesus.
Christian Marriage — the faithful, exclusive lifelong bond between one man and one woman — is essential to the Gospel (see Matthew 5:32, 19:3–9).
That is the truth behind Pope Francis’ decree of Jan. 27 proclaiming that five Franciscan friars who died in 1597 were killed in odium fidei — in the hatred of the faith.
The five martyrs were Spanish missionaries to the New World, serving among the native Guale people in territory that is now the state of Georgia. They were targeted during a native uprising against the Church.
A question arises, however, when Christians are killed not by pagans or nonbelievers, but by other Christians: Were they killed in the hatred of the faith, or for other motives? The answer distinguishes martyrdom from mere murder.
The question comes up in the case of the “Georgia Martyrs” because the man who launched the uprising was a baptized Christian. Married at the time of his conversion, a warrior named Juanillo wished to take a second wife. The missionary friar Pedro de Corpa rejected the idea, and Juanillo beheaded him. Then followed a spree in which four other friars in the region were hunted down and killed.
They died as martyrs because they died defending an indispensable doctrine of the faith.
But Pedro de Corpa and his companions were not the first martyrs for marriage. They are part of a tradition that stretches back to Christian beginnings.
In matters related to marriage, the early Christians immediately set themselves apart from their pagan neighbors. They believed in the permanence of marriage. They rejected adultery, concubinage, and polygamy. Most controversially, perhaps, they refused to participate in sexual acts that their religion forbade as sins. This ruled out all forms of sodomy — sexual activity that was intentionally nonprocreative.
The problem was that such acts had become habitual for Roman couples.
In A.D. 155, St. Justin Martyr wrote of a woman in the capital city who had lived that way with her husband — until her conversion to Christianity. Both she and her husband indulged “in pleasure contrary to the law of nature” not only with each other, but also with their “servants and hirelings.” After converting, she refused to continue in this way of life, and the couple became estranged. The husband went off to Alexandria, Egypt, where he could freely carry on extramarital affairs.
Fearing, however, that she was complicit in his sins, she petitioned the emperor himself for a divorce.
Her husband did not want to lose her dowry, and so he, in turn, denounced her as a Christian, in order to bring about her death under the law.
For some reason, the emperor — who must have known the couple — chose not to prosecute the woman on that charge. But now the aggrieved husband wanted vengeance, and so he went on to denounce the man who had instructed his former wife in the faith, and there he succeeded. The instructor, named Ptolemaeus, was hastily tried and died as a martyr for marriage.
The historian Robert M. Grant observed, in a 1985 study, that sexual morality “was a prime aspect of ‘Christian formation’ ” in the mid-second century. The early Church placed a premium on healthy marriages. In the generation immediately after Justin’s, the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, in instructing adult converts, referred to acts of marital sodomy as “unseemly embraces” and compared them to the pleasures dispensed by prostitutes.
For such boldness, Clement would eventually have to flee his city.
For all Christians in the Roman Empire, to teach the truth about marriage — or live the truth about marriage — was a dangerous thing.
The problem is perennial, even in a nominally Christian society.
Perhaps the most famous martyr for marriage is St. Thomas More, a layman who lived in Catholic England in the 16th century. A renowned jurist and author, he was a close friend and advisor to the king, Henry VIII.
When Henry was unable to produce a son (and heir) with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, he feared for the stability of the dynasty, and so he sought an annulment from the pope. Henry entrusted the matter to his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. But Wolsey failed to persuade the pope, and so the king removed the cardinal from office, replacing him with Thomas More.
But More disagreed with Henry’s claim that his marriage to Catherine was invalid, so he refused to sign the king’s repeated petitions for annulment. Nevertheless, he kept his opinions to himself and did not publicly oppose or criticize the king.
Henry eventually rejected not only the pope’s decision in the matter of the annulment, but even the pope’s authority over him. He declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England, requiring all clergy and government ministers to acknowledge him as such.
More and the bishop of Rochester, Cardinal John Fisher, refused to accept Henry’s claims. They would not affirm Henry’s annulment. Nor would they recognize his second marriage as valid. They did not speak publicly about these matters, but their silence was resounding. Both men were tried and convicted of treason and died by beheading in the summer of 1535.
They were accused, tried, convicted, and executed by men who had been baptized as Catholics. Their crime was upholding the truth about marriage.
Which brings us back to the Georgia Martyrs, who died just a few years after More and Fisher.
In the year 2007, Archbishop José H. Gomez preached about them: “They were martyrs for the sanctity of marriage — for the truth of the Gospel in the face of a culture that rejected those truths.”
But their lives are not merely history lessons, he added. “They are obvious role models and intercessors for us as we seek to evangelize our own dominant American culture. In which human love is so distorted. In which the belief in the fatherhood of God and the mission of the Church is undermined and called into question.”
If marriage is what the Gospel says it is, then its success cannot be measured by worldly standards of what’s “normal.”
If marriage is what the Gospel says it is, it is indeed — in every age — a matter worth dying for.
