Persecution
In the first centuries after Christ’s death, the Church was loved by some people and despised by others. Many people saw Christians as challenging the old religion or the established social order. This new Church needed to be stopped. How? Easy: make Christians renounce their faith, or if that didn’t work, exterminate them.
Persecutions sprang up in different places and at different times. Some were smaller such as the first one in Jerusalem. It was there that the Deacon Stephen was stoned to death for his faith. He was the first martyr, the first of many.
Later there were much larger persecutions where hundreds or even thousands of Christians were killed at a time. The odd thing though, was that no matter how many Christians you killed, there always seemed to be more. The old saying held true; “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.” It was the seed which, when planted, grew and blossomed more with each new persecution.
The fact is, today the Church is larger than ever with over a billion Catholics in total: one out of every six people on earth. The martyrs keep coming too. In 2009, there were at least thirty—seven Catholics killed for the faith.
One of the reasons why there are so many Catholics today, two thousand year after Christ, is because of the martyrs of the 20th century. The hundred years between 1900 and 2000 were probably the bloodiest hundred years in the Church’s history; it was a century of martyrdom.
There are no exact numbers, and we don’t know all the places where Catholics were martyred, but here are some of them: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Cuba, Angola, Algeria, Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, North Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, Spain, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, including Poland, Ukraine, Albania, Romania, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia.
Persecutions sprang up in different places and at different times. Some were smaller such as the first one in Jerusalem. It was there that the Deacon Stephen was stoned to death for his faith. He was the first martyr, the first of many.
Later there were much larger persecutions where hundreds or even thousands of Christians were killed at a time. The odd thing though, was that no matter how many Christians you killed, there always seemed to be more. The old saying held true; “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.” It was the seed which, when planted, grew and blossomed more with each new persecution.
The fact is, today the Church is larger than ever with over a billion Catholics in total: one out of every six people on earth. The martyrs keep coming too. In 2009, there were at least thirty—seven Catholics killed for the faith.
One of the reasons why there are so many Catholics today, two thousand year after Christ, is because of the martyrs of the 20th century. The hundred years between 1900 and 2000 were probably the bloodiest hundred years in the Church’s history; it was a century of martyrdom.
There are no exact numbers, and we don’t know all the places where Catholics were martyred, but here are some of them: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Cuba, Angola, Algeria, Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, North Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, Spain, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, including Poland, Ukraine, Albania, Romania, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia.