“Our Faith is More Important than Our Lives,” Catholics of India, Our Prayers are with You

All eyes turn eastward. Christ the Crucified comes in the Far East.

Heroic believers in India are bearing witness to His truth with their sufferings and blood. Christians of India “will continue to protect our faith sacrificing our lives because our faith is more important than our lives,” says Varkey Cardinal Vithayathil, the President of the Indian Conference of Catholic Bishops.

We here in the West have a duty as well—prayer. “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them; and those who are ill-treated, since you also are in the body” (Heb 13:3). We have our own sufferings to unite with theirs. Here in the West, the enemies of Christ have put our minds to the sword. They have attempted to confuse us in this and that gray area, those who here utter all sorts of lies and deceit about Christ and his Church. (And to those who assert that Christianity, too, is a violent religion, look to India. If Christianity is as violent as you say, why do we die so differently? Why is there no counteroffensive?)

Are we a people to whom “our faith is more important than our lives”? For those who do not know, our brothers and sisters in this country have been martyred, our churches burned, our religious sisters (who have given their virginity to Christ) gang-raped by anti-Catholic extremists. Have we wept with her over these outrageous crimes against all of us? There are more accounts of atrocities.

Let us too, with docility learned from the faithful of India, rise up against the mockery and scorn of our own society to bear witness and suffer with them in our own small way, because we, too, “also are in the body.” Let us learn from them—the sacrifice of their lives leaves us with a question: they have given everything, are we even willing to lose friends and family for the sake of the Gospel and proclaiming Christ’s truth?

Why have they lost their lives? They are Christians who live the Gospel radically—they have cared for orphans, clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and preached the Gospel! This, dear friends, is radical Christianity. Our brothers and sisters have lived Christ’s call to baptize all nations. They have evangelized those of other faiths and have won converts—a grave crime! (And no doubt in the eyes of many disciples of Oprah in the West, this puts the Christians in the wrong—some sort of cultural sin against diversity, pluralism, and relativism.) We in the West seem to have this “value” in our society of pluralism in which the treasure we have found in faith in Christ must be kept to ourselves, to our own individual private sphere. But we cannot keep our faith in our private sphere. Faith in Christ transforms every aspect of our lives. “Anyone who has discovered Christ must lead others to him. A great joy cannot be kept to oneself. It has to be passed on” (Pope Benedict, World Youth Day, 2005).

We must come out of the silence, complacency, and dungeon of relativism which we have entered. And we must be willing to pay the same price that those in India are. Are we willing to be so gentle as to be put to death as well? Are we willing to suffer the same fate for our beloved little ones in the tide of rising scorn? Though many in the West do not yet face “the” death for our beliefs, but we face deaths of our own, social death, deaths of relationships we hold dear, financial or career death when we get fired for not prescribing abortifacients to women because of our faith in the goodness of the child in the womb, death to the world as we cling to our God.

And are there objections when I say “we” get fired for not prescribing abortifacients? This is our faith – we are one! In Christ, we are all “one body.” Is this not what St. Paul taught: “If one member suffers, all suffer together” (1 Cor 12:12-31)? This is coming from the same apostle, St. Paul, who heard the words of the Risen Christ, “why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4) Christ ascended into heaven felt persecution of the Church literally as persecution against his own self. The greater the love for another, the more one pours the self out into and for the object of love.

And so yes, “we” are dying in India, because we, too, “also are in the body” (Heb 13:3). Let us pray earnestly for them and for a swift end to the persecution.

And the late Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta knew that Christ himself was dying in the womb through the unborn all over the world. She said that abortion was “the greatest destroyer of peace today.”

Perhaps we cannot stop the increasing persecution in India, but we can bring peace here in the West by calling a ceasefire to the “war against the child.” Bl. Mother Teresa—she who touched the “untouchables”—the same little Albanian nun whose efforts continue to bear fruit for the poor and hungry of the world’s second-most populous nation, still today offers her plea:

Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child. From our children’s home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortion. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents and have grown up so full of love and joy.

Speech of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
National Prayer Breakfast
February 3, 1994
Read or listen to the whole speech

Let us fast and pray for an end to the violence in India, and at the same time heed the message the Christians of India give to us in the West! May we model our faith after the Christians of India, may our faith be more important than our lives.

Blessed Mother Teresa, pray for us!
Martyrs of this persecution, pray for us!