The Martyrium of St Bartholomew the Apostle. Photo: Renata Sedmakova/Shutterstock.comThe Martyrium of St Bartholomew the Apostle. Photo: Renata Sedmakova/Shutterstock.com

In 1986, Fr Jorge Mario Bergoglio SJ, the future Pope Francis, went to Germany to finish his doctoral thesis. During his stay in Germany, he went to Hamburg to celebrate a baptism.

The parish priest of the church in Hamburg Fr Bergoglio went to was working on the cause for the canonisation of a priest who had been guillotined by the Nazis for having taught catechesis to the children.

During his work on this cause, the Hamburg priest discovered that in line behind the priest in question, there was a Lutheran pastor condemned to the guillotine for the same reason. Reflecting on the fact that the blood of the two had mixed, the parish priest went to his bishop and told him: “I’m not taking this cause forward only for the priest: it’s either for both or for neither!”

Pope Francis recalled this anecdote when he answered a question by Russian journalist Alexey Bukalov during the papal flight back to Rome at the end of the Holy Father’s apostolic visit to Turkey last November. It sheds light on how Christians, what­ever their denomination, should view the killing of fellow Christians simply for being Christian.

A case in point is that of the 21 Copts who were beheaded in Libya last month, who the Coptic Orthodox Church will be commemorating in its Church calendar and also inserting their names in the Coptic Synaxarium, the Oriental Church’s equivalent to the Roman Martyrology – a procedure equivalent to canonisation in the Latin Church.

The mixing of Christian blood when Christians are killed because they are Christian, has long been going on. One example is the case of 45 Catholic and Anglican Uganda martyrs killed between 1885 and 1887 by King Mwanga of Buganda in south Uganda, where a number of them were burnt to death.

Remembering the sacrifice of the Catholic martyrs at their canonisation, Pope Paul IV had also paid tribute to the Anglican martyrs: “We do not forget the others who, belonging to the Anglican confession, met death for the name of Christ.”

There is no doubt that it is understandably very difficult for Christians to overcome their theological differences. Still, as theologians continue to try to sort out their disagreements, Christians need, very urgently, to find a way forward together.

More than 50 years ago in Jerusalem, on January 5-6, 1964, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras said to Pope Paul VI: “Let’s put the theologians on an island to discuss among themselves and we’ll just get on with things!” People were unsure whether this had truly having been said. Yet in Istanbul, on November 30, 2014, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew told Pope Francis: “No, it’s true, he said that”.

Following their encounter, Francis and Bartholomew, today’s leaders of the millennium-long separated Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, issued resounding and historic calls for the reunification of their global communities.

Speaking to one another after their November 2014 solemn Orthodox divine liturgy at the church of St George in Istanbul, they pledged to intensify efforts for full unity of their churches, agreeing that such unity already exists among Christians dying in conflicts in the Middle East.

For Francis, the Nazi elimination of the Christian priest and the Lutheran pastor for having exercised their pastoral mission was an “ecumenism of blood, which helps us so much, which tells us so much”.

On the flight to Rome, the Pope told journalists: “Unity is a journey we have to take, but we need to do it together. There is spiritual ecume­nism: praying together, working to­gether, many works of charity, much work, teaching together..... Then there is an ecumenism of blood: when they kill Christians. We have so many martyrs.”

Modern persecutors of Christians don’t ask which church their victims belong to. The unity that Christians seek is regrettably al­ready occurring in regions of the world through the blood of martyrdom.

cphbuttigieg@gmail.com

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