One of the speakers at the funeral of a US abortion doctor who was assassinated by an anti-abortionist, fittingly denounced his brutal murder for the atrocity that it is, but then went on to hail him as a "martyr" for the service that he rendered to society through his abortion clinic.

Children in Pakistan are recruited as suicide bombers and sent by their Taliban chieftains to slaughter other human beings by blowing up their own bomb-clad and drug-packed bodies and die as "martyrs" for Allah.

There are other forms of more or less serious misuse of the term "martyr" by people of religion and secularists alike. The term evokes Christian witness.

Deriving from a Greek word signifying witness, martyrdom gained its current significance when it was adopted by first century Christians to describe their brethren who had willingly suffered persecution and painful death for their uncompromising witness to Christ.

It is abhorrent to attribute the dignity of martyrdom to an abortionist, a suicide bomber, or a terrorist. Even a person who dies in the line of duty, whether military or otherwise, may be, according to case, described as a hero, but a martyr?

The term "martyr" simply denotes a person who suffers, willing and joyously, for faith and virtue, when he cannot do otherwise without compromising his faith and virtue.

However much he desired martyrdom, St Ignatius of Antioch (AD 50-115c) did nothing to procure it other than give highly visible witness to Christ and forbidding his fellow Christians from doing anything to save him from it.

Nearer to us, St Maximilian Kolbe did not seek martyrdom but he underwent it at Auschwitz out of love for Christ after a fellow prisoner selected for starvation lamented for his family. The use of the term "martyr" to describe abortionists and suicide bombers is contemptible.