Since Jesus Christ has been proclaimed to be the meaning of
the human person in Gaudium et spes #22[1],
then any act against the human person, is now understood to be an act against
Christ. And since Christ is the revelation of the Father (“Philip, he who sees
me sees also the Father,” Jn. 14, 9), then any act against the human person is
an act against Christian Revelation and Christian faith. Hence, the one acted
against is now considered a martyr of the faith. This was the case of
Maximillian Kolbe and Edith Stein.
As George Weigel said it in his Witness to Hope (447-448):
“John Paul II was making an important theological point deciding that
St. Maximilian Kolbe was indeed a martyr – systematic hatred for the human
person… was a contemporary equivalent of the traditional criterion for
martyrdom… Because Christian faith affirmed the truth about the inalienable
dignity of the human person, anyone who hated that truth hated, implicitly, the
Christian faith. Modern totalitarianism was an implicit form of odium fidei,
because it reduced persons to things.”
Consider the extensive martyrdoms that are in process now, and have been during the last century, and therefore the extensive events of sanctity that have and are now taking place - hiddenly - within the economic and sociological structures of sin where persons are "things."
[1] “In reality it is only in the mystery of
the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the
first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord. Christ the new
Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love,
fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. It is
no wonder, then, that all the truths mentioned so far should find in him their
source and their most perfect embodiment.”
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