Prepare for MARTYRDOM - a WARNING from Bishop Schneider
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Summary
In this episode, Bishop Schneider talks about the life and assassination of U.S. Bishop Charlie Kirk, and why he should be considered a martyr in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Bishop Schneider is the author of the book, The Martyrs: A Guide to the Martyrs of the Past, Present, and Future, and has served as a keynote speaker at the Rome Life Forum for the past three years.
Transcript
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We have to understand that the source of martyrdom is supernatural love.
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Bishop Schneider, thank you so much for joining us.
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Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
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In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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Talking about your book on the martyrs, I thought it would be amazing to speak,
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first of all, about something that has captured the imagination of the world,
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With the assassination of Charlie Kirk, it was a massive thing.
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And right away, people started talking about martyrdom.
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Now, there was theories that he might be joining the Church.
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One bishop, in fact, his brother, said that he was indeed going to join the Church.
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Maybe wanted to be, maybe would have been, we could say.
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But how is a Catholic to make sense of the idea that he's being thought of as a martyr?
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He obviously spoke for Christ and for his truth on life and on family,
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perhaps more courageously than many Catholics, perhaps even many Catholic religious leaders.
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And yet comes the question, Charlie Kirk, could he be considered a martyr?
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Yes, I think yes, because we could see in his life that he was really very committed to defend the Christian faith,
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the uniqueness of our Lord Jesus Christ, the faith in him as the only redeemer of the world.
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And also, he boldly defended God's commandments about marriage and family and also life.
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So, these two main, or I would say three main attacks of the world against Christianity and also Catholicism,
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I would say, is the first attack against the first commandment of God with the relativism,
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saying that there are many religions and so Jesus Christ is one of the ways.
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Even some high-ranking clergy are speaking so, and so this is the first and then the other attack is against the fifth commandment not to kill.
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And this is the, I think, the greatest wound in our current world, the worldwide genocide of the unworn children.
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This is horrible, and we have to fight against this, really.
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And the other commandment, the sixth commandment, simply, it is all this agenda against family, against marriage,
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the so-called gender ideology or the LGBT agendas are a direct attack against the sixth commandment.
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It is basically an abolishment, a total abolition of the sixth commandment of God.
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And so, these three attacks, we could see that Charlie Kirk was defending Christ and God's commandment on these three issues.
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The uniqueness of our Lord Jesus Christ, inviting especially young people to believe in Jesus Christ as the only Savior,
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and then to be defenders of life against the anti-culture of death, and then the sanctity of marriage and family.
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So, therefore, we have to acknowledge it, and I think God will reward him for this, his commitment, courageous.
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And he was, of course, conscious that with this, his commitment, he was going against the current and was also provoking enemies and hatred against him.
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Therefore, we can say he was killed, objectively, we can say, out of hatred against these, his commitments, which he did.
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In this sense, we can consider him a martyr, but, of course, we cannot celebrate him in the Catholic Church as a martyr,
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So, relative realization between the uniqueness of the Catholic Church as the unique God-willed religion,
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and others, even Protestants' communities, which are not the true, full way to God, which is not—these are separation from the true Church.
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But, of course, Charlie Kirk did it in, I assume, in a so-called invincible ignorance.
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He was convinced that he is remaining in his community, he is serving God.
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Only God can judge his intentions of the heart.
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We can assume that he had a good will, bona fide, as the theologians say,
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but nevertheless, we cannot celebrate him as a martyr liturgically in the Catholic Church.
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We can have a deep esteem of this courageous man, and ask God that the sacrifice of his life can produce fruits of conversion of the young people
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who had listened to him to the Catholic truth and fullness.
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We are called to speak the truth, to proclaim the gospel, and to live our lives without fear.
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For the past three years, we've brought this mission to the very heart of the Church.
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At the Rome Life Forum, you won't just hear truth proclaimed,
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you'll have the chance to ask your questions directly to the speakers.
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This is your opportunity to engage, to challenge, and to go deeper into the battles we face today.
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On the very same thing of, as you mentioned about Charlie and his invincible ignorance,
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he, by his own testimony, was looking to Catholicism.
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But then, he mentioned the number one thing keeping him back from Catholicism was the confusion coming from Pope Francis.
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Yes, I think this is also a kind of mitigating circumstance.
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This huge confusion, which, unfortunately, the last pontificate of Pope Francis caused in the Church,
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and even being outside the Church, and therefore God will also take into account this very difficult circumstance of confusion
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for those non-Catholic Christians who were seeking the truth.
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I think if we had a Pope which had been strong and crystal clear in defending Jesus Christ, the only Savior,
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the sacredness of marriage, of God's creation of man and woman,
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and fighting, even as a Pope, against the worldwide gender ideology, courageously,
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and inviting the other Christians to join the fullness of the Catholic faith, explaining them,
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I think that Charlie Kirkwood had joined the Catholic Church.
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Now, one of the things in your book, you mentioned that you yourself have known martyrs for the faith,
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and describe them in the book. Tell us about that.
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Yes, I had the grace of God that I grew up in my childhood in the underground church in the Soviet Union,
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and especially one martyr who was, he's really beatified, a priest martyr, blessed Alexei Zaritsky,
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Ukrainian bi-ritualist priest. He was very close to my parents.
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So, when my parents were in the Ural Mountains in the forced labor camps and in the ghettos there for Germans,
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he came several times, and so my parents helped him in some way.
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My parents were hunter-crowned church activists and helped Father Blessed Alexei, this martyr priest,
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several times, even hiding him, helping him to organize the masses.
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And then he visited us in Kyrgyzstan, where I was born,
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even so celebrated in our house, the traditional Latin Mass, in 62.
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And I was one year old, and my mother put me in a cradle on the side of the table
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So, in some way, I became an altar boy with one year of my age.
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And so, he blessed me and my siblings, and so this was, I saw him with my eyes,
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but I don't remember, of course, I was one year old, and he blessed me.
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And then when he left us, it was May 62, from Kyrgyzstan back to Kazakhstan,
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where he was in a kind of house arrest, and then he was straightaway arrested by the KGB,
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the Secret Service, in Karaganda City, and put into the Karlak Gulag,
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And there, he still suffered one and a half year, these horrible conditions,
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and then died as a consequence of these conditions in the prison in 63.
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We celebrate here in Kazakhstan the feast of this martyr priest
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who gave his life here in Kazakhstan for Christ and for the Catholic faith.
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And he, his main phrase was oftentimes this, when he said,
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remain faithful to the faith of your forefathers.
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It's very timely for our day also, even for us in the Western world.
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Remain faithful to the faith of your forefathers.
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So, those generations who gave us this true and full Catholic faith.
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And the other priest was Father Yanis Pavlovskis, a Capuchin priest from Latvia.
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He also passed many years in the Gulag, in Karaganda, even there where I was first bishop auxiliary,
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in the same town, in the 50s, during the Stalin time.
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And then, when he was freed, he could go back to Latvia.
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And then, he was a parish priest in Estonia, where we moved then from Kyrgyzstan to Estonia,
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My first holy confession was with this confessor priest.
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And on Sundays, since we had to travel, most of the father's family, to travel to the church, 70 miles,
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he invited us after Mass, only our family, we were four siblings and the parents,
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to go in his room, to spend some hours there, to drink something and to rest,
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before we had to travel with the train in the evening.
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And so, I had four years, so a close contact to this holy confessor priest.
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He did not die directly as a martyr, but he passed so many sufferings in the camp of concentration.
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And what he gave to us, to me and my siblings, my parents,
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when we left the Soviet Union in the end of 73,
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and said farewell to him, he gave us a blessing,
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There are some churches where communion is given in the hand.
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And when we heard this, it was incredible for us.
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And I, in my age as a boy, I could not understand.
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It was so strange when I heard this first word.
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We were so deeply educated to the reverence by the blessed Father Zaritsky,
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by other priests, and by this Father Yanis Pavlovskis,
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And the other person is a virgin, Gertrude Tetzel, a German,
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in Kazakhstan, in Karaganda, in my previous diocese.
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She was a lay catechist, and really, she helped a priest,
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the underground priest, to teach children catechism.
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She prepared the adults for sacraments, for holy marriage.
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In the absence of the priest, she was leading prayers for burial,
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because there was no priest, how to bury people.
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And sometimes, in emergency cases, she baptized children before they died.
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You see, this is the true collaboration of women in the church,
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not to occupy offices of administration or even hierarchical ranks,
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starting with, of course, with deacon, and then they will promote, and so on.
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As in our day, we are witnessing these efforts in the Catholic Church
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This virgin, Gertrude Tetzel, she was so many years persecuted.
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She was in prison, in gulags, only because she was teaching catechism,
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and then she was preparing the young couples for matrimony.
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And she gave all her life, and then she suffered so much in prisons,
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and in the prison, she organized a kind of secret church.
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She, every Sunday, there was worship without a priest, of course,
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At the danger that she could be even condemned to high punishments,
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she did it, and even sometimes she was so zealous that she tried even to convert
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the waiters and the bosses of the camp of concentration.
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She was several times, very often, she called during the night for interrogations,
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She had to work all the day hard, like a man, and then all the night, not sleeping.
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And during these interrogations, she started to evangelize them.
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And she had such a strong personality and convincing words.
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I think it was the Holy Spirit, that the officers there, they were shocked.
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And then one day, she was called in the night again.
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And then the first question she asked the boss,
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No, today is the feast of the ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven.
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And then she started to make a catechesis of Jesus Christ and his ascension.
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And so, and then the boss said, Take away this woman.
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And then she was even expelled from the camp because they were fearing
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that she is evangelizing all the prisoners there.
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And now, it started a process of beatification.
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And last week, all the documents were brought to Rome,
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And there, you'll start the apostolic process of her beatification.
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I presented also in my book, which was published recently,
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So, one of the things you present in your book,
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you speak about Our Lady, the Virgin Mary, as a martyr.
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And of course, for most people, that's going to be,
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because in the Church, we call her the Queen of Martyrs.
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It is not the suffering which makes one martyr.
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And so, Our Lord, of course, is the source of martyrdom.
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The redeeming sacrifice is the source of all martyrdom.
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Our Lord demonstrated and revealed in His redeeming death on the cross,
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And so, really, we have to understand that the source of martyrdom is supernatural love.
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No one has more love than who is giving his life for his friends.
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I am calling you no more servants, but friends.
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And so, he gave his life out of love for the Father.
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And then, out of love for all the sinful humanity,
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Of course, everyone must individually accept Christ to be saved.
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Before the soldier reached the body of Our Lord,