The wars of religion waged in Europe following the Protestant Reformation were tragic and lamentable in every way. In our ecumenical age, we can scarcely fathom the willingness to pillage and slaughter for the sake of doctrine. Things being as they were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many were all too willing (religious motives being intertwined with political and economic interests), and pillage and slaughter they did. After Lutheranism and Calvinism spread violently through much of Europe, the latter faction prevailed over the Lutherans for control of the Netherlands in 1572. There, the local resentment against Spanish (Catholic) rule served to predispose the people to the Calvinist cause.
In the midst of this mayhem, some parts of Europe still enjoyed peace. A young Dominican friar of the German Convent of the Holy Cross completed his theological studies at the prestigious University of Cologne, where Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Henry Suso, and John Tauler had studied and/or taught. Upon ordination, Friar John became parish priest in the village of Horner in the Spanish Netherlands, where he labored humbly and zealously for the salvation of souls for twenty years.
When the Calvinists captured the towns of Dordrecht and Gorkum, John learned that the Catholic clergy there were confined and tortured under pressure to repudiate the doctrines of the Real Presence and Papal Primacy. Immediately, John obtained permission from his superiors stealthily to visit the beleaguered captives with the consolation of the Sacraments. Thinking only to fortify his brothers in the Faith despite great peril to himself, John succeeded for a time before finally being found out. He was given to join the imprisoned clergy and share in their horribly cruel treatment for about two weeks before the nineteen of them were ordered to be hanged in the nearby city of Brielle.
Made to march around the gallows and mockingly provoked to sing to Mary, the group did most devoutly invoke Our Lady’s assistance with the Salve Regina. Beckoned to chant again, they solemnly intoned the Te Deum. Likened to the Master by their witness to the truth, “when reviled (they) did not threaten, but continued entrusting (themselves) to him who judges justly.” (1 Pt 2:23) Finally, their sharing in the pattern of Christ’s death was brought to fulfillment as they were hanged in a barn on July 9, 1572.
We’re of course right to be grateful that the profession of our Catholic faith is nowhere as hazardous today as it was in sixteenth-century Europe or as it is for many of our brothers and sisters in various other parts of the world today. Is it possible to deny, however, that this freedom can easily lead to complacency? If we were asked for a basic defense of the truth of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist or the primacy of the Pope, could we answer decently? St. Peter gives a wonderfully salutary admonition in his first epistle: “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” (1 Pt 3:15)
This imperative is salutary not only on account of the fruit it can bear in illustrating the beauty of the Faith for those as yet unfamiliar with it; it can be no less edifying for us. I recall distinctly how being openly challenged about Catholicism as a teenager prompted what became an eye-opening investigation into the mystery of redemption revealed by God through the Church. What began at first simply as a search for rejoinders soon became a mesmerizing exploration of a treasure I’d hitherto largely taken for granted, and this basic pattern has been repeated innumerable times over the centuries. The gift of faith grows within us as we share it.
The fact that we can have a friendly exchange about doctrinal differences today without coming to blows is certainly a gift for which to praise God. Yet, this is not because the truth of what God in his Love has done for us isn’t worth dying for. The Lord having shed his own blood in order to bear witness to it, we do well to be willing at least to sweat a bit in defense and promulgation of so great a mystery.
Fr. Timothy Combs, OP