Defenders of the Faith in Word and Deed

Rating:
Summary: Heroes make history
Review: Fr. Charles Connor of EWTN fame has written an excellent short book on "martyrs", e.g., witnesses, to the Faith.

Starting with an account of the early Christians and the dangerous lives they lead under Roman rule, he takes the reader through twenty centuries of Catholic history, with chapter-length biographies of figures such as Athanasius, Thomas More, Edmund Campion, and modern heroes like Jesuit Walter Ciszek and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Fr. Connor's specialty is English Catholicism and it shows here. I particularly enjoyed the brief treatment he gave to Frank Sheed and the founders of the Catholic Truth Society and the Catholic Evidence Guild. Sheed and co. would take to street corners and defend the Faith against charges leveled by everyone from militant atheists to town drunks.

I couldn't help but be saddened reading the chapters on European Catholics from the not-so-distant past. In the now aggressively secular culture of Europe, Mass-attendance is below 10%, cathedrals are little more than museums, and what was once the cradle of Christianity is on the losing side of a demographic civil war with Islam.

But while the Faith is on the wane there, it's on the march elsewhere, growing by leaps and bounds in the "global south" of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

One of the key lessons of books like this one is that the Marxian view of history - that impersonal forces determine its course - is wrong. With God's grace, heroes make history, and "Defenders of the Faith in Word and Deed" is chock full of them.