<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed but historically important
Review: A very solid well researched book. Shows intelligence and reverence to the topic. The stories are on a global scale and offer compelling stories of sacrifice and suffering. One weakness is that the book aims for a large global story. Each chapter, set in a region or time period offers some compelling stories, but others are weaker and pull down the book. Still a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Idea; Weak Execution
Review: How can I put my experience reading this book into words. Story after story provides accounts of amazing men and women who, in the face of unthinkable torture and certain death, simply would not abandon their Savior nor the Church in Rome. Each chapter details the persecution of Catholics in a different part of the world, including Mexico, Soviet Russia and its Territories, Ukraine, Charles de Foucauld, Spain, Nazi Holocaust, Edith Stein, Poland and Saint Maximillian Kolbe, Eastern and Central Europe - An Introduction, Albania, Lithuania, Romania, Latin America (including Archbishop Romero of El Salvador), Asia - An Introduction, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Africa. Some chapters portray individuals such as Charles de Foucauld, Edith Stein, and Saint Maximillian Kolbe.
This book will amaze and inspire you. It is a textbook on how to love Christ above all and a reminder that the Catholic faith is truly worth dying for.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book Has Helped Me
Review: I picked up Robert Royal's book mainly because I wanted information about this little-known subject. I had in the back of my mind that I could use it for apologetics purposes to point out that Catholics have been targeted by exploitive regimes rather than being collaborators, as Pope Pius XII has been accused of.What I encountered was the power of the witness of these men and women who found the grace to love their enemies. One of the priests who was victimized by the Soviets wrote to his mother from the Gulag: "If we allow ourselves to become exasperated, we are not real Christians, just fanatics". I have to admit to being exasperated alot and have had to examine how much do I love people whose behavior causes me pain (usually unintentionally). Fr. Christian Lebreten of the French Trappists who were killed by Algerian terrorists 8 years ago also got my attention. He writes to his killer (in advance) "I see God's face in yours" and "may we meet as happy theives in the kingdom if it is the Father's will". The monks all wrote in advance in the journals that they did not want Muslims in general or their own neighbors to be blamed or looked down upon for their deaths by an extreme minority. My wife was upset with me for taking the book on vacation. (It isn't light reading.) But I'm glad I did.
Rating:
Summary: Inspiration for the New Millennium
Review: No period in history has seen greater persecution of Christians, and so we should not be surprised that the 20th century has seen the creation of perhaps more martyrs and Saints than any other historical period which preceeded it. In his book, Robert Royal examines the persecution of Catholics in countries such as Mexico, Spain, Austria, and Poland over the last century. Royal's book includes extensive research and compelling background material for each of the martyrs addressed. The book includes such well-known martyrs such as St. Maximilian Kolbe, Miguel Pro, and Bishop Oscar Romero, and also introduces the reader to lesser-known martyrs for the faith. No Pope has canonized or beatified as many Saints as Pope John Paul II. A great many of them are from the 20th century. There is a reason that the Pope has done this. He realizes that we will need the role models of these faithful men and women as we face the future. Royal presents us with the stories behind many of these very men and women. Their stories are both extraordinary and inspirational. Royal's book presents not only the stories of these martyrs, but also a history of the Church versus socialist/communist governments. In the end, it is a book about good and evil.
Rating:
Summary: Great Idea; Weak Execution
Review: Robert Royal deserves resounding applause for having taken on an important, difficult, and outrageously neglected subject. To be sure, Mr. Royal's heart is in the right place -- which is more than one can say for his writing skills. Is this book terribly written? By no means. Nevertheless, Mr. Royal has a rather pedestrian and awkward style. And there are some unbelievable errors: People are hanged, Mr. Royal, not hung. In addition, there are many passages that fizzle out, that never really go anywhere. And I had very little interest in the rather lenghty and tedious biographical information on several of the martyrs. Their martyrdom, the circumstances leading up to and surrounding it, and the ultimately beneficial results for the Church is where the focus should have been. Finally, Mr. Royal's selection of Marie-Michel Marcel Van surprised me -- "At one point, Christ even asked Van to tell him some funny stories." Uh-huh. And the same is true of his selection of Archbishop Romero. Mr. Royal does not persuade that the Archbishop wasn't a Marxist wedded to Liberation Theology. The Archbishop was brutally murdered, to be sure. But was he also martyred? Did he die for the Faith or for a bankrupt ideology? Despite these and other imperfections, I do indeed recommend this book -- it is something of a monument to those who paid the ultimate price or at least suffered greatly as witnesses to the Fullness of Truth.
Rating:
Summary: Good Friday continues
Review: Robert Royal's account of the 20th century martyrs is grim, compelling, necessary. To read this book is to take one's place with St John the Evangelist, St Mary Magdalene, and the Mother of God under the shadow of the Cross. We read with what relentless fury, with what dehumanizing atrocity, the secular persecutors of the Church treated the priests, religious & layfolk. The section on the Spanish Civil War was especially eye-opening & horrifying: a needed corrective to histories that have been told from the skewed standpoint of the Left. The luminous examples of Miguel Pro of 1920s Mexico, of Charles de Foucauld in 1916 North Africa, of Oscar Romero and others, will inspire any reader. They are not double-minded souls, but lovers of God's law. The Communist atrocities in Albania and Rumania are particularly reprehensible and sickening, the tortures devised quite hellish. We are angered at the comparative silence of other historians when denouncing the evils that came from these nations. The history (not comprehensive, the author admits, in spite of the subtitle which the publisher insisted upon) takes us to the days of Solidarity in Poland, through Korea, Vietnam, and China, through martyrs of the Idi Amin era in Uganda, and the awesome example of the seven Cistercian Trappists in Tibhirine (Our Lady of Atlas), Algeria, who were compelled to surrender their lives in 1996. In the chapter on Vietnam, Cardinal Francis X. Nguyen Van Thuan tells of his days in Communist prisons. "Is thy steadfast love declared in the grave, thy faithfulness in Abaddon? Are thy wonders known in the darkness, thy saving help in the land of forgetfulness?" Robert Royal answers the psalmist's plaintive questions (from Psalm 88) in the affirmative. "The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century" is a harrowing account which can dishearten, and cause us to hate what is evil more than we love what is good, but the unwavering confidence and hope of these scores of Christian martyrs -- from St Maximilian Kolbe to the Vietnamese Redemptorist who would banter with the saints in heaven -- will almost certainly inspire and fortify.
Rating:
Summary: An imperfectly written eye opener
Review: Robert Royal's book "Catholic Martyrs" is a decent enough effort. I applaud him vigorously for his efforts. He does a decent enough job in laying out the facts concerning the men and women who have died for the Catholic faith in the 20th century. I found the chapter on the "forgotten holocaust", the deaths of 10 million Ukrainian Catholics at the hands of Stalin and the Marxist/Communists to be quite an eye opener. Likewise, his chapter on Edith Stein who died as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross to be well written. The same cannot be said for some of the other chapters. One reviewer pointed out the one of the more puzzling lines, "Christ told so-and-so to tell some funny stories". Okaaay. But those minor slip ups aside, I do recommend this book to anyone who wants to find out more about the courageous men and women who gave their lives for the church. So do buy this book and read it. It is worth your time and money.
Rating:
Summary: An imperfectly written eye opener
Review: Robert Royal's book "Catholic Martyrs" is a decent enough effort. I applaud him vigorously for his efforts. He does a decent enough job in laying out the facts concerning the men and women who have died for the Catholic faith in the 20th century. I found the chapter on the "forgotten holocaust", the deaths of 10 million Ukrainian Catholics at the hands of Stalin and the Marxist/Communists to be quite an eye opener. Likewise, his chapter on Edith Stein who died as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross to be well written. The same cannot be said for some of the other chapters. One reviewer pointed out the one of the more puzzling lines, "Christ told so-and-so to tell some funny stories". Okaaay. But those minor slip ups aside, I do recommend this book to anyone who wants to find out more about the courageous men and women who gave their lives for the church. So do buy this book and read it. It is worth your time and money.
Rating:
Summary: Imperfect but eye-opening
Review: Royal's book is an eye-opener that enables us to look at recent history and also current events with greater interest and concern. The newspapers do not read the same after reading this book. I am reading the book with a group and we find it to be informative, inspirational, and leading us to want to learn more about the people, history, and events. We are glad to be reading and learning from it. We are finding inspiration that does not require perfection. There are some mistakes of fact in the book, showing that Royal is not always a master of the history of the countries he discusses. There is also a tendency to emphasize the Catholic merits and accomplishments in a way that does not speak of Catholic misdeeds. A little one-sided. Our readers would also have appreciated some maps. Still, this book does open up stories that need to be told and better understood and appreciated, stories not only of faith and courage in the face of vicious persecution, but also of the frequent extreme animus of modern movements and tyrants against Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.
Rating:
Summary: Catholic martyr status and thoughts about heroism
Review: This world history of the Catholic martyrs of modern times provides chapters which cover each martyr in depth and detail, with in-depth biographical sketches outlining their lives and achievements. The process of Catholic martyr status and thoughts about heroism are presented with much depth and discussion in this important survey.
<< 1 >>
| 
