Karl Rahner has been among the most prominent voices urging for such a broadening of the notion of martyrdom. Traditionally, those who have died in active struggle have been excluded from consideration as martyrs, however righteous the cause. While he recognizes the important caveats that must be observed (in order to exclude, for example, the crusading knights of the Middle Ages), Rahner argues that this element of active struggle often springs directly from a pure inner conviction about Christ:…the death Jesus ‘passively endured was the consequence of the struggle he waged against those in his day who wielded religious and political power. He died because he fought: his death must not be seen in isolation from his life. Putting this argument the other way around, someone who dies while fighting actively for the demands of his or her Christian convictions…can also be said patiently to endure his or her death.
He is joined in this plea by the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who, hearkening back to Origen (over the head of Augustine) argues for the inclusion of ‘political martyrs’: by which he means to indicate those who witness to the truth of the kingdom in active struggle against oppression. The emphasis within this conception of martyrdom falls almost entirely on the activity performed by the martyr, and its (presumed) resemblance to the teaching and action of Christ himself. This has of course a particular application in the Latin American context in which liberation theology arose. However, the difficulty that Boff runs into (and Rahner risks) is that he makes abstract principles distilled from the life of Christ by whatever hermeneutical process fundamental to the recognition of a martyr aside from the actual narrative of that life. As William Cavanaugh puts it (speaking of Boff and fellow theologian Sobrino) they ‘assume that the content of Christ’s life, death and resurrection can be isolated apart from their form’. If martyrdom is reduced in this way to some principle – ‘love’ or ‘justice’ – apart from imitating the pattern of Christ’s life, then it is susceptible to becoming criteria-less. It loses its distinctly Christ-like characteristics that might mark it out from other sorts of acts. Cavanaugh continues:
The imitation of Christ is not reducible to some principle such as “love”, but is rather a highly skilled performance learned in a disciplined community of virtue by careful attention to the concrete contours of the Christian life and death as borne out by Jesus and the saints.
Perhaps one of the problems here is in the Roman Catholic need to identify exactly who is and who isn't a martyr/saint...
