One of the great challenges to a person who believes that God’s will is always present is that Providence orders a world of growing irreligiosity, violence, terrorism, and atheistic ideologies. The divine plan is clearly beyond the human ability to comprehend. For many years God demands of us belief when the majority of the population, educators, government leaders, and law enforcement disbelieve, refuse to accommodate, even fear, Divine Providence. The belief that God is in control of all things challenges the rationality and secularism of our world, and seems in social media, the academic world, modern science, and popular culture, ludicrous. Throughout most of the past five hundred years of American history Roman Catholics have faced anger, resistance, violence, discrimination, and loss of inherent rights. The most courageous, the most convinced of God’s will, were those willing to die for their beliefs—the martyrs.

Martyrs are “witnesses” to God’s Providence, so much so that they often intuitively anticipate their own death at the hands of disbelievers and oppressors. A martyr is typically a normal person, not more intelligent, not more courageous, not “better,” just more faithful, knowing that God’s will orders all things, including in their own lives.

For the first three centuries of American history after the arrival of Columbus martyrs were typically missionaries bringing the Good News to indigenous peoples, who were often receptive but sometimes not, and violence was the result. During the past two centuries, the modernity of American society, culture, and technology has resulted in a modern mentality that eschews God and His Providence in the belief that humans are the ultimate expression of the evolution of life. Modern ideologies besides Darwinism include Marxism, the belief that material forces dominate a godless world; behavioralism, that humans are inherently irrational, dominated by the subconscious mind; and relativism, that truth depends on the whims of the individual: with such secular ideologies holding sway over most of the world’s peoples, it is an easy task for government to assume the role of God and demand obedience and worship from the masses. Since such governments are often oppressive to opposition and in control of powerful armies, those who stand up for God oftentimes accept God’s will that their lives will be a witness to Providence.

What happened to Mexico during the nineteenth century in the wake of independence from Spain is illustrative. The Mexicans identified the Roman Catholic church with imperialist Spain, and the decades following independence saw increasing restrictions on the influence of the Church. Constant political conflict between liberals and conservatives in Mexico led to economic, social, and cultural instability—one of the casualties was Christian morality. Benito Juárez, leader of the Liberal faction, fought against the power and influence of the Catholic Church. Liberals had the wealthy and educated backing them against the vast numbers of uneducated peasants who retained their faith, not giving into modern ideologies. Oppression of Roman Catholics erupted into the Cristero War in the early twentieth century. Mexico’s 1917 Constitution upheld earlier governmental acts seeking to bring secularism to the Mexican people.

The Catholic Church was not silent during these years when modernity was taking over the world. Vatican I, for example, proclaimed: “Everything that God has brought into being he protects and governs by his providence, which reaches from one end of the earth to the other and orders all things well. All things are open and laid bare to his eyes, even those which will be brought about by the free activity of creatures.” Vatican II almost a century later provided an incisive assessment of modernity: “Never before has man had so keen an understanding of freedom, yet at the same time new forms of social and psychological slavery make their appearance.” The Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on the Persecution of the Church in Mexico accused the Mexican government of trying to rid the Church from Mexico, depriving it and its people of basic rights, such as the right to worship freely.

A wonderful, insightful portrayal of the conflict between government and religion in twentieth-century Mexico is Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The book evokes the life of an unsuspected martyr, known only as the “whiskey priest,” who is a drunkard and scoundrel who accepts a hitherto unanticipated role of supporting God’s will in providing the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, for oppressed people while continually fighting against his own sense of unworthiness and his terror at being caught and executed. Facing him is the Lieutenant, a fervent atheist who supports government repression, and who is infuriated “to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy–a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.” The Lieutenant stops at nothing to capture the whiskey priest and halt the sacraments from providing the Mexican people with a hope beyond the secular power of the government. The priest’s terrified acquiescence to God’s will in performing the sacraments finally leads to his capture and martyrdom. The book wonderfully assesses what happens to a society in which the rational, secular state forbids religious beliefs and functions, and the people become numb and dead inside. To prevent this martyrs sacrifice themselves.

A historical example to support’s Greene’s fictional portrayal is Jose Sabás Reyes Salazar (1883-1927). A native of Jalisco, Mexico, Sabás was ordained in Tamaulipas, a barren, harsh land where he served until government persecution forced him to flee to Tototlán, Jalisco, where he again faced persecution in delivering the sacraments to the faithful. He was priest during the presidency of Plutarcho Calles, whose administration featured oppression of Catholic worship on pain of imprisonment and death. Father Sabás realized that continuing to deliver the sacraments in secret would result in personal disaster, but he could not resist God’s call. Federal troops in 1827 entered the town searching for Catholics; Father Sabás took shelter in the home of one of the families he served. When the troops entered the home, Sabás, to prevent the family from suffering, as he was the one they were searching for, came out of hiding and made himself known—he knew that the result would be torture and death. He conformed to the will of God, praising God as the torturers and executioners slowly took his life away.

Another example of martyrdom by a priest seeking to defend the rights of the people to worship occurred in Guatemala almost half century ago. Stanley Rother (1935-1981) was a small-town Oklahoma boy turned priest and missionary to Guatemalans in a small village in the late 1960s. He served for over a decade as violence increased during the Guatemalan Civil War. He knew that his life was in danger, writing his bishop in 1980: “The reality is that we are in danger. But we don’t know when or what form the government will use to further repress the Church. . . . Given the situation, I am not ready to leave here just yet. There is a chance that the government will back off. If I get a direct threat or am told to leave, then I will go. But if it is my destiny that I should give my life here, then so be it. . . . I don’t want to desert these people.”

There is no more compelling proof of the power of faith and belief in God’s goodness and the rightness in conforming to His will than Rother’s simple statement, “so be it.” God, the supreme Being, gives life, being, and demands life, being. Who are we to deny our being to God when He calls for it?