The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History - Hardcover

Royal, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0824518462 ISBN 13: 9780824518462

Publisher: Crossroad Pub Co, 2000

Synopsis

Provides a global account of the heroic men and women martyred for the faith in the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Royal, Ph.D., is president of the Faith and Reason Institute, Washington D.C. He is author of several books, including, Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality (0-8245-1604-4) and The Virgin and the Dynamo (0-8245-4468-5) He has written for many newspapers and journals including The Washington Post, Crisis, The Catholic Historical Review, Communio and The American Enterprise Magazine.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Historian Royal (President/Faith and Reason Institute) surveys the Catholics who, on every continent but Antarctica and Australia, have died for their beliefs in the course of the last century.After an introduction defining the meaning of martyrdom in Catholic faith and devotion, and an explanation of some of the guidelines by which the church determines whether a particular murder constitutes martyrdom, Royal surveys the waves of persecution--from the Mexican government's anticlerical war on the church in the 1920s to the near-genocidal tribal conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda in the 1990s--that have produced more martyrs than any other period of Christian history. Although the stories of many of these figures (such as Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, and Oscar Romero) are well-known, others (the heroic Mexican Jesuit Miguel Pro) are more obscure, and some accounts (the many martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, the victims of postwar Romania's "reeducation," and the surprising story of the Albanian security agent whose denunciation of the Enver Hoxha's persecutions was inadvertently broadcast in 1948) will be new to most readers. Royal treads delicately around some of the more controversial aspects of his martyrology (like the pre-WWII anti-Semitic writings of Kolbe), and he is plainly uncomfortable with the political thrust of the story of Romero and the other martyrs of El Salvador. And some of people profiled here (such as China's Cardinal Ignatius Kung) are not martyrs in the strict sense of the word, as they suffered for their faith without giving their lives. Royal's catalog of the horrors that Catholics, like so many others, suffered at the hands of brutal regimes of both right and left in this bloody century will edify believers--and should provide a useful (and often surprising) historical corrective for all scholars of the modern age. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crossroad Pub Co
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0824518462
• ISBN 13: 9780824518462
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 430