Robert Royal and I have been friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators for nigh on to four decades.
Dr. Royal is a gifted linguist, a serious Dante scholar, and a close student of modern Catholic intellectual life. For years now, he has edited The Catholic Thing, one of the few Catholic websites I unhesitatingly recommend. And on dozens of wonderful summer evenings, in the pre-9/11 days when Washington did not approximate an armed camp, we anchored the infield on the Ethics and Public Policy Center softball team, playing on the National Mall with the Washington Monument in center field.
To be sure, Bob Royal is a New York Yankees and New York Giants fan, which would not ordinarily endear him to me. But he earned a lifetime of tolerance when, within ten seconds of David Tyree’s miraculous “helmet catch” setting up the Giants’ win in Super Bowl XLII, he went full Elijah and sent me a text message reading, “There is a God in Israel!”
In the run-up to the Great Jubilee of 2000, Pope John Paul II created a Commission on the New Martyrs, whose report suggested that more Christians had been killed in odium fidei (in hatred of the faith) in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen centuries of Christian history combined. Martyrdom, the pope knew, was not confined to the distant past and the Hollywood archives where films like The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators gather dust. Martyrs are all around us today. A recognition of the martyrs of our time, John Paul hoped, would strengthen the faith of Catholics as we marked the two thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation.
Bob Royal made an outstanding contribution to the fulfillment of that hope with his book, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History, which was translated into several languages. There, readers not only met such famous figures as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St. Maximilian Kolbe, but also the martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, the martyrs who died during the communist subjugation of central and eastern Europe, the martyrs of Maoist China, and the martyrs of the Mexican Cristero uprising (including the noble underground Jesuit, Bl. Miguel Pro, who may have been the first martyr in history photographed at the moment of his death, when he shouted “Viva Cristo Rey!” as the firing squad’s bullets sped toward him).
No continent, and no decade, was without its 20th-century martyrs, and Dr. Royal’s book remains the gold standard for those who wish to learn, and learn from, that story of Christian heroism.
Now, Robert Royal continues his witness to the witnesses with The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century. Once again, he spans the globe, sketching the cruelties visited upon Christians in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and, yes, the West, where radical Islamists target Catholics and other Christians for no other reason than that they’re Christians.
His nuanced chapter, “White (and Red) Martyrs in Red China,” should be required reading in the Vatican Secretariat of State when, it may be hoped, a root-and-branch re-appraisal of the last pontificate’s China policy is undertaken. Bob Royal is experienced enough and wise enough to know that there are no easy answers in China, where the border can be porous between the regime-approved Patriotic Catholic Association and the underground Church. But he also knows, as the Vatican diplomats should, that Xi Jinping is not interested in accommodating the Catholic Church, but rather in destroying it through a process of “Sinicization” that empties Catholic faith of its Christian content. Anyone who doubts that should consult the redoubtable Cardinal Joseph Zen—or ponder the witness of Jimmy Lai, who has now passed over 1,600 days in solitary confinement in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison.
The Virgin Mary’s Fiat—“Be it done unto me according to your word”—set the basic pattern of all Christian discipleship; the martyrs exemplify that pattern in its highest degree of nobility. For their self-sacrifice is the closest human beings can come to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, who, in obedience to the Father’s will, handed himself over to death and in doing so revealed the Resurrection—and the destiny for which God created us, which is eternal life within the light and love of the Trinity.
For reminding us of this, Bob Royal has earned the gratitude of the world Church.
Even if he is a Yankees fan.
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We read: “…Xi Jinping is not interested in accommodating the Catholic Church, but rather in destroying it through a process of Sinicization’ that empties Catholic faith of its Christian content.”
Three points:
FIRST, about false inculturation or Sinicization, we might be reminded of the partially evangelized Hung Hsui-ch’uan (under the Protestant missionary Issachar Roberts) who, in the mid-19th Century, had visions and found himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ(!). And, then led the Taiping rebellion (1851-1864) against that generation’s occupiers of Beijing, the declining Manchu dynasty. A rebel theocracy, and a failed uprising rather than a revolution. But which still claimed between 12 and 20 million lives due to battle, starvation, and devastation from broken dikes.
SECOND, today, it’s the atheist regime in Beijing that thinks itself God, with a population of 1.4 billion. An overlaid Marxist heresy imported from the West and which some have pretended is part of the traditional Chinese character, such that diplomacy could bet on the long game. (Parallels [and differences] can be drawn between the 19th-century Hung and the 7th-century Muhammad who also had visions, and mingled fragments of the Judeo-Christian tradition into his playbook, and who today has a very sectarian following of 1.8 billion.)
THIRD, meanwhile the perennial Holy See/apostolic succession—centered in the meager 109 acres of the Vatican—needs externally a fresh start in real inculturation in the face of martyrdoms. And, internally, a restored coherence in how to (both) do “communio” or “ecclesial assembly,” and be the “hierarchical communion” of the Second Vatican Council (Lumen Gentium).
SUMMARY: “I am a Christian with you, and a pope for you.”
It’s not always heroic to be a martyr to the madness of the Islamic “religion.” The real heroes are those who value life and defend it – by whatever means necessary. Let’s remember that Islam is a barbaric movement (I would never consider it a religion).
Once upon a time Christians, including priests, did not practice a doormat Christianity. See (also available in Kindle):
Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam Hardcover – July 26, 2022
by Raymond Ibrahim (Author), Victor Davis Hanson (Foreword)
https://www.amazon.com/Defenders-West-Christian-Heroes-Against/dp/1642938203
Robert Royale is a stalwart Catholic voice in the public square, in the classroom, in the book world, and a reliable source and commentator on the issues and follies and forces inside the Church.
As to GW’s concerns about rehabilitating the Secretariat of State (via an augmented reading plan), and his negative note on the Vatican Secretariat of State’s affinity for the Chinese Communist State and its “Patriotic Church,” I’m sure that the Secretariat of State appreciates GW’s diplomatic repose, as it will assuredly not tip their boat over, etc.
If, on the other hand, the Church really wanted to “reform” itself, it should start by demoting and dismantling the Vatican Secretariat of State bureaucracy, and restoring the primacy of the Congregation for the Faith, lost to us by design of Pope Paul VI, (which would of course require the “re-assignment” of the psycho-sexually-absorbed Cardinal Fernandez).
Paul VI was not the one who demoted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to being one dicastery among many (part of a mini-synod?), and then split the CDC into two halves, one for doctrine, and the other for possible enforcement or not.
Peter:
There may be a misunderstanding wrt my point on the “CDF” and the “Sec of State.”
I am not referring to the recent further demotion and renaming of the CDF (etc), by the late Pontiff Francis, as a “dicastery.”
I am referring to the late 1960s “reorgs” of the Vatican by Pope Paul VI, which I am saying was the beginning of the assertion of the primacy of the Secretariat of State over all other “congregations,” now relabelled by the bureaucracy as “dicasteries” under the Secretariat of State.
Am I understanding your point, or misunderstanding you?
Thank you for this informative expose. The persecution has been going on with particular force since the seventh century A.D. See these scholarly interviews by Fr. Connolly of CWR. See also below the link to the work of historian R. Ibrahim, who exposes periodically the persecution.
“The forgotten history of Christian Slavery under Islam”
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/16/the-forgotten-history-of-christian-slavery-under-islam/
“Christian Slavery under Islam”
https://www.thepostil.com/author/dario-fernandez-morera/
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2025/07/07/choose-conversion-exile-or-submission-the-muslim-persecution-of-christians-may-2025/
CHOOse — Conversion, Exile, or Submission’: The Muslim Persecution of Christians, May 2025