150 NA Martyrs You Should Know with Brian O’Neel

In his book 150 North American Martyrs You Should Know, Brian O’Neel tells the stories of mostly “red martyrs” (those who shed their blood through traumatic deaths) associated with North America. Some were from other countries and died attempting to spread the faith on the continent; some were born in North America but died doing missionary work in other lands; some were individual heroes or part of an heroic group; while others were “white martyrs” who, although they did not shed their blood for the faith, suffered greatly to spread it. The book includes a lively presentation about each martyr (or group of martyrs), a practical application for the reader, and an historical context for how these martyrs helped the Church grow in North America and change the world through their courage, commitment and perseverance. Their stories have the power to inspire us today to live our Catholic faith bravely and boldly.

Episode Links:

“150 North American Martyrs You Should Know” by Brian O’Neel: https://servantbooks.com/products/150-north-american-martyrs-you-should-know

More by Brian O’Neel: https://saintstombs.com/home

Rush Transcript

Show Introduction

Announcer:
Are you willing to accept Christ’s invitation to know Him more intimately, love Him more intensely, and follow Him more closely, and then go out into the world and live His good news? If you say yes, then you could be the thirteenth apostle. Join Dan Duddy and Tom Caffrey, the odd couple of Catholic Radio, as they ride the radio waves two by two to share the goodness, beauty, and truth of Jesus Christ and His Church. And now, ladies and gentlemen, the thirteenth apostle.

Tom Caffrey:
The age of martyrs isn’t yet over. So to those who experience martyrdom today, you aren’t forgotten. Are you prepared to become a martyr, red or white? Welcome back, friends, to another episode of the Thirteenth Apostle, where we explore the good, beautiful, and true of the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church. And the challenges of being Catholic, the challenges of being Christian—martyrdom is certainly one of them. This is Tom Caffrey. Welcome again to our station wqphradio.org. We have talked over the years about the challenges. Our tagline is the good, the beautiful, and true, but good doesn’t always mean pleasant. And so we have as our guest in this episode Brian O’Neill, who is a repeat guest. Must mean he was pretty good the previous time, and that previous time was about his new enterprise website, SaintsTombs.com. Very interesting website. The title says a lot, certainly doesn’t say it all. Otherwise, there would be no reason to open the website link. But today we have him on because of his book, One Hundred and Fifty North American Martyrs That You Should Know. Brian O’Neill, welcome back to the Thirteenth Apostle.

Brian O’Neill:
Tom, it’s a pleasure to be with you again.

Discussion on Martyrdom

Tom Caffrey:
Oh, thank you, Brian. So, martyrdom is in some ways a fascinating thing to talk about, to think about. Unless you’re talking about somebody you know personally who was martyred, it is an abstraction. In other words, it’s one thing to talk about martyrdom, and you can read about a lot of things and know about it, but you don’t know something unless you’ve experienced it. And of course, if you’ve experienced martyrdom, you’ll know it; others will know about it, which is the reason for your book and the reason we’re talking about the martyrs. I know there’s been some controversies about martyrs; maybe we’ll get into them. I can think of one about the martyrs in New Mexico, but we won’t jump into that now. Brian, talk to us a little bit about your faith. I know you said in the previous episode you’re a cradle Catholic, but you also talked about a conversion. So you’re obviously not converting to the Catholic faith since you were baptized into the Catholic faith sometime in your childhood or infancy. So tell us about your faith and then what led you to this book.

Brian O’Neill:
Yeah, growing up in my household we had a perfunctory nominal attachment to the faith. We went to Mass every Sunday, but Jesus never truly touched our lives in terms of how we live. We lived as the world lives. Then as a young adult, I got involved with the young adult group and had a conversion experience. So I started reading about the saints and the martyrs at that point and became just fascinated by them to the point where I would tell people stories and they would just give me a deer-in-the-headlights sort of look. They would have no idea who I was talking about. So, for instance, Blessed Franz Jägerstätter or Blessed Mama Rosa Fabri, and people like this who most have never heard of. So I decided to write a book about it. It was called Thirty-Nine New Saints You Should Know, and it was about the blesseds and saints created by Pope John Paul II. And then I wrote another book, same publisher, Sophia Press. It was called Saint Who? Thirty-Nine Holy Unknowns, about saints that used to be household names or who were always sort of unknown, but who deserved to be better known in our day and time. And then the publisher came to me and said, “These two books did really well. We’d like you to write a third one. We want you to write it about the North American martyrs.” And I thought, what? North American martyrs? That’s Saint Isaac Jogues and companions, beginning and end of story. But as I found out, that wasn’t at all the case. So for instance, of the typically named North American martyrs, the first to die was Saint Jean de Brébeuf in 1642. The first person to die on what is now US soil for the faith was Father Juan Padilla, a Franciscan who went with Coronado’s search for the city of El Dorado, and he died in 1542.

Tom Caffrey:
That is the mythical city of El Dorado, right?

Brian O’Neill:
Correct, correct. They never found it. Now, spoiler alert. So I started researching this, and there was a priest who was starved and hacked to death by English Protestants on an island off the coast of Virginia named Father Christopher Plunkett. There was a priest named Father James Coyle who was shot in the chest almost point blank in Birmingham, Alabama in 1921. I learned about the nativist and Know Nothing Party violence against our fellows in the faith, about how churches were burned down, hundreds of people killed at one time, things like this. If you go to Philadelphia, for instance, even though the faith was legal to practice there during colonial times, one of the few places in the thirteen colonies, there’s a place called Old Saint Joseph, and were it not for the sign hanging above the door, you would never know that a church was there, because they hid it so as to not arouse the ire and violence of their Protestant neighbors. It’s a fascinating history. It goes back to the sixteenth century, it continues into the twentieth century. On the day we’re recording this is the feast of Blessed Stanley Rother, the first American recognized as a martyr by the Vatican, and so on and so forth. So a lot of Catholic blood has been spilled on this continent, both the US, Mexico, and Canada. A lot of people from this land have gone overseas and lost their lives in service of the faith.

Tom Caffrey:
I want to jump in and say I’m very glad you brought up Blessed Father Stanley Rother. I saw a documentary on him several years ago, and I had never heard of him, and I was deeply moved by his story. And I urge our friends in the audience to look him up, read his story, see if you can find that documentary. I don’t know; it’s been too long. I don’t remember whether it was YouTube, but I’m going to guess it was YouTube. But anyways, a powerful story.

Brian O’Neill:
Yeah. And a new documentary is coming out in late August called American Martyr: The Stanley Rother Story. And it will be in theaters, I believe, August 25th and 26th, with August 27th being the day it’s in theaters for the Spanish language. So I have seen the film and it is—he is a true hero. We American Catholics don’t know anything about the history of the church in our country except that maybe it starts with John F. Kennedy becoming the first Catholic president. That’s really as far back as it stretches. But we see St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Christmastime. But this what we’re talking about, what you’ve written about in your book, the one hundred and fifty North American martyrs that you should know—this really is the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Catholic Church in the Americas.

Tom Caffrey:
Yes, and reading One Hundred and Fifty North American Martyrs You Should Know will give people an understanding of that and an understanding of the history of the Catholic Church in our country. It’s far different than most people imagine or know. Now Pope Benedict XVI—he wrote, and from what I’ve read and heard more in response to the proliferation of saints in John Paul II’s pontificate. Pope Benedict XVI was trying to apply some brakes on that process, saying we really have to be real serious and intentional and careful about who is put forward as a martyr. And he said the martyrs of the past and those of our time gave and give life. And he really was emphasizing the shedding of blood, the red martyrdom, but to do so freely and consciously. So in a supreme act of love, witnessing to their faithfulness to Christ, to the gospel, and to the church. So there was a discussion about a French priest several years ago who had his throat slit in the middle of celebrating Mass, and he died, and people were quick to call him a martyr, but there was pushback because part of martyrdom is that you know of the hatred of your enemy and that you are offering yourself in martyrdom. It’s not just accidental. So it was very interesting. Well, his namesake predecessor, Pope Benedict, not the sixteenth—it is necessary not only to ascertain the odium fidei, or the hatred of the faith on the part of the killer, but also irrefutable proof of readiness for martyrdom, such as outpouring of blood and of its acceptance by the victim. So now some people could say that’s splitting hairs; others would say, well, obviously. Others say no, we got two popes, both named Benedict, saying that a lot of people are killed for their beliefs. Aren’t they all? But they’re not. They’re killed unbeknownst to themselves that it’s for their faith or it’s in a war or something like that. Were all the crusaders martyrs? No, that’s hard to believe because you’ve got the Fourth Crusade, which was Christian and gave us, when we get to Byzantium, and then it becomes Islamic. So I thought it was very interesting to read in some of our historical documents what’s involved, what’s entailed to being a martyr. The martyr doesn’t have any say in this, right? It’s those of us. A saint doesn’t have anything to say about themselves and whether they’re saints. This is by those. It’s like, Brian, you can’t call yourself—well, you can, but that I’m sure in the great view illegitimate if you called yourself a hero. Somebody else could call you a hero. So this is where we get with, okay, what does it mean? I think that you talk about the persecution of North Americans, but in the colonies—we’re not talking Canada yet, which happened as you detail—but in the colonies. So talk about the experience of Catholic martyrs from the persecution in the thirteen colonies.

Persecution in the Thirteen Colonies

Brian O’Neill:
Sure. So there is up in Maine, there was a French priest named Venerable Sebastian Rale. He was a chaplain or a minister to the Penobscot Indians in Maine. He had a lot of converts. Most villages were Christian villages. The British tried to steal the Penobscots’ land very often, and he wouldn’t tell them to leave there because it’s too dangerous to you. Like Blessed Stanley Rother, he wouldn’t leave his people, even though it meant likely certain death for him. And indeed one day the British attacked one of the villages, and he protected to the greatest extent possible his people so that they could run and get away from the British and they shot him. You know, there were things like that. We all know that Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was from Maryland. Everyone thinks Maryland was the Catholic colony, but it wasn’t, because it started off as being a place of freedom of religion, but then more Protestants moved in than there were Catholics, and they said you can’t hold office, you can’t hold land, you can’t educate your children in the way you want to. So Charles Carroll, the signer, he was sent by his dad to Paris to get a Catholic education, and the father wrote his son saying if I was younger, if you could do it all over again, I wouldn’t be in this land because it’s so bad of a place to be a Catholic. So there was tremendous persecution. And then in the eighteen hundreds, you would think with freedom of religion it would be alright, but there were the school controversies in places like Massachusetts and Philadelphia, where the bishops were asking the school board to not make Catholic students read the Protestant Bible and have Protestant religious classes, and that was interpreted as us Catholics trying to take the Bible out of school, which is a different situation we have now. And in any event, so they rioted, the Protestants did, burnt down churches. People were killed—just bystanders, not people taking part in the riots or trying to defend against them; they were slaughtered. In the 1850s, in Louisville, Kentucky, there was a large population of German Catholic immigrants, and the nativists and the Know Nothings wanted to prevent them from voting. So what they did was the night before the election, they set fire to their houses. And if people didn’t perish in the flames, if they made it out alive, they were shot or hacked to death, which is pretty effective voter suppression, I think you all agree. So there are stories like this that populate our nation’s history, sadly, throughout its time as the beginning of the colonies to relatively recently. The KKK was founded after the Civil War; it kind of died out, but with the influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, it was refounded to not only go against Blacks but to go against Catholics and Jews in places like Muncie, Indiana, where my great-grandfather lived. He ran for mayor in part to stand up against the Klan. Didn’t win, but because the Klan was so strong in places like Indiana. So it wasn’t until John Kennedy became president that we started to emerge from the proverbial ghetto and start being an accepted part of the American fabric. But even just a couple weeks ago, I was on a Descendants of the American Revolution Facebook group, and this one guy acting under an assumed name attacked me for being Catholic and saying how we can’t be true Americans and how we had nothing to do with the Revolution. So it’s still with us today.

Tom Caffrey:
It’s a good segue into thinking what I was thinking: of course we shouldn’t ever despair and give up hope. I think that’s true for everybody, whatever your identification is, but certainly as a Christian. You referenced the KKK, Ku Klux Klan, and they’re no longer in power. We can think of many powerful groups throughout history that just seemed unstoppable, and yet they were stopped. Our challenge today, and I know you talk about this, is maybe we’ll call it the soft oppression, the soft persecution in our post-Christian West, whether that’s Europe, North America. I won’t say South America too, but certainly it’s much, much less in South America than Europe, Canada, and the United States. But that we brought on ourselves where we have—I don’t like the term lost our faith. That’s like something happened to you. It’s more of you’ve walked away, you’ve stepped away from your faith, you’ve denied your faith, you’ve rejected your faith, ignored it, however you want to say it. And so nature abhors a vacuum, and other things are filled, whether that’s materialism, scientism, Islam, and there is persecutions. And not just in the abstract, right? We can talk about this persecution where you don’t want to have the name of God be said, but it’s also in our families, where for many of us, our family isn’t Catholic, they’re not Christian, and they don’t want it brought up, they don’t want to discuss it, and if you bring up Christ, it’s like you said a terrible word. So I think the chapter, and I referenced it early on, about New Mexico. So then my question to you, Brian O’Neill: why was the New Mexico territory the most dangerous place for missionaries?

The New Mexico Martyrs and Pueblo Revolt

Brian O’Neill:
Because you had such a strong identification by the natives with not only their culture, but their religion, and it was also dangerous. They didn’t like the friars, the Franciscan friars, coming in and trying to convert them, even though the seed of conversion produced much fruit amongst the Pueblo and other bands of Indians. The sad thing though is that it was partly the Spanish settlers who caused problems by not respecting the Pueblo, even Pueblo converts, and even the friars did things to destroy Pueblo culture. At first that wasn’t the case. At first they thought, okay, let’s assimilate into for the natives the good things about their culture and their religion that are compatible with Christianity. But then some later friars came along and they just showed no respect for the natives, their culture or their historical beliefs, and as a result, they got a band of the eight thousand Pueblo Indians and attacked all the missions and destroyed and decimated them. And they not only killed the friars, but they also killed those Indians who had converted and who refused to join the rebellion. There was a little fault on each side, but the long and short of it is that hundreds of Christians died in this revolt. What strikes me as kind of funny is that one of the statues in Statuary Hall in Congress is the leader of this revolt. So I’m not sure that we should be honoring him in that way, but that’s what happened.

Tom Caffrey:
And so often with oppression, then there’s a violent reaction to oppression. We can think of in our own country. I mean, at one time, women didn’t have the right to vote, couldn’t hold a bank account, a checking account, and there was no violent reaction to that, but there was a strong reaction to that. It took a long time, and then there’s still a lot of animosity under the heading of feminism. Of course, Blacks from Africa, the enslaved—they certainly revolted. And I think of the Catholic experience in Spain, when they were wresting Spain back from the Moors, from the Muslims. It went a little bit back and forth there a couple of times, and their forced conversion of the Jews, and if needed, that’s when the Inquisition started. So if you needed a little more pressure, the Inquisition, but you were going to be either evicted from Spain without any of your belongings or you were going to convert. And the term for that was the Reconquista, to reconquer Spain. And that was done by Catholics, that was sponsored by the King and Queen of Spain. So it’s kind of like, again, the Spaniards, what they did to the Pueblos. Some of the Pueblos, the violence—I mean, in early—it was repeated, that violence was repeated. And last thing I’ll say in this is in early Islam, many Christians converted to Islam for the same reason that hundreds of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity in that Converso, the forced conversion in the lands that were mostly Christian or significantly populated Christian before Mohammed. Why did those lands become part of Islam? Same reason: if you don’t join us, we’ll kill you, or you’re going to lose all your property. There were martyrs, but there were many, many more people who converted. Like my theology mentor often said, and I’ve often said in his honor, it’s complicated.

Brian O’Neill:
It is.

Tom Caffrey:
And but faith is what we’re called to demonstrate, to witness, so I think your book is a witness to that. It’s a very interesting story in there, and I urge our audience to get a copy of Brian. Say the name, the title of the book.

Brian O’Neill:
Sure, A Hundred and Fifty North American Martyrs You Should Know, and there’s actually one of the chapters is dedicated to a woman who I believe was a martyr in Boston. So at the Massachusetts connection.

Closing

Tom Caffrey:
All right. Brian O’Neill. Another good conversation. You gotta keep churning out the books; we’ll continue to have these conversations. So friends in the audience, you heard the title of the book, 150 North American Martyrs That You Should Know. Author is Brian O’Neill, O apostrophe capital N as in Nancy, E-E-L. Brian, thanks so much.

Brian O’Neill:
Thank you, Tom. It’s been my pleasure and an honor.

Tom Caffrey:
Wqphradio.org. Friends, up next is The Angels, followed by Your Prayer Intentions. Thanks for your support, as always, Marianne, Jean, and James. Can’t do it without you. God bless you. God bless you, Brian.

Brian O’Neill:
God bless you, Tom, thank you.

Announcer:
Thank you for listening to the 13th Apostle with Tom Caffrey. Tom’s website is faithpilgrims.com or email trcaffrey@faithpilgrims.com. How about you? Will you be the thirteenth apostle?