![\"Is](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/455\/2015\/06\/Andrea_Mantegna_-_St_Sebastian_-_WGA13975.jpg\")
<\/a>I am thankful Rod Dreher took up my piece \u201cWhy Doesn\u2019t Holy Mother Russia Remain Orthodox?<\/a>\u201d in his \u201cOrthodoxy, Catholicism, and the State<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The following passages from Dreher\u2019s post pick up on themes I thought about addressing in my original piece but left hanging instead:<\/p>\n Well. I can agree with Rosman that the \u201cMurray Project\u201d \u2014 broadly speaking,\u00a0the idea that one can be both a good Catholic and a good American \u2014 is dead, or at least on its last legs.\u00a0And I agree with them that this might well be good for the faith, in the sense that it will separate out the people for whom the faith really matters from the casual Catholics and other Christians. What is coming will be clarifying for us all, but I\u2019m not sure we should be altogether pleased by it.<\/p>\n That said, I don\u2019t believe that Russia is a good example from which to draw this conclusion. The Russian Orthodox Church endured 70 years or more of intense persecution, probably the worst in all of Christian\u00a0history. It is a miracle that Christianity survived at all in Russia. I do not like the entwining of Church and State in Russia today, but I doubt very much that that has much to do with the woebegone state of the Christian belief there. What nation, and which peoples, could have suffered something\u00a0so grotesque and unremitting, and have bounced back so quickly?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He continues with:<\/p>\n Did persecution strengthen the Catholic Church in France? I can\u2019t see that it did. There has been no meaningful religious persecution in England in at least two centuries, but the faith \u2014 Protestant and Catholic alike \u2014 is in very serious trouble there. Something else is going on. Whatever it is, I share Rosman\u2019s wish that the Catholic bishops and other prominent Christian leaders would stop drinking the Kool-Aid and start speaking out, and preparing their people for long-term endurance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If the French and Russian persecutions decimated their respective churches then which one of these descriptions is more apposite?<\/p>\n 1) Could it be that Tertullian and the Early Church were wrong about the salutary effects of martyrdom and what they wrote was mostly propaganda as Candida Moss has suggested in The Myth of Persecution<\/em><\/a>?<\/p>\n This is an important question because, as Robert Royal showed in The Catholic Martyrs of the 20th Century<\/em><\/a>, we\u2019ve recently passed through a period that can claim the most martyrs of any time\u2013it doesn\u2019t seem to be ending either.<\/p>\n Shouldn\u2019t we be seeing the benefits of these pesecutions instead of a drop in Catholic numbers in Europe and the States?<\/p>\n 2) Conversely, if semen est sanguis christianorum <\/em>is correct, then could the fault somehow lie with the witness of the French and Russian churches?<\/p>\n Alec Vidler\u2019s The Church in an Age of Revolution<\/em><\/a> comes close to something like this conclusion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n These are pressing questions and I\u2019m afraid I don\u2019t have any answers for now.<\/p>\n However, I do know that the Polish Church emerged from its period of wartime and postwar martyrdom stronger<\/a> than it had ever been. That is, only to have that victory eroded by a total capitulation<\/a> of the reborn Polish nation-state to American Neo-Conservative designs for Poland\u2019s economic future. It\u2019s too bad Poles ignored the warnings of Wyszynski and Wojtyla<\/a>.<\/p>\n Martyrdom or not, will capitalism, with the help of the state, bury us all in the grave of consumerism<\/a>?<\/p>\n I suppose that\u2019s a third question I have for Rod Dreher.<\/p>\n