Driven to Martyrdom, by Regis Martin

By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, Aug. 19, 2023

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. …

[Editor’s Note: This is the second in a multi-part series on St. Ignatius of Antioch]

It was not in defense of any sort of abstract principle that drove St. Ignatius of Antioch to such an extremity as to choose death, despising even the most cruel and pitiless of its torments.

“God is the fire my feet are held to.”
—Last line of “Ars Poetica II,” by Charles Wright

It was not with airline or train ticket in hand that Ignatius of Antioch arrived in Rome near the end of the first century. “A soul seething with the divine eros,” is how St. John Chrysostom would describe the sainted bishop and martyr three centuries later in a homily preached on his feast day in Antioch. He did not travel first class, or even coach, on that final visit to the imperial capital. Not in this world, he didn’t …

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