Today is the feast of a saint that is very near and dear to my heart, and to which I owe a lot personally: Pope Saint Martin I.
While today fairly obscure, Martin's general claim to fame is that he is the last universally-acknowledged martyr Pope. He was taken from Rome by the Byzantine Emperor Constans II in the 7th century and done to death by starvation in what is now Crimea in Ukraine. Martin suffered this fate for opposing the Imperial heresy of Monothelitism, the belief that Christ has only one will and operation, and for asserting dogmatically the complete humanity of Christ and his possession of a fully human and free and sinless intellect and will alongside and in harmony with his eternal divine will.
More immediately, he suffered for refusing to abide by a universal Imperial gag order declared by Constans to end the controversy, which autocratically forbade any discussion of the theological issue at all on either side. It was for breaking this silence to anathematize both the Monothelites and those who forbade public confession of Christ's two wills that he was killed.
Martin was and remains a powerful bridge between East and West. While he was a strong asserter of Papal authority and infalliblity, broke communion with the Church of Constantinople, and refused to acknowledge the authority of the Byzantine Emperor over theology or Rome, he spoke Greek fluently and was deeply conversant with Eastern theology. During his short reign he received numerous refugees from the Byzantine Empire fleeing theological persecution and the rise of Islam, made copious use of their knowledge and skills, and distributed them and their cultural and ecclesiastical learning throughout the West--so that shortly after his reign a Syrian monk from Tarsus, St. Theodore, was appointed by Papal decree to the throne of Canterbury in England. He was a close cooperator and ally of Saint Maximus the Confessor, the greatest of all Byzantine scholastics, and is still venerated in the Eastern Orthodox churches today.
He was also a thoroughly human and humane saint, who died in part because of his absolute refusal to countenance active resistance to the Emperor's armies and his insistence that "I have judged it better to die a thousand times than to allow the blood of even one person, anyone, be shed onto the earth." In this, he was a powerful witness and contrast to a century that was all but drowning itself in the blood of holy wars and persecutions. Likewise, in his few surviving letters written from his exile, he openly and movingly describes his bodily sufferings and his feelings of abandonment by his friends, allies, clergy, and spiritual children.
In this humanity, his insistence on the importance of human will and freedom for salvation, his resistance to autocratic power, his refusal to allow the truth to be silenced along with error, his intercultural and ecumenical focus, his common condition with the oppressed and prisoners, and even in his death in what are today bloody and war-torn regions, I believe he is an important saint for our times.
One of my goals in life is to spread devotion to Martin. Hence, you can find on this blog a novena to him I composed to him a few years ago, which I urge anyone who wishes to pray or spread or make use of for your own purposes. Likewise, I have done my own translation of the letter in which Martin describes his capture by the Emperor and the early period of his exile, as well as another letter shortly before his death describing his condition of starvation and lamenting his abandonment. Finally, here is a somewhat florid and imprecise account of his life which I wrote many years ago, but which contains a fuller description of Monothelitism and quotes from a contemporary document describing his sufferings and death.
Ora pro nobis!
