Word: martyrdom
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...evil, in the living. Encountered in his investigations are a humanely skeptical Jewish doctor, a peasant woman who was Nerone's adoring mistress, their illegitimate teen-aged son, and a nymphomaniac contessa who clashes with a bitter homosexual painter over the boy. Watching past and present collide, seeing martyrdom cheek by jowl with betrayal and murder with suicide, the monsignor-before his own death-becomes a more troubled man of God and aware shepherd of men, as absorbed in the plight of sinners as in the credentials of saints...
...demonstrators managed to recapture their flotilla in time, but when the Proteus finally sailed into view, an escort of Royal Navy launches swamped one rowboat and a canoe and chased the others off. The demonstrators wound up in jail, the kind of mild martyrdom they had obviously had in mind. "We called the local police," said one, "to be sure there were enough cells for us." Next day a crowd of 1,000 appeared at Holy Loch waving placards. But the Proteus was on station, and Dunoon welcomed it with a civic reception and a dance. Said Town Clerk Duncan...
Eliot's brilliant Murder in the Cathedral is a churchly pageant, its great poetry close to litany, concentrating on Becket's temptation to martyrdom and using his murder for savage satire on the hypocritical rationalizations of tyrants. Anouilh's Becket attempts-without much psychological or historical depth-to show the love-hate relationship between the King and the servant-friend who turns against him in order to serve the church. Fry sought to concentrate more on Henry than on Becket and to illuminate the interplay of law-civil, canon, moral, divine. Says Fry: "Henry was essentially religious...
Without this myth, the story of the House of Levy, and of Ernie Levy in particular, would be just another saga of suffering. Using this legend, the author is able to create a deeply religious mystique that underlies the entire tale of martyrdom, that makes it somehow more real, more heartfelt, and more tragic than the usual scenes of persecution and extermination...
...Last of the Just is more again than merely a history of martyrdom, it is also an accusation. An accusation of a world that, in the name of Christ, has persecuted the Jews for almost two thousand years. "They take the cross," says Ernie in a moment of bitterness, "and they turn it around." In such moments of anger, and in others of heavy concern (It is admirable that during a period when they were teaching murder to their Aryan scholars, the instructors taught the Jewish children suicide") M. Schwartz. Bart momentarily abandons the ideal of patient suffering that illuminates...