Word: martyrize
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Teilhard is still widely celebrated among Catholics as one of the church's major doctrinal martyr figures in the decades prior to Vatican II. His then unpublished writings were deemed so threatening that they were implicitly attacked in Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical against dangerous opinions about the evolution of mankind. In 1962 the Vatican went so far as to publicly censure Teilhard by name in a so-called monitum (warning...
...book is that rather than destroying or humiliating Alger Hiss, adversity has brought out his best qualities. It is a mixed picture though. "People who have an explanation for Al's behavior these days tend to see him either as an unregenerate old villain or a spotless martyr," he writes. "But I'm in a curious position and don't have to see him as saint or sinner...
...child of her time and place-France after World War I, sapped yet still adventuresome. Weil's mind belonged to the classics but her emotions owed much to 19th century romanticism, especially the aspect that substituted the sufferings of the artist for the anguish of the martyr. Simone was born into the French upper-middle class in 1909. Her father-a physician-and her mother had Jewish backgrounds, though they observed no religious ritual or custom. The child never regarded herself as a Jew. Later she rejected the God of the Old Testament as the sanctioner of cruelty...
More was no martyr by temperament. In Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, he is a man splendidly fit for life, witty and compassionate, loving both God and His world. Unable to bring himself to consent to the Act of Succession, which legitimates Henry's divorce from Catharine of Aragon, he seeks safety in silence, counting on the law to protect him. In the hands of men like Thomas Cromwell, however, the law is an instrument that can be bent, Nixon-like, to suit any ends, and More is condemned finally on the basis of suborned evidence...
...author delights in turning history on its head in smaller matters too. T.S. Eliot notwithstanding, he makes a strong case against the 12th century martyr of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket, whom he sees as a willful, grandstanding prelate who egotistically courted martyrdom. Becket, he says, "did no service to Christianity." Flouting popular myth, Johnson points out that the great medieval cathedrals were generally not the work of inspired volunteer artisans but of skilled hired hands, who sometimes went on strike and had to be chided for goofing off. He clears Alaric and his Goths of the charge that they destroyed...