Word: martyrizing
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...much persecution as acceptance that finally drove Christians to solitary life in the desert. When Constantine established Christianity as the Roman Empire's official religion, the faithful needed a new enemy to remain in tension with this world, and they discovered it in themselves. The martyr-saint who had been thrown to the lions was replaced by the ascetic-saint who was beset by private visions of demons. In the "barrenness and calm abstraction of the desert," man could come to grips with his true nature, writes Lacarrière. Life's superfluities dropped away; the moral choices...
...with an impudent Gallic wit. Director Peter Glenville has flung the drama onto the screen like a vast Bayeux tapestry, held fast with the lancet-sharp performances of Peter O'Toole as Henry II, England's first Plantagenet ruler, and of Richard Burton as the 12th century martyr Thomas Becket. Henry loved Becket, raised him to eminence as Archbishop of Canterbury, then lost his onetime friend in a struggle between church and state that ended with Becket's murder...
...void," he tells his mistress (Sian Phillips). Then the easy-living courtier becomes archbishop, and fate summons him to uphold "the honor of God." But does he die to defend canon law, made great by the great office thrust upon him, or is he merely a self-appointed martyr in search of his Cain? Given a mass of ambiguities to project, Burton projects them remarkably well. He daringly meets the competition offered by O'Toole with a sober, almost stubbornly restrained performance-and if the script defeats him, his commanding presence and magnificent voice carry him a long...
...hero of the play is a priest, a kind of angry young martyr of burning faith and compassion who deliberately pins the yellow Star of David to his cassock and eventually goes to his death in the gas chambers. Father Riccardo Fontana (Jeremy Brett) is a Jesuit serving with the papal nuncio in Berlin when a distracted SS lieutenant bursts into an afternoon tea and begins a semihysterical recital of the statistical horrors of the "factories of death for people" at Treblinka and Belzec. "I'm sorry . . . why must you come to me?" says the nuncio in visible dismay...
...might have ruled the Communist world, but Joseph Stalin shouldered him aside. Ever since, Leon Trotsky has been the favorite martyr of those Marxists who feel that Communism was never given a fair trial because Stalin corrupted...