Review: Martyrs for the earth
The coffin of slain U.S. missionary Sister Dorothy Stang is carried by members of the Landless Movement during a funeral service on Feb. 15, 2005, in Anapu, Brazil. Sister Stang, a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, lived in Brazil's Amazon region for nearly four decades, working to protect the land rights of peasants and speaking out concerning the ecological dangers of deforestation. (CNS photo/Agencia O Globo, Ailton de Freitas)The Greek word martyr means simply “witness”—someone who testifies in court. But for many of us, it brings to mind the early Christians executed by the Roman Empire, perhaps even thrown to the wild beasts, like Perpetua and Felicity. One’s imagination is easily captured by their dramatic story, but a reader who steps back might wonder: What kind of “testimony” was so threatening to the Roman Empire that there was a need to execute a couple of nursing mothers? Martyrdom illuminates how the good news of Jesus Christ, the “dangerous memory” of his death and resurrection, posed a threat to the imperial authority of the Roman Empire.
Today, who or what might be threatened by the testimony of martyrs? Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo’s new book, Ecomartyrdom in the Americas: Living and Dying for Our Common Home, reveals how Jesus’ message poses a deep challenge to certain patterns and powers of modern life. She invites us to look carefully at the lives of modern ecomartyrs as a guide to help us “re-imagine and re-embody the relationship between human beings and the earth.”
Echoing Pope Francis’ insight in “Laudato Si’” that the human environment and the natural environment degrade together, she shows how both are damaged by extractive industries—mining, oil, logging and other industries. Water resources are threatened by oil spills, by the water-intensive practices of metallic mining and by the collapses of tailings dams that release toxic mining byproducts into local waterways. Deforestation and species loss seem inevitable, and human, animal and plant life are all threatened by the polluted air and water that result from the extraction and use of these resources.
Those who would resist—often, Indigenous peoples—are subject to criminalization and assassination. These dynamics are not new, Gandolfo reminds us; colonialist attitudes toward the Americas have long been characterized by what she calls “extractivism”—a willingness to force some lives and some lands to be sacrificed so that others might prosper. (Slavery, too, was an “extractive industry.”) In the words of Atahualpa Yupanqui (whom Gandolfo quotes), “Some people must ‘spit out blood’ so that others can live a more comfortable life.”
As the climate warms around the globe, it is becoming more and more obvious—even to those who would prefer to deny it—how much the fates of humans and other creatures all over the world are deeply interconnected and very much at risk. But these connections are complex, and the scale of the crisis is overwhelming. How can we begin to comprehend the complex web of connections and draw out some of the strands of our moral responsibility?
Many of us have a clear sense that we ought to do something to respond to such excessive environmental destruction (and its human consequences), especially as it becomes clear to all how vital the Amazon rainforest is for mitigating the effects of climate change. Yet we often struggle to know where to start, because the scale of the problem is overwhelming. This book provides a valuable service by offering a clear picture of our complicity with environmental injustice and revealing some of the ways that lifestyles in the United States and other rich countries are entwined with violence, a violence that ensnares both people and the earth. But Gandolfo does not stop there; she also points us toward clear paths of resistance.
In a chapter titled “Dying for Our Common Home,” Gandolfo describes how global human rights standards are being forced to evolve in response to these urgent problems. With the Rio Declaration of 1992 and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the United Nations and other bodies have begun to establish the idea that human rights must include the right to a safe, clean and sustainable environment. A landmark regional treaty for Latin America and the Caribbean, known as the Escazú Agreement (2021), enshrines legal protections for “environmental human rights defenders.” And extractive industries themselves are arriving at the understanding that they cannot operate in places where they have not obtained the free prior and informed consent of the local populace—a standard endorsed by companies that have signed the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
Just as the meaning of “human rights” must evolve as we acknowledge how much the fate of humanity is wedded to the fate of the broader environment, the category of martyrdom must also expand. As Gandolfo explains, the Latin American churches, at the grass roots as well as among liberation theologians, have for decades been “transforming the meaning of Christian martyrdom” as they cultivate the memory of St. Óscar Romero and other “martyrs of solidarity.” Thinkers like Jon Sobrino, S.J., Leonardo Boff and others have built upon Thomas Aquinas’s argument in the Summa Theologiae that martyrdom consists essentially of standing firmly with truth and justice “against the assaults of persecution.”
Christians who are persecuted for their defense of the poor and of land rights are rightly considered martyrs, as they testify to the truth of human dignity. With Romero’s canonization in 2018, “official recognition of this expanded understanding of martyrdom represents a significant development in the church’s tradition and an institutional witness to the preferential option for the poor and oppressed as a central commitment of the Christian faith,” Gandalfo writes. Yet this development must continue, as we come to recognize ecomartyrdom as an important form of Christian testimony today.
Today’s martyrs may still be those who are killed in odium fidei¸out ofhatred for the faith. They may also be those who, like Romero, are “killed by fellow Christians out of hatred for his insistence that the Christian faith demands solidarity with the poor and oppressed.” And they may also be those who, like Dorothy Stang, S.N.D.de.N., are killed by fellow Christians out of hatred for her insistent defense of both the rainforest and the people dwelling there. In other words: ecomartyrs.
No student leaves my classroom without hearing that name. Sister Dorothy Stang was assassinated in the Brazilian Amazon in 2005 by hit men hired by ranchers and loggers who saw both plants and people as obstacles. Sister Dorothy is among the martyrs Gandolfo profiles in a chapter titled “Narrating the Witness” that is really the heart of this book.
When my students encounter her story, they are initially baffled by the idea that this white-haired nun from Ohio could have seemed dangerous to anyone, much less so threatening that she needed to be assassinated by hired gunmen. But the more they examine her story, the more they begin to understand that we are all complicit in her death and in the deaths of so many people and places that face the consequences of extractivist ideology and economics. As the bishops’ final document from the Amazon Synod put it:
One of the most glorious pages of the Amazon has been written by the martyrs. The participation of the followers of Jesus in his passion, death and glorious resurrection has accompanied the life of the Church to this day, especially in the moments and places in which, for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus, Christians live in the midst of acute contradictions, such as those who struggle, at great risk to their own lives, to defend the existence of this territory.
In addition to Sister Dorothy Stang, Gandolfo movingly profiles five other recent martyrs, including Berta Cáceres (Honduras), the Rev. Josímo Morais Tavares and Chico Mendes (both from Brazil), the Rev. Alcides Jiménez (Colombia) and Marcelo Rivera (El Salvador). Yet she also makes clear that she has chosen to write about these individuals not because they are unique (they are, sadly, far from unique), but because their communities’ memorializations of them have made them “palpably present.”
Their importance in collective memory is beautifully conveyed by a website that accompanies the book. There one can experience art, music and documentary films about the six martyrs and the communities that remember them, and can grasp at least part of the creativity and resistance they have inspired. A section on “Resources for Action” invites us to honor their legacy by becoming involved in the work of organizations that are “planting seeds, globally and locally, of fighting every day for environmental justice, climate justice, and ecological well-being.” This section complements the final chapter of the book, “Responding to the Witness: Honoring Ecomartyrs With Our Lives,” a closing reflection that is both theologically and practically astute.
During the Jubilee year of 2000, Pope John Paul II designated a church in Rome—the Basilica of St. Bartholomew, who was himself martyred—to be a sanctuary for the memory of modern-day martyrs. There, the Community of Sant’Egidio (to whom the pope entrusted the church) has collected relics of many martyrs: the chasuble of St. Romero, the tunic of Archbishop Faraj Rahho of Mosul, the trowel of St. Charles de Foucauld and a letter from Blessed Franz Jägerstätter written just before his execution. At the beginning of the coming jubilee year, 2025, St. Bartholomew’s will, for the first time, receive the relic of an ecomartyr.
Sister Dorothy Stang’s religious community will present a small vial of blood-soaked dirt collected from the site of her murder—an appropriate relic for a martyr who gave her life for the earth. Together with many other ecomartyrs, named and unnamed, her legacy is a reminder that care for our common home may indeed come at a high cost.
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