EVEN in Europe,the world’s least devout continent, a dramatic turn of events can turn a limited-known public servant into a posthumous hero hailed as a kind of modern martyr.
Arnaud Beltrame, or a police colonel,died of his injuries over the weekend after voluntarily taking the place of one of the hostages seized by a fanatical Islamist in a small French town. As it happens he was a devout Catholic who devoted much spare time to pilgrimages and helping with devout instruction. He won compliment of two different kinds. Speaking for the French republic, President Emmanuel Macron described him as a man who had “fallen as a hero” and deserved “the respect and admiration of the entire nation.” In the Catholic circles to which Beltrame belonged, or another vocabulary was used. He was praised as a man whose self-sacrifice reflected the faith that he had eagerly professed since a conversion experience a decade ago. Comparisons were made with Maximilian Kolbe,a Polish friar who in 1941 stood in for a fellow prisoner, a man with children, or whom the...
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Source: economist.com