Martirii – un caz de incorectitudine politică de nesuportat: a trăi după Richard Rorty
Martyrs, A case of political unbearableincorrectness: to live according to Richard Rorty

Summary/Abstract: When one looks back to those in Romania who confessed the faith under torture and died as Orthodox martyrs after the First World War and before the fall of communism, many puzzles emerge. There is the general question of how to write a balanced history of this period marked by the murderous regimes of Hitler and Stalin, the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust and of Orthodox Christians in the Soviet Union. Some of the martyrs in theperiod had misguided political and social commitments by whic h they lived, but for which they did not die. Their deaths were for Christ and true belief so that the blood of their martyrdom separated them from their past. But it is the present, not their past, that makes their glorification a major cultural challenge. Romania, having freed herself from the secularist tyranny of international socialism, currently faces the soft laicism of the European Union, which takes on ever more the character of a secular fundamentalist state demanding the removal of traditional Christianity from the public forum and from the public square. This post-Christian laicist ethos requires an affirmation of religious diversity and difference as cardinal cultural goods so that the recognition of right belief and right worship becomes an act of intolerance, while the condemnation by Orthodox Christians of what the Church knows to be sinful sexual acts becomes bigotry. In terms of the now-dominant secular culture, the martyrs of the 20th century, apart from their early lives, are culturally problematic because of their exclusivist affirmation of right worship and right belief. Romanians confront the deep political incorrectness of the glorification of their 20th-century martyrs, within a dominant secular culture that Richard Rorty recognized as losing any sense of the divine. The martyrs underscore with their blood the existence of God in a culture that wants to deny the transcendent.

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