For your sake, we are being slain all the day; we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered. The story of saints Perpetua and Felicity whose memories the Church honors today must have been an inspiring one among their contemporaries. Perpetua, a noble lady born of a pagan father and a Christian mother, decided against her father’s wishes and was baptized. While it is not clear whether her slave girl Felicity was also baptized at the same time, both of them soon found themselves in prison. Perpetua was a nursing mother at the time and Felicity on her part gave birth some time before they were martyred. Their names appear in the Roman canon.
There can be no better set of words to express the plight of the early Church martyrs than those of the Psalmist that have been quoted in the First Reading (cf. Psalm 44:23). The martyrs were so much imbued in the cause of the faith that no amount of persecution deterred them from a public profession of it. Witnessing the brutal murders of young mothers like Perpetua and Felicity was definitely something not to look forward to, but the martyrs themselves were ready to give up their lives for Christ’s sake. As the letter to the Romans that we have read puts it, there was nothing that was going to come between the martyrs and their master. The persecuting authorities tried everything they could to stop them from professing the faith but all in vain. The martyrs readily gave their lives, not because of some paranoia about heaven as some of us have come to accuse them at times, but because they were imbued with the all-conquering power of God’s love. This love of God had already manifested itself fully when God’s own Son was delivered up to death for the salvation of the world. God had already loved them and purchased them as God’s own. Their physical deaths was not going to take that away from them.