You can kill the truth-tellers, but you cannot kill the truth they tell.

In today’s Gospel text from Mark 9, Jesus predicts his passion and death. He speaks about it quite openly with his twelve apostles. Those events of Good Friday—which we commemorate at each and every Mass—were prophesied in many passages of the Old Testament, like the one we heard a few moments ago from Wisdom, chapter 2. In those particular verses, some wicked people speak of their evil intentions toward a certain just man—a guy who was obviously disturbing their consciences with his morally upright behavior. And they definitely didn’t appreciate having their consciences disturbed! So they proceed to hatch their evil plot. They say, "Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. . . . Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him."

Although they were written many years before Jesus walked the face of this earth, those words accurately express the sentiments of our Lord’s enemies. They wanted to kill him—Scripture makes this abundantly clear—ultimately because they wanted to kill the truth he was speaking about and witnessing to. They objected to the Gospel message: that’s really what they wanted to undermine and destroy. But these enemies of our Lord forgot one thing: you can kill the truth-teller—yes—but you cannot kill the truth he tells (or, in the case of Jesus, you cannot kill the Truth he is! As he said in John 14, "I am . . . the TRUTH!") Sure, they put Jesus in the grave for a couple of days, but they could not destroy him or his message! As he predicted, he rose from the dead on Easter Sunday; and his truth has been faithfully proclaimed by his Church from Pentecost until this very day.

But, unfortunately, efforts to kill the truth have continued almost nonstop for twenty centuries. This has resulted in the deaths of all too many truth-tellers. The Roman Emperors, for example, tried to kill the truth of the Gospel for nearly three hundred years, by throwing thousands of our spiritual ancestors to the lions. And what an interesting irony: they tried to conquer the truth, but, in the end, the truth conquered them—and the entire empire became Christian (at least in name).

And how about our century? We’ve witnessed communism, nazism, fascism, radical feminism, materialism and the sexual revolution—all of which have brought suffering (and sometimes death) to those who speak and live the truth of Christ.

This past May, in an ecumenical ceremony appropriately held at the Colosseum in Rome, Pope John Paul II honored many of these "truth-tellers" of the last hundred years—Catholic and non-Catholic alike. Here is some of what he said on that occasion:

In the twentieth century, and maybe even more than in the first period of Christianity, there has been a vast number of men and women who bore witness to the faith through sufferings that were often heroic. How many Christians in the course of the twentieth century, on every continent, showed their love of Christ by the shedding of blood! They underwent forms of persecution both old and new, they experienced hatred and exclusion, violence and murder. Many countries of ancient Christian tradition once more became lands where fidelity to the Gospel demanded a very high price. In our century "the witness to Christ borne even to the shedding of blood has become a common inheritance of Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants" (Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 37).

The generation to which I belong experienced the horror of war, the concentration camps, persecution. In my homeland, during the Second World War, priests and Christians were deported to extermination camps. In Dachau alone some three thousand priests were interned. Their sacrifice was joined to that of many Christians from other European countries, some of whom belonged to other Churches and Ecclesial Communities.

I myself am a witness of much pain and many trials, having seen these in the years of my youth. My priesthood, from its very beginning, was marked "by the great sacrifice of countless men and women of my generation" (Gift and Mystery, p. 39). The experience of the Second World War and of the years following brought me to consider carefully and with gratitude the shining example of those who, from the beginning of the twentieth century to its end, met persecution, violence, death, because of their faith and because their behavior was inspired by the truth of Christ.

You can kill the truth-tellers, but you cannot kill the truth they tell. John Paul II understands this idea I would say as well as anyone. That’s why I don’t think he was surprised in the least when the Berlin wall came down, and Eastern European communism came to an end (for the most part) several years ago. As his biographer, George Weigel has said, the Holy Father believes that the crisis of the twentieth century has been a crisis of ideas. Communism is built on false ideas about the human person and the meaning of life. It says that human beings are like cogs in a machine: they have no intrinsic value and no eternal destiny. Those are lies! And John Paul II knows that all lies will eventually be exposed, and that the truth will ultimately prevail. This is why he was always so bold in his dealings with the communist authorities in his own country and in other places. As Martin Luther King would say, he always believed that "Truth, pressed to the earth, will rise again."