Commemoration of SS. Chrysanthus and Daria, Martyrs

2 Corinthians 6:4-10 / Luke 11:47-51

In his story "The Cask of Amontillado," Edgar Allen Poe presents us with the horror of being buried alive. Told from the perspective of the murderer, Montresor, still unrepentant some fifty years after the deed, the story tells how Montresor lured Fortunato, whom he accused of a thousand unnamed injuries, into the catacombs beneath his palazzo. It was Carnival, and Fortunato, decked in jester's motley, although already drunk from the festivities, is enticed by Montresor into the deep, dark tunnels to taste what Montresor insists is the finest cask of Amontillado. Throughout their journey, Fortunato, already looking foolish in his costume and addled by drink, assures his host of the rightness of his own opinion about wines, the nobility of his lineage, and the solidity of his constitution, brushing off his cough from the damp as no trouble at all. However, tricked into an alcove, Fortunato finds himself chained to the wall, and Montresor then finishes the deed by walling a quickly-sobering Fortunato into the alcove, left with only the dying light of their torch as a companion before his inevitable death. Even his final plea to Montresor — "For the love of God!" — is echoed in a more vindictive and triumphant tone — "Yes, for the love of God!"

The lives of Chrysanthus and Daria present us with quite a different account of being buried alive. Like Fortunato, Chrysanthus was a man of noble birth and, in the eyes of his father, he also dressed up as a fool, drunk with falsehood. However, his folly was nothing other than the new life he discovered in reading the Acts of the Apostles, his jester's motley nothing other than the new man put on in baptism. When his father tried, and failed, to entice him with wanton women, and subsequently arranged his marriage to the Vestal Virgin, Daria, to bind him more powerfully to the world, Chrysanthus found in Daria instead of chains another who came to embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and instead of a wall and burning torch, together they found light of faith and the gates of heaven. Even when he was subjected to torture, he never submitted, and his sober drunkenness and holy folly turned his persecutor, his persecutor's family, and many other to the Gospel. Ultimately, for unnamed injuries to Rome, Chrysanthus, Daria, and those they drew to Christ, were put to death, the happy couple being buried alive. Indeed, so great was the malice against the Gospel that others who came to venerate them, Diodorus and Marianus, were likewise entombed alive in the crypt where the martyrs' bodies had been placed. All of this, indeed, for the love of God.

We can have no doubt that Chrysanthus and Daria lived out the vision of the ministers of God presented by St Paul. They maintained the faith as surely in tribulation, in necessitis, in distresses, in strifes, in prisons, as they did in chastity, in knowledge, in longsuffering, in sweetness, in the Holy Ghost, in charity unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God. Yet, when we venerate their names, what part do we play? Is our memorial like that of Diodorus and Marianus, who, for the love of God and his saints, suffered the awful death of being entombed alive? Or is our memorial like that of the scribes and Pharisees and bear witness to our consent of the killing of the prophets of old, even while they build monuments in their honor? Do we, in fact, recall the martyrs' deaths as Montresor did Fortunato's?

Certainly, neither we nor the scribes and Pharisees intend in any direct way to imitate the cruelty of those who slew God's holy ones. All the same, the only honest monument we can erect is conforming our own lives to theirs, to be so related to them in love that we, no more than they, have no fear of the death. It is in our wearing the armor of justice, up uprightness to ourselves, to our neighbor, and to the poor, that our veneration of the heroic saints is for us a badge of honor and a source of merit, rather than a witness to our hypocrisy and a basis for condemnation.

Honor the lives of the martyrs we must, and call upon their aid in our lives without hesitation. Yet, as we draw to Jesus Christ by drawing close to them, do we consent to meet the same fate as they did? Are we ready to be entombed by the wickedness of the world, knowing that in death as much as in life, we are no less alive in Christ Jesus our Lord?