If you go to Westminster Abbey in London, be sure to check out the statues of the 10 great 20th Century martyrs above the Great West Door. It is an interesting group, and includes some folks who might not have been considered saints or martyrs by the public at the time. There are two who were killed by Nazis during World War II-- Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I'm pretty sure that not many people in Germany considered them saints in 1945, and I doubt that folks in the rest of the world knew much about them. There is also a missionary, Lucian Tapiedi, killed by Japanese occupiers of New Guinea in 1942. His name is not a household word. There is also a statue of Oscar Romero, the bishop in El Salvador killed in 1980, whose views opposing the right-wing government of his country made him controversial at the time. A move is afoot now to advance his cause for canonization, but that wasn't the case in 1980. The other name most of us would know is Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated in the terrible year of 1968. I'm old enough to remember him as a very-controversial figure who was killed as his civil rights campaign was moving to broaden from its focus on race to include the issue of poverty. The fact that people do not recognize prophets and martyrs in their own day is nothing new. We read today in the Gospel (Mt 17: 9A, 10-13) that John the Baptist was the new Eljiah, but that people did not recognize him and did to him "whatever they pleased." The same was true of jesus. Why? Why can't we recognize spiritual greatness when it is among us, and why do we so-often attribute greatness to folks who, when we look back at them, seem not so great at all? So often it seems that the answer is that we don't think for ourselves-- we follow prevailing wisdom because it is easier and safer and doesn't provoke controversy. Jesus gets crucified, after all, because the Jewish leaders persuade the crowd that crucifying jesus is the thing to do, even though the same people had welcomed Him warmly to Jerusalem less than a week before. Proclaiming the spiritual greatness of all of the people I mentioned at the time they were alive would have subjected those who did so to criticism, and in Nazi Germany to worse, from lots of people, especially the people in charge, the power structure. That's how those in charge maintain their power when they have no moral compass. How do we find the prophets and martyrs today? How do we find the people who in 50 years will find their statues prominently displayed at Westminster Abbey? Maybe one way is to look for the people the power structure tells us we shouldn't like, the people who are subjected to criticism or mockery or worse. Mockery is one of the devil's greatest tools-- it is what the Roman soldiers did to Jesus on the cross. Who gets mocked today, and what does that tell us?