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In the Catholic Church there are numerous feast days throughout the year that honor the lives of martyrs, holy men and women who died for the Christian faith.
These liturgical celebrations highlight the deaths of these individuals and how courageous they were in the face of persecution.
However, St. Augustine believed that we must not only honor these saints, but imitate them.
He wrote his ideas in a sermon on the feast of St. Lawrence.
For St. Augustine, the key to imitating the martyrs was a love of eternal life, a desire to be in communion with God.
If we love God and want to be with him, we are willing to endure any torment in this life, even to the point of death.
