For over four hundred years, ancient chronicles, government records, and modern histories have preserved the names of five Franciscan friars who died heroically on the coast of "La Florida" in September 1597. From various regions of their native Spain, they had heeded the call for missionaries to evangelize the Native peoples of America. Courageously, they had gone to the northern reaches of Spanish Florida, now the state of Georgia, an area already the scene of violence, to reach the people of the Guale Nation. Far from the protection of governor and garrison, they constructed missions, offered Mass, preached, and baptized.
Among all the difficulties faced by the missionaries, perhaps the greatest was that of sharing Christ's teaching on marriage
-- essentially that marriage is a life-time union of one man and one woman -- with a people whose culture included polygamy. That teaching was in Jesus' day not part of any nation's culture, and the teaching was spread with the Gospel. The missionaries neither could nor would change it. As the Second Vatican Council's document Lumen Gentium would state in a later age, "The intimate partnership of married life and love has been established by the Creator and qualified by His laws. It is rooted in the conjugal covenant of irrevocable personal consent." Some truths are worth dying for, and the Georgia Martyrs found this to be one.