Would you die for your faith? As an example, if you were on an airplane and it was being taken over by a religious group (other than yours) and one of them puts a gun to your head and says, "Renounce your god or take a bullet?" what would you do?

Someone posted this on my Facebook wall the other day. My immediate answer was that I Hail Mary my way through everything, so I would Hail Mary and take the bullet because if we truly believe, it's the afterlife that matters.

But it's hard to imagine such a scenario. When anyone questions my pro-life position with scenes of "what if," my eyes usually roll to the back of my head and their voice becomes the "wha-wha" of the parents of Charlie Brown.

"What if your daughter were raped, and the baby (as the result of that rape) was threatening your daughter's health?" "What if you had to choose between your daughter and your grandchild's life, who would you choose?" You can "what if" this to infinity and beyond.

It's the extreme versions of a life that we can't imagine, yet I'm supposed to come up with an answer. I don't have one. I can't imagine anything happening to my daughter.

Dying for my faith is hard to imagine, too, but reading about the saints who did die for the faith, has opened a window in my mind.

The book, Voices of the Saints by Bert Ghezzi contains 365 saints, many who were martyred in ridiculously brutal ways. Yet, they were willing to die for their faith.

Our current political climate has made me think about this more and more. We used to be "a nation under God," but lately I'm not so sure. In other countries, dying or killing for your faith has become an every day occurrence. In the United States, attacking Catholics and Christians in general has become the verbal sport du jour.

How long before we experience that same violence in this country?