On February 25th U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell committed suicide by lighting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. Bushnell died while shouting “Free Palestine” and intended his death to be a form of protest against the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
In an attempt to normalize suicide as “political protest,” Time Magazine described the history of self-immolation and said, “Self-immolation was also seen as a sacrificial act committed by Christian devotees who chose to be burned alive when they were being persecuted for their religion by Roman emperor Diocletian around 300 A.D.” Time cited a 2012 article from The New Yorker in defense of this claim which said that “around 300 A.D., Christians persecuted by Diocletian set fire to his palace in Nicodemia and then threw themselves onto it—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.”
But this is false.
The fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius describes the fire in Nicomedia (not “Nicodemia” as The New Yorker wrote) in book eight, chapters five and six, of his work The Church History. He says of the fire’s cause that “a false suspicion was laid to our people,” i.e., Christians. He is not aware of Christians purposefully starting it. He then writes,
Entire families of the pious in that place were put to death in masses at the royal command, some by the sword, and others by fire. It is reported that with a certain divine and indescribable eagerness men and women rushed into the fire. And the executioners bound a large number of others and put them on boats and threw them into the depths of the sea.
This is not an example of suicide done to protest the Emperor’s actions. These Christians had been sentenced to death and some of them joyously accepted their impending martyrdom knowing they would receive the “martyr’s crown” in heaven as a reward (Rev. 2:10). Early Christian writers like Origen (Commentary on Matthew), Lactantius (Divine Institutes 3:18), and Augustine (City of God, 1.16-27) all condemned suicide as gravely sinful and made no exception for suicides done of out of protest towards unjust rulers.
The Church teaches that suicide is gravely evil but that “Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide” (CCC 2282). This means we should pray that God has mercy upon anyone who commits suicide, including Airman Bushnell.