“Jesus, help me.”

Pope Francis paused during his address last month before a group of Catholics from Scotland to recall the stirring prayer of the 21 Egyptian Copts as they prepared for their execution at the hands of Islamic State militants: “Jesus, help me.”

“They were killed simply for the fact they were Christians,” Pope Francis said, according to a report from Vatican Radio.

“The blood of our Christian brothers and sisters is a testimony which cries out to be heard.”

Amid the horror of the Islamic State’s campaign of religious cleansing, the Pope underscored the truth that Catholics, Orthodox and Copts have shared the same fate and a newfound unity as they enter into the passion of the Church in the Middle East.

“They are Christians! Their blood is one and the same. Their blood confesses Christ,” Francis proclaimed. The martyrs, he said, “belong to all Christians.”

The whole world recoiled when faced with the videotaped beheadings of the 21 Copts — humble laborers who worked in Libya and sent meager remittances back home to their families. Dressed in orange jumpsuits provided by their captors, the men stood on the beach, waiting their turn.

“Jesus, help me.”

The video was not smuggled out of Libya. It was carefully produced and distributed by the Islamic State group and is part of a recruitment strategy for attracting more jihadists. And it seems to be working. The organization is not only drawing fervent Muslims and disaffected young men onto the battlefield in Syria and Iraq — it is enticing teenage girls, too.

The unapologetic brutality of the Islamic State’s tactics offers a new vision of faith — one that celebrates the will to power and man’s age-old inhumanity to man. Religious leaders from every faith must oppose this movement, just as political and military leaders must check its advance.

The Islamic State is tempting the world with a version of faith designed to repudiate and replace “true religion.” Its policies reflect “a coordinated effort on behalf of fanatics to see that true religion, which stands for friendship, peace and the dignity of the human person and the sacredness of human life, is stamped out,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York in an op-ed in the New York Post marking the executions of the 21 Copts.

“Jesus, help me.”

The Christians of Egypt, India, Iraq, Nigeria and Syria have experienced this searing truth firsthand, and, like Christ, they have often found themselves abandoned by the world.

Yet, while Islamic terrorists threaten the very existence of these ancient churches, it has not extinguished the flame of faith.

“Beshir Kamel, brother of both Bishoy Astafanus Kamel, who was 25, and Somaily Astafanus Kamel, who was 23, thanked their murderers for not editing out the name of their Savior when disseminating the video of their beheadings,” Kathryn Lopez reported on National Review. “Appearing on an Arabic-Christian television station, Kamel said that the families of the men — … 13 of them from the same small, impoverished village — were congratulating one another: ‘We are proud to have this number of people from our village who have become martyrs.’”

“Kamel continued: ‘Since the Roman era, Christians have been martyred and have learned to handle everything that comes our way. This only makes us stronger in our faith, because the Bible told us to love our enemies and bless those who curse us.’”

Coptic Christians and their brothers and sisters in Syria and Iraq understand too well that a believing Christian may be called to enter into the passion of Christ, not only in prayer and in the sacrifice of the holy Mass, but, very directly, when paying the ultimate price for discipleship.

As Beshir Kamel reminded us, the fire of persecution has always threatened the Church, from the early Christians, who were torn apart by wild animals to entertain crowds at the Roman Colosseum, to 21st-century Copts, whose beheadings have been used as fodder for terrorist propaganda.

Over the centuries, Christians have been martyred in England, China, Poland, Uganda, Ukraine, Japan, Spain, Russia and Mexico. At the shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa, Poland, a mural depicting the passion of Christ includes St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest and martyr who volunteered to take the place of another prisoner sentenced to death in a Nazi concentration camp. The mural suggests that Kolbe is present as Christ carries the cross, just as Jesus was present when Kolbe made his fateful choice.

Kolbe’s act of heroic charity is perhaps the only true antidote to the culture of death in any age.

And in the years ahead, we will hear stories of Christians in the Middle East who testified to the dignity and sanctity of life even as others embraced the Islamic State’s policy of suicide bombers, executions, forced marriages and abductions.

“Jesus, help me.”

The blood of martyrs is the seedbed of the Church, and the Copts who died on the beach with a prayer to Jesus on their lips are the sowers who will provide for our needs, decades or even centuries from now.

During this Lent, let us join in the passion of Christians in the Middle East and beseech God for peace and for their protection from the enemy.

And if death is near, we pray that they “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23). We ask Jesus, the Lamb of God, to guide their journey to Golgotha, a place he knew before the creation of the world.

“And carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called ‘The Place of the Skull,’ which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There, they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them” (John 19:17-18).

“Jesus, help me.”