Orthodox clergy inverted baptism-by-blood doctrine to sanctify the killers rather than the martyrs

Evidence

Acts of blood vengeance were believed to cause religious defilement that rendered the actor ineligible to receive the Eucharist. By offering the Serb warriors communion without requiring their confession, the Serb Orthodox clergy take the “extermination of the Turkifiers” out of the category of blood vengeance. Instead, they present it as an act sacred in itself, with the implication of baptism by blood. Here, however, there is a twist. In the Christian doctrine of baptism by blood, it is the martyr whose sins are washed away by the baptism. In the extermination of the Turkifiers the killers who are baptizing the Turkifiers in blood are rendered worthy of communion and receive a full forgiveness for all their sins. Killing Turks or Turkified ones becomes not only worthy, but sacred, raised to the same level of sacrality as baptism or confession. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 149

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A precisely inverted theology — the ritual that cleanses martyrs’ sins is redeployed to absolve the killers — that quietly explains how a church could sanctify genocide.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — here the killers rather than the victims receive the salvific death-baptism, an inversion of the sacrificial logic documented there.

Related

• Genocide replaced the reconcilable blood feud with an all-or-nothing sacred extermination (similarity 0.81)