VATICAN - Commemorating the Martyrs - Catholic World Report

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Commemorating the Martyrs
In a special ecumenical ceremony, Pope John Paul led the Church in honoring all
Christians who gave their lives for the faith during the 20th century.

The ecumenism of the martyrs and the witnesses to the faith is the most convincing of all; to the Christians of the 21st century it shows the path to unity. It is the heritage of the Cross lived in the light of Easter: a heritage which enriches and sustains Christians as they go forward into the new millennium. . . . We do this as we ourselves offer pardon, faithful to the example of the countless witnesses who were killed even as they prayed for their persecutors.

This was how Pope John Paul II explained the meaning of the Ecumenical Commemoration of the Witnesses to the Faith of the 20th century, a unique ceremony that was held in the Roman Coliseum on the afternoon of Sunday, May 7.

Earlier, during his midday Regina Caeli audience in St. Peter’s square, the Pope invited the people to come to this “important event of the Great Jubilee.” He explained the significance of the ceremony:

In a final word of explanation, the Pope noted that the commemoration would be an ecumenical ceremony, at which “testimony of a number of Christians of different confessions and ecclesial communities will be heard.” The witness of those who die for the faith, he said, is a common patrimony of all Christians. “The courage they demonstrated in taking up the Cross of Christ calls out to us with a voice louder than any factors of division.”

The Pope opened the Commemoration service with a greeting and introductory prayer in Latin. He was followed by Metropolitan Gennadios, the Greek Orthodox exarch for Europe and personal representative of Patriarch Bartholomew I, who delivered his prayer in Greek. Then Rev. Ishmael Noko of the World Lutheran Federation added an English prayer.

After that introductory rite, a procession led back to the outside of the Coliseum, where a small wooden pulpit decorated with purple flowers had been installed in one of the arcades, under a large Byzantine icon of a cross against a red background. There, near the great Arc of Constantine, hundreds of people had gathered to sit on the grass, under a cloudy, darkening sky. After an Italian Catholic priest read from the Gospel, the Lectionary was taken by an Orthodox deacon and placed symbolically on a small gilded throne in front of the Pope’s seat, beside a Paschal candle.

A light rain had begun to fall during the Pope’s homily, and after a brief respite the rain resumed during the reading of the names of 20th-century martyrs. But few people left the Coliseum as the ceremony neared its dramatic peak. The 12,692 people who had died for the faith during the 20th century were remembered under several categories: those who died under Soviet Communism, under Communism elsewhere in Europe, under fascism, under the Nazi regime, and under other persecutions.

Many of their stories had a powerful emotional impact. A seminarian from Burundi, fatally wounded in an April 1997 massacre that also took the lives of 44 of his classmates, wrote: “Writing in our own blood, we pray for, and beg the pardon of, those who have killed us.” There were moving recollections of a Jesuit priest in Albania who endured 17 years of imprisonment and torture before his death, and a Chinese catechist who spent 20 years in prison camps after being arrested in 1958 at the age of 22.

The ecumenical character of the event was evident in the choice of texts that had been selected for the commemoration of the martyrs. These readings included a passage written by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tichon, who was elected to that post in 1917 and died in 1925; from an Anglican bishop who died in Papau New Guinea in 1942; from a young Canadian Baptist doctor who died in Nigeria, where he was treating the victims of an epidemic of meningitis; and from the late Armenian Apostolic Catolicos Karekin I, who spoke of the persecutions suffered by his people.

After each of these readings, a priest stepped forward to light a candle in front of the Gospel, while choirs sang in different liturgical styles, representing the different countries from which the testimony was taken. In total, the service lasted nearly three hours, and darkness had fallen before Pope John Paul recited the concluding prayer, asking God to remember all those who had fallen for the faith, “and, in your infinite mercy, their persecutors as well.”

“Martyrdom” and “witness”
— a distinction in terms

As the Vatican prepared for the special May 7 ceremony, the Holy See cautioned that, technically speaking, the individuals being honored should be identified as “witnesses to the faith” rather than as “martyrs.”

Father Daniel Ols, an official of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, pointed out that the term “martyr” properly refers to people who have been beatified or canonized. The May 7 ceremony was an ecumenical event, paying tribute to Christians of different denominations who have died for their faith. Most of them are not, and probably never will be, the subjects of “causes” for canonization or beatification.

The first calendar of events for the Jubilee year referred to the May 7 ceremony as a commemoration of “new martyrs” of the past century. The subsequent calendars have been more accurate, referring to “20th-century witnesses to the faith.”

A Geography of Martyrdom

There is no major point on the globe which has not seen some case of 20th-century martyrdom that is now being examined by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

In 1900, Christian missions in China suffered violent persecution when the Boxer movement and the Closed Fists Society bloodied the dawn of the 20th century. In the Philippines, a schismatic sect led by Gregory Aglipay caused violence which produced a number of martyrs.
In 1904 Spain had its first martyrs of the century in Valencia, where two young laymen were martyred by anti-Catholic activists. In 1924 in Brazil an anti-clerical revolution led to persecution against the Church. In Tanzania a group of missionaries was killed in Majimai. In Mexico persecution began with the Revolution in 1911, increased in 1917, and lasted until the 1940s; hundreds were martyred. In Spain once again, persecution under the Second Republic (1931-1939) caused what was then the greatest Christian holocaust since the times of the Roman Empire.

In Germany, Austria, Poland, France, and Italy, the Nazi regime waged a fierce persecution. We all know about the persecutions which took place in the Soviet Union, including Ukraine. After the Second World War, Communist persecution was seen in many places and became systematic in Eastern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, the Czech Republic, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere.

Persecution has been common in Africa: in northern Africa (Algeria and Libya in the 1980s and 1990s); in Central Africa and the Great Lakes region: in Burundi (1989-90), Cameroon, Ethiopia and Eritrea (1980s), Gabon (1977), Equatorial Guinea (1983), Kenya (with open persecution by the Mau Mau society, and more subtle oppression in successive years), Liberia (1989), Nigeria (1995), Rwanda (1994), Sierra Leone (1995), Somalia (1960-64), Uganda (1972 and 1995), Zaire (1960-64); in east Africa: Angola (1982-84), Lesotho (1980s), Madagascar (1980s), Mozambique (1985), South Africa (1985), and Zimbabwe (1977-79). Above all there has been persecution recently in Sudan, with a brutal Islamic persecution which has lasted now for more than 30 years since 1966 up to the present day.

Central and South America have seen persecution and violence for religious motives, often connected with the struggle for justice and peace in contexts of civil war and social conflict. There has been such noteworthy violence against Christians within recent memory in Argentina (1976), Bolivia (1980), Brazil (1976-85), Colombia (1991), Ecuador (1987-85), El Salvador (1980s), Guatemala (1980s), Guyana (1979), Haiti (1971), Honduras (1975), Mexico (late 1940s), Panama (1989), Peru (1987-91), Puerto Rico (1991), Santo Domingo (1965), Venezuela (1946 and 1991).

In Asia we recall the continuing persecution in China (from 1933 to the present day), as well as the anti-Christian campaigns in North Korea (from 1949 to the present day), India (1949 and 1995), Indonesia (1944-45, and today also in East Timor), and Thailand (1930s and 1940s). Other periods of oppression were connected with situations of conflict, for example, in the Philippines (1976-77 and 1984-85), Bangladesh (1971-74), Laos (1960-72), Vietnam (1940s and 1970-80). We must add Middle East countries such as Iraq (1915-18) and Lebanon (1975-90), and surreptitious persecution in various parts of the Muslim world, above all in Saudi Arabia. In Oceania the most serious episodes were seen in Papua New Guinea in 1942-1943.

— Father Fidel Gonzales