The almost 500 martyrs due to be beatified in Rome in October are priests, religious, nuns, laymen and laywomen. The Spanish Bishops’ Conference presents them as “witnesses of hope” and invites Spanish dioceses to go to Rome for the occasion. An expert on the history of Spain in the 1930s is Vicente Cárcel Ortí, former head of chancery of the Supreme Tribunal of the Segnatura Apostolica, a post he held for over twenty years. According to Fr Vicente Cárcel Ortí, the martyrs are not “martyrs of war” – as he explained to SIR – but “martyrs of religious persecution”: they “bore witness to their faith during the religious persecution of the years 1934 and 1936-39. The Church is beatifying them because they died forgiving and praying for their executioners, like Christ on the cross”. “We ought not to confuse them with those who fell on the battlefield, those who waged an armed struggle against each other – he says -, nor even with the victims of the political repression, which took place both in the republican and nationalist zone for religious reasons”. Monsignor Demetrio Fernández, Bishop of Tarazona, recalls in this regard that “the Church wishes to propose them to believers and all men of good will today as an example of love, forgiveness and reconciliation” and Msgr. Raúl Berzosa, auxiliary bishop of Oviedo (Asturias), also underlines that these martyrs “were not soldiers, or trades-unionists, politicians or intellectuals, but true believers willing to give their life for what they believed”.
