Who are the “new martyrs” the Pope honored on Sunday?

On Sunday, September 14, Pope Leo XIV presided over an ecumenical celebration at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, in the presence of representatives from 24 Christian denominations. Organized as part of the Jubilee, it commemorated the martyrdom of 1,624 Christians who have been killed for their faith since the beginning of the 21st century.

This list of contemporary martyrs recalled a similar one compiled for the Jubilee of 2000 at the request of John Paul II. The Polish pope had honored the many victims of 20th-century ideologies — particularly communism and Nazism — whose memory continues to be preserved at the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on Tiber Island in Rome.

In the same spirit, Pope Francis had wished to renew the initiative, entrusting the task in 2023 to a new commission of experts. While the updated list has not yet been published, commission members emphasized that it was not a formal recognition of martyrdom — which requires a lengthy canonical investigation for beatification — but rather a reliable historical record of those who died for their faith or in defense of values directly linked to it.

It was within this perspective of an “ecumenism of blood” that some martyrs listed also belonged to other Christian denominations. At a September 9 conference at St. Bartholomew’s, Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, noted that his office could potentially recognize martyrs from other confessions, though it had not done so “out of courtesy.”

The Italian cardinal expressed admiration for Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed in a concentration camp for opposing Nazism, and extended his solidarity to members of other religions murdered simply for their faith.

Compared with the 20th century, the profiles of the nearly 1,700 martyrs of the 21st century have shifted. Many were victims of jihadist violence in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — such as the Easter 2019 bombings in Sri Lanka, which killed 269 people, and the execution of 21 Coptic martyrs on a beach in 2015, whom Pope Francis included in the Roman Martyrology with the agreement of Coptic Pope Tawadros.

Among those remembered were Fr. Jacques Hamel, killed during Mass in 2016; Comboni Sister Maria De Coppi, murdered in a terrorist attack in Mozambique in 2020; and some 40 Christian students aged 12 to 17, massacred with their teachers at a school in Mpondwe, Uganda.

There were also countless victims from Christian communities in Muslim-majority countries, such as Basharat Masih, murdered in Pakistan in 2023 for trying to prevent the forced conversion of his daughter.

Many martyrs in Mexico, Nigeria, and Haiti gave their lives resisting ethnic conflicts, drug cartels, and armed gangs as part of their daily witness of faith. Among them was Italian Sister Luisa Dell’Orto, who spent 20 years serving orphans and street children in Port-au-Prince before being killed in 2022. Another was Congolese catechist Floribert Bwana Chui, murdered in Goma in 2007 after refusing bribes to allow spoiled food onto the market. On June 15, 2024, he was beatified, the Church recognizing him as a martyr of “honesty and moral integrity” in a country scarred by corruption.

Cardinal Semeraro highlighted the importance of these witnesses, noting that while some were not killed out of direct hatred for the Christian faith, they died because, as Christians, they defended values inseparable from it—above all, justice.

According to Fr. Angelo Romano, former rector of St. Bartholomew’s, “some on this long, unofficial list may eventually be formally recognized as martyrs, others not. And there are many we will probably never know of, though they are true witnesses.”

Pope Francis himself had declared in 2023 that martyrs today “are more numerous than in the first centuries.”