The Vatican’s new ecumenical catalogue of Christians killed while bearing witness to Christ has been presented as a record of contemporary martyrs. Pope Leo XIV has nevertheless drawn a necessary distinction between these “Witnesses to the Faith” and martyrdom formally recognised by the Catholic Church. The older Catholic tradition makes the question more exacting still: bloodshed alone does not make a martyr, and neither truth nor ecclesial unity becomes irrelevant at the moment of death.
There are words which the Church may use broadly without much danger. Martyr is not one of them. Behind it stand the blood of the Apostles, the Roman persecutions, the Fathers, the theology of St Thomas Aquinas, centuries of liturgical cult and an exact juridical tradition concerning those whom the Church publicly honours as having died for Christ.
That is why the Commission’s new catalogue of Witnesses to the Faith deserves considerably more scrutiny than the appealing phrase “ecumenism of blood” might suggest. Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, has spoken of Christians belonging to different confessions whose blood “often precedes our theological dialogues” and of a catalogue in which Catholic martyrs formally recognised by the Church may stand alongside documented witnesses from other Christian bodies.¹ The instinct behind the project is easy to understand, for Christians are still murdered because they bear the name of Christ.
Men and women still choose death rather than apostasy. Priests, religious and laymen have been killed because the Gospel they professed brought them into collision with dictatorships, ideological movements, religious persecutors, organised crime or corrupt power. The courage of such a person does not cease to be courage merely because he is not visibly in Catholic communion, but admiration is not definition, and the Church has never treated the shedding of blood as self-interpreting.
Pope Francis himself anticipated the difficulty when he established the Commission in 2023. Its purpose was to gather the names and testimony of those who had shed their blood confessing Christ and witnessing to His Gospel, including Christians outside the Catholic Church. Yet Francis expressly said that the initiative was “not to establish new criteria for the canonical ascertainment of martyrdom”.² That qualification governs the whole enterprise and prevents the catalogue from being mistaken for an alternative canonical process.
Pope Leo XIV has now drawn the distinction with still greater precision. Addressing the conference organised by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints on 16 September, he described “Witnesses to the Faith” as “a broader category”, distinct from those whose martyrdom is being examined in a cause of beatification and from those already enrolled among the Blessed and Saints. He said that the Commission’s work is “of a historiographical and educational nature, not a legal one”.³
Leo then explained why such a category had been devised. It permits the Commission to honour complex cases in which the motives of those responsible for a killing cannot explicitly be attributed to odium fidei — hatred of the Faith. The enquiry can therefore concentrate principally upon the fidelity of the victim even where the intention of the persecutor cannot be established with the certainty demanded by a canonical cause.³ That admission is the key to understanding the catalogue, because it identifies precisely the point at which historical commemoration and canonical martyrdom diverge.
The contrast with Benedict XVI is therefore illuminating. Addressing the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in 2006, Benedict recognised that modern persecutors frequently conceal hostility to Christianity beneath political, social or ideological motives. Odium fidei need not therefore be advertised openly by the murderer, and it may be established indirectly. But Benedict insisted that it must nevertheless be established “always in a morally certain way”. Without it, he said, “there would be no true martyrdom according to the perennial theological and juridical doctrine of the Church.” He then added: “This is the constant teaching of the Church.”⁴
There need be no contradiction between Benedict and Leo, because Leo has expressly preserved the distinction which prevents one. Benedict is describing martyrdom in its theological and juridical meaning within a cause of saints, whereas Leo is describing a deliberately wider historical category in which one of the elements required for canonical martyrdom may remain unproved. The Commission records witness; a cause judges martyrdom. Those are related tasks, but they are not identical.
The problem begins when ecclesiastical language ceases to preserve that distinction. If a catalogue is repeatedly described simply as an “ecumenical catalogue of martyrs”, the natural implication is that those within it have been judged to be martyrs in the Catholic sense. Yet Leo XIV has said that the broader category exists partly because the very motive which Benedict called necessary for true martyrdom cannot in every case be established. Semeraro himself has made the distinction plain, saying that some of those entered in the catalogue might later become the subjects of causes of beatification or canonisation “provided the required conditions are met”.¹ If inclusion in the catalogue had already established martyrdom, the canonical conditions would not still remain to be proved.
The theological doctrine beneath those conditions is not merely bureaucratic. St Thomas Aquinas teaches that martyrdom consists in standing firmly in divine truth and justice despite the threat of death. It is elicited by fortitude and commanded by charity; faith gives the martyr the truth for which he suffers. Without charity, St Thomas says, martyrdom does not avail, just as St Paul teaches that even surrendering one’s body to be burned profits nothing without charity.⁵ Martyrdom, therefore, is not simply extreme sincerity. It is a supernatural act ordered to God and perfected by charity.
St Augustine supplies the complementary principle. Suffering does not interpret itself, for the wicked may suffer as well as the righteous and identical punishments may be inflicted for radically different causes. Hence his famous rule: “Martyrs are made, not by the punishment, but by the cause.”⁶ The cause matters because the Church is not merely observing that someone died bravely; she is judging what the death witnessed to and why it was inflicted.
That is why the older Catholic tradition did not simply conclude that anyone killed while professing some form of Christianity thereby became a martyr of the Catholic Church. The old Catholic Encyclopedia, summarising patristic usage, states directly that heretics and schismatics put to death as Christians were denied the title of martyr, citing St Cyprian, St Augustine and Eusebius.⁷ St Cyprian’s own language is uncompromising: “He cannot be a martyr who is not in the Church.”⁸ His concern was not that the schismatic had suffered insufficiently, but that suffering could not sanctify deliberate separation from the unity of Christ’s Church. Blood could not turn schism into communion.
That is the older Catholic baseline and it must not disappear from the discussion, but it must also be stated accurately. Cyprian’s dictum cannot simply be converted into a mechanical judgment upon every baptised Christian born centuries later into a separated communion. Catholic theology distinguishes objective religious error from subjective culpability. Formal heresy or schism requires something more than merely having inherited an erroneous ecclesial position, and a person may be ignorant of the full claims of the Catholic Church without having pertinaciously rejected what he knows to be divine truth.
Pius IX stated the necessary distinction with unusual clarity. He reaffirmed without qualification the Catholic dogma concerning the necessity of the Church for salvation, while simultaneously teaching that those who labour under invincible ignorance are not punished for a guilt which they have not voluntarily incurred. God alone searches the heart.⁹ The distinction does not make ecclesial separation insignificant; it prevents Catholics from confusing objective disorder with subjective guilt.
That matters particularly here. One proposition is that formal heresy or schism cannot be transformed into holiness simply because a man dies courageously. Another is that Catholics cannot know from external denominational affiliation alone whether a particular person’s separation involved formal culpability before God. Those propositions are compatible, and together they provide a more authentically Catholic account than either indiscriminate ecumenical celebration or equally indiscriminate condemnation.
Pre-conciliar Catholic language itself was sometimes more nuanced than a crude reading of Cyprian might suggest. In Sempiternus Rex Christus in 1951, Pius XII spoke of the sufferings of Christians separated from the Apostolic See and referred explicitly to the “bloody martyrdoms” of separated “brothers and sons”.¹⁰ The context is important, because Pius XII did not infer from their suffering that ecclesial division had ceased to matter. He drew precisely the opposite conclusion: their blood strengthened his hope for their return to Catholic unity.
This is a significant datum because it means that Catholic recognition of heroic death among separated Christians did not begin with Vatican II. Yet neither did pre-conciliar recognition imply that denominational separation had become theologically indifferent. Pius XII could speak of martyrdom among the separated while still insisting upon reunion with the Apostolic See. That older balance is worth recovering because it shows that recognition of grace outside visible Catholic communion need not entail indifference to the Church’s claims.
St John Paul II went considerably further in Ut unum sint. He wrote that Christians already possess, in a certain sense, a “common Martyrology”, and argued that the imperfect but genuine communion existing among the baptised becomes “already perfect” in martyria unto death.¹¹ The expression did not emerge from a vacuum, since Pius XII prevents us from pretending that pre-conciliar Catholicism could see nothing but false martyrdom outside visible Catholic unity. Nevertheless, John Paul’s formulation unmistakably places a new ecumenical emphasis upon what older theology handled through more exact distinctions concerning faith, charity, baptism, culpability and membership of the Church.
That development requires interpretation according to Tradition, not the abandonment of Tradition in favour of the latest terminology. This is precisely the methodological problem which Nuntiatoria has encountered repeatedly in recent months. In our examination of the Vatican’s sixtieth-anniversary treatment of Nostra aetate, we argued that charity towards persons cannot become affirmation of religious error and that newer categories of dialogue must remain subordinate to the Church’s prior confession of truth.¹² At Assisi, when an SSPX pilgrimage was restricted to private prayer while authorised ecumenical prayer with separated Christians remained possible, the question again became one of ecclesiology: what account of communion explains the differing treatment?¹³ In The Questions Rome Still Has Not Settled, the principle was the same: where later language appears to alter inherited Catholic categories, continuity must be demonstrated proposition by proposition rather than merely asserted.¹⁴
The same discipline is required here because two different theological questions are involved. The first concerns the cause of the death. Was the Christian killed through odium fidei, whether directed immediately against the Faith itself or against a Christian virtue flowing from it? Benedict XVI says that this must be established with moral certainty for canonical martyrdom, while Leo XIV says that the wider category of “Witnesses to the Faith” deliberately includes cases in which it cannot be so established.
The second concerns the ecclesial condition of the witness. What does the Catholic Church mean when she publicly recognises as a martyr someone who died outside visible full communion with her? That question does not disappear merely because the persecutor’s hatred of Christianity is obvious, and it belongs to a different order from the evidential question of odium fidei.
The twenty-one Coptic Orthodox Christians murdered by Islamic State in Libya make the distinction particularly concrete. In 2023 Pope Francis announced, with the consent of Pope Tawadros II, that they would be included in the Roman Martyrology. Francis described their blood as a “seed of unity”, said their inclusion signified the spiritual communion between the Catholic and Coptic Churches, and invoked their prayers.¹⁵ Their case is quite different from the ambiguous historical situations described by Leo XIV, because Islamic State did not obscure the religious identity of its victims or the character of their execution. They were presented to the world as Christians and murdered in an explicitly religious spectacle, so the principal question was not uncertainty over odium fidei but the ecclesiological meaning of their Catholic liturgical commemoration.
Nor is the Roman Martyrology merely the Commission’s catalogue under another name. The Martyrology belongs to the liturgical life of the Roman Church, and inclusion carries an ecclesial significance which a historiographical catalogue expressly does not. That distinction makes Leo XIV’s clarification all the more valuable, because it prevents a historical record of Christian witness from being confused with the Church’s formal recognition of martyrdom and cult.
A broad category called Witnesses to the Faith can therefore perform a legitimate function. It can preserve testimony about those whose fidelity unto death deserves remembrance without pretending that every element necessary for a canonical cause has already been established. It permits historical recognition without collapsing the judicial category, but precisely for that reason Rome should resist allowing the broader category to swallow the narrower one.
“Witness to the Faith”, “Christian killed because he was Christian”, “ecumenical martyr”, “canonically recognised martyr”, and “saint admitted to the public cult of the Catholic Church” are not synonymous expressions. Catholic tradition supplies distinctions for a reason: it knows the difference between objective error and subjective culpability; between material separation and formal rejection; between heroic natural courage and supernatural charity; between a persecutor’s hostility to Christianity in general and odium fidei established for a canonical cause; and between historical remembrance and liturgical cult. Those distinctions do not diminish genuine Christian heroism. They allow the Church to describe it truthfully.
A Protestant may refuse courageously to deny the divinity of Christ. An Orthodox Christian may be murdered explicitly because he confesses Jesus Christ. A Catholic missionary may be killed because evangelical charity places him in the path of a criminal organisation, while another Christian may die heroically where the precise motive of his killer remains forever uncertain. Those deaths may not all present the same theological or canonical case, and nothing is gained by pretending that they do.
This is where “ecumenism of blood” requires particular discipline. The phrase may express a genuine and moving reality: Christians divided at the altar may nevertheless shed their blood confessing the same Lord. It may remind Catholics that supernatural grace cannot be measured simply by reading a denominational label and that personal culpability belongs ultimately to God’s judgment. But the phrase cannot mean that visible ecclesial unity has ceased to matter. It cannot make contradictory confessions equally true, make formal schism holy, or remove the canonical requirement concerning the cause for which a martyr dies.
Blood is therefore not a substitute for theology, nor does the violence of a death authenticate every belief held by the person who suffers it. Augustine’s principle remains as necessary now as it was in the Donatist controversy: the punishment does not make the martyr; the cause does. Leo XIV has consequently done something useful by making explicit what looser descriptions of the project risk concealing. The Commission’s subjects form a broader category; its work is not juridical; its historical enquiry may include Christians whose killers’ odium fidei cannot be demonstrated; and it is not an alternative canonisation process.
That distinction should now govern the vocabulary of the Dicastery, Vatican media and Catholic commentators. The older tradition supplies a second guardrail: formal heresy and schism cannot be transfigured into sanctity simply through suffering, while Catholics must also distinguish culpable rejection of the Church from separation inherited without personal fault. Pius XII shows that even strong pre-conciliar ecclesiology could speak of the martyrdoms of separated Christians without surrendering the necessity of Catholic unity.
There is therefore no need to choose between cruelty and confusion. The Catholic answer can be both charitable and exact: honour heroic fidelity where it is found; preserve the names of Christians who died rather than betray Christ; investigate the motives of their persecutors; distinguish ignorance from pertinacity and material separation from formal schism; recognise that God alone judges the interior soul; and maintain nevertheless that Christ founded one Church and that visible unity with her is not an optional theological detail.
When the Church herself uses the word martyr, she should therefore use it carefully. The difficulty with the new catalogue is not that Rome remembers non-Catholic Christians who have died confessing Christ, for their witness should not be forgotten. Nor is the difficulty that Leo XIV has recognised a wider historical category, since he has explained exactly why such a category exists. The difficulty would begin if that category were permitted to redefine the thing whose limits made that category necessary.
That is the line worth defending, not against the blood of Christian witnesses, but precisely because their blood deserves something better than imprecise theology. Truth does not dishonour the martyr; it tells us what martyrdom means.
¹ Vatican News, “Semeraro: i martiri, testimoni del Vangelo che genera vite coraggiose e luminose”, 15 September 2026
² Pope Francis, Letter constituting the Commission of New Martyrs – Witnesses of the Faith, 3 July 2023
³ Pope Leo XIV, Address to the Study Conference promoted by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, 16 September 2026
⁴ Pope Benedict XVI, Letter to the participants in the Plenary Session of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, 24 April 2006
⁵ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 124, “Of Martyrdom”
⁶ St Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 35
⁷ Catholic Encyclopedia, “Martyr”
⁸ St Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church, ch. 14
⁹ Pope Pius IX, Quanto conficiamur moerore, 10 August 1863
¹⁰ Pope Pius XII, Sempiternus Rex Christus, 8 September 1951, §§42–43
¹¹ St John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §84, 25 May 1995
¹² Nuntiatoria, “Truth Must Be Confessed; Persons Must Be Loved”, 18 September 2026
¹³ Nuntiatoria, “The Creed Outside the Basilica”, 11 September 2026
¹⁴ Nuntiatoria, “The Questions Rome Still Has Not Settled”, 21 August 2026
¹⁵ Pope Francis, Address to Pope Tawadros II, 11 May 2023
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