In a powerful affirmation of the Church’s enduring witness, Pope Leo XIV on June 20 declared 174 new martyrs of the Catholic faith—individuals who died amid brutal persecution during World War II and the Spanish Civil War. The decree, signed by the Holy Father and published by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, brings to light the extraordinary courage of those who gave their lives “in odium fidei,” or out of hatred for the faith.
These new martyrs, ranging from teenage seminarians to seasoned priests, were victims of two of the bloodiest and most ideologically charged eras of the 20th century. As Pope Leo XIV noted through this act, their deaths were not political accidents—they were sacrifices made out of fidelity to Christ and their calling, in defiance of regimes that sought to erase Christianity from public life.
Among the 50 French Catholics recognized were priests, seminarians, Catholic Scouts, and members of the Young Christian Workers—most of whom were under the age of 30. They were arrested and deported to concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Dachau, and Zöschen, where they died of typhus, tuberculosis, starvation, or execution. Some were tortured by the Gestapo for clandestinely ministering to French laborers forcibly sent to Germany under the Vichy regime’s Service du Travail Obligatoire.
Father Raimond Cayré, a 28-year-old diocesan priest, died in Buchenwald in October 1944. Father Gerard Martin Cendrier, a Franciscan aged just 24, perished in the same camp a few months later. Roger Vallée, a 23-year-old seminarian, died in Mauthausen, and Jean Mestre, a 19-year-old layman and member of the Young Christian Workers, was killed in Gestapo custody in May 1944. “Their apostolic action,” the Vatican affirmed, “was seen as a direct affront to the totalitarian and anti-Christian ideology of the Nazi regime.”
The youngest French martyrs include two Catholic Scouts, aged just 21 and 22, one executed by gunfire at Buchenwald and the other beheaded in Dresden in 1944.
In Spain, the pope declared 124 martyrs from the Diocese of Jaén who were killed between 1936 and 1938. According to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, the violence they suffered was driven by “anti-religious and anti-Christian sentiments” during the Spanish Civil War, a time when churches were desecrated, priests executed, and faithful Catholics driven underground. The martyrs include 109 diocesan priests, one religious sister, and 14 laypeople, now recognized in two groups: Father Manuel Izquierdo Izquierdo and 58 companions, and Father Antonio Montañés Chiquero and 64 companions.
Bishop Sebastián Chico Martínez of Jaén responded to the decree with gratitude, stating: “These lands have been blessed and watered throughout the centuries of Christianity by the blood and witness of martyrs … their sowing has been fruitful in new Christians and will continue to be so.”
Alongside these declarations of martyrdom, Pope Leo XIV also approved a miraculous healing attributed to the intercession of Fr. Salvador Valera Parra, a 19th-century Spanish priest renowned for his works of mercy during epidemics. In 2007, at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a newborn named Tyquan—delivered lifeless and unresponsive by emergency cesarean—suddenly revived after prayers were offered by a Spanish doctor devoted to Valera Parra. The baby, initially expected to suffer severe brain damage, grew into a healthy child, prompting the Vatican to recognize the event as a miracle and clearing the way for Fr. Valera Parra’s beatification.
Finally, the pope declared four individuals venerable for their heroic virtue: João Luiz Pozzobon, founder of the Pilgrim Mother Rosary Campaign; Anna Fulgida Bartolacelli, a disabled laywoman consecrated in silent service; Raffaele Mennella, a young cleric who died at 21; and Teresa Tambelli, a Daughter of Charity who spent her life serving the poor in Cagliari.
Through this sweeping decree, Pope Leo XIV reaffirms that holiness is not reserved for history books or hidden in monasteries—it is lived in the darkest prisons, the harshest camps, and the fiercest battlegrounds of ideology. Their legacy is not just of death, but of unshakable faith and witness in the face of hatred.
