During Lent we presented many new martyrs of WWII. A special memorial chapel was created by St. John Paul II. In
1999, in preparation for the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, St. John Paul II
established a “Commission of NEW MARTYRS” to investigate Christian
martyrdom in the 20th century. The commission worked for two years on the
premises of St. Bartholomew’s Basilica, collecting some 12,000 files from all
over the world..
More than thirteen thousand testimonies were received by the commission, some of which were recalled on the occasion of the ecumenical prayer in memory of the witnesses to the faith of the 20th century, presided over by St. John Paul II at the Colosseum on May 7, 2000.
On that occasion John Paul II said:
“The generation to which I belong has known the horror of war, concentration camps, persecution. […] The experience of the Second World War and the years that followed led me to consider with grateful attention the shining example of those who, from the early years of the twentieth century until its end, experienced persecution, violence, death, because of their faith and their behavior inspired by the truth of Christ. And they are many! Their memory should not be lost, rather it should be recovered in a documented manner.”
St.
John Paul II decided that the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on Tiber Island
should become a memorial place for the “new witnesses of the faith” of the 20th
century. The proclamation was solemnly celebrated on October 12, 2002, in the
presence of Cardinals Ruini (Rome), Kasper (Germany) and George (Chicago), and the Orthodox Patriarch of
Romania Teoctist. A large icon dedicated to the Witnesses of the Faith of the
20th century was placed on the high altar.
In
2008 Pope Benedict XVI visited the Basilica and explained:
“Remember the Christians who fell under the totalitarian violence of Communism, Nazism, those killed in America, in Asia and Oceania, in Spain and Mexico, in Africa: we ideally retrace many painful events of the past century. So many fell while fulfilling the Church’s evangelizing mission: their blood mingled with that of native Christians to whom the faith had been communicated.”
Martyrs gather around the figures of Christ surrounded by Mary, John the Evangelist and John the Baptist as well as Apostles Peter, Paul and Andrew.
To the right and left
are seen as two great processions of witnesses to the faith: one symbolizes the
Christian East, the other the West. In these two large processions one recognizes
people like Dietrich Bonhöffer, Patriarch Tikhon of the Russian Orthodox
Church, Father Girotti (Italian Dominican, biblical scholar, who died in the
Dachau concentration camp where he preached for a long time).
Continuing downwards, one notices some destroyed buildings and Christians about to be killed; it is a reminder of the genocide of the Armenians and many eastern Christians in Turkey in 1915, a rupture of more than a thousand years of cohabitation in that land.
Also recalled are all the attempts at the actual annihilation
of the Christian presence, such as the one that took place in Albania: a priest
with a child in his hand is seen being killed (this is the memory of Father
Kurti, sentenced to death in 1972 only because he had secretly baptized a child
in the camp where he was held).
On the way up one
encounters a man dressed in gaudy clothes being beaten by two guards: this is
the public humiliation that was reserved for so many Christians before they
were killed, as a way of striking at their dignity, discrediting them in the
eyes of the people. Above, the frame shows a crowd about to be shot, in a
public execution, as happened at numerous turns in 20th century history. The
first picture below, on the other hand, remembers the many murdered, those
whose lives were suddenly cut short. One sees a bishop on the altar, it
is Bishop Romero, killed while celebrating the Eucharist. One recognizes, among
others, Msgr Gerardi, Don Giuseppe Puglisi, killed by the mafia in Sicily.
On the left instead, the
panels remind us how, in suffering, the life of the ‘new martyrs’ is a
testimony of love, stronger than hatred: to evil they have responded with good.
The first scene offers a vision of the Soviet Gulag on the Solovki islands: it
is a very old monastery, transformed by the regime into a detention camp, which
gathered mainly Christians. It shows two bishops, one young and one old,
pushing a wheelbarrow: it is the representation of a testimony given by a
survivor who in her diary recounted of two bishops, one old and Orthodox, the
other young and Catholic, who went to the extremely hard forced labor together,
so that the young man could help the old man. It is a sign of Christians
learning to love and help each other again in the suffering of persecution.
In the upper painting, from inside a prison, in Romania, one can identify the prisoners, each holding sheets of paper in their hands: these are parts of a single Bible (possession of which was forbidden by prison regulations), which the inmates had divided among themselves so that they could learn part of it by heart and recite it to the others, and thus not lose the precious treasure of the Word of God.
Moving up the iconic narrative, one encounters persecuted
Christians who nevertheless never ceased to feed the hungry, heal the sick,
love their suffering neighbors, and communicate the Gospel to all. One sees a
Christian welcoming a man dressed in the uniform that, in this icon, identifies
the persecutors: it is the sign of the readiness of the witnesses of faith to
forgive, to trust in the possibility for every man to change his own heart.
It is amazing how much is conveyed in this stricking icon, with the martyrs and others..
In April 2017 Pope Francis visited the Bascilica along with relatives and friends of some of the new martyrs:Karl Schneider, son of a pastor killed in a Nazi camp in 1939; Roselyne Hamel, sister of the Hamel murdered in France last year; Francisco Hernandez Guevara, a friend of William Quijano killed in 2009 in Central America for trying to offer an alternative to youth away from gangs.