Cardinal Semeraro: Blessed Santander martyrs show our vocation to holiness

Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, presides at the Beatification Mass of the Servants of God Francisco González de Córdova and 79 companions in Santander, Spain, saying holiness is the “common vocation” of every baptized person.

Image of the 80 new Spanish Blesseds 

Holiness is the “common vocation of every baptized person” and is a virtue for every age and for people in every “state of life in the Church.”

This message was the heart of the homily delivered in Spanish on November 7 by Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

Representing Pope Leo XIV, he presided at the Beatification Mass of the Servants of God Francisco González de Córdova and 79 companions in the Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady in Santander, Spain.

A growing multitude

The Cardinal recalled Pope Leo’s General Audience on Wednesday, November 4, when the Pope spoke of the “vast multitude of the Lord’s friends.”

Cardinal Semeraro said that holiness continues to spread and cannot be “confined to an age, a place, or a particular state of life.”

Every beatification “adds a piece to a mosaic that is still unfinished,” noting that the 80 martyrs of Santander included priests, seminarians, and laypeople.

Their “state of life in the Church,” he said, does not determine holiness, which is neither “the privilege of a few” nor “tied to a particular form of consecration.”

They faced persecution in “different circumstances,” yet all bore witness that they “belonged to Christ,” he noted.

Among the 80 new Blesseds, who were martyred during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, some were thrown into the sea with their hands and feet bound and a stone tied to their bodies.

Others disappeared aboard the prison ship Alfonso Pérez. Still others were killed and burned. Some died in a kind of concentration camp.

The group included 67 priests, three Carmelite religious, three seminarians, and seven laypeople.

Called to join the company of the saints

For Cardinal Semeraro, a beatification does more than “recall a painful chapter in the Church’s history.” It opens a window onto “that very history,” allowing us to glimpse “grace at work.” It is a witness that calls us to respond.

The newly beatified, therefore, “do not belong to the past,” he said. Rather, they point us here and now to the “path of fidelity.”

The “vast multitude” of Saints and Blesseds is more than a sight to contemplate but a “multitude to which we are called to belong.”

Their witness calls us to move beyond being “spectators of their greatness” and to “live with the same fidelity to Christ in the circumstances of our own lives.”

Mercy in the face of injustice

The reading from the Gospel of Luke captures the moment when Christ, on the Cross, prayed for those putting him to death. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Jesus, the Cardinal explained, suffered an injustice that “did not lead him to hatred.” In doing so, he showed that “evil has no power to extinguish God’s mercy, because his love is stronger.”

“This is where the word of the Gospel meets the witness of the martyrs,” Cardinal Semeraro continued, “the witness of all the martyrs and, today, of the 80 brothers whom the Church has declared blessed. We look to them.”

The “witness of the martyr” must be understood in the light of Christ’s own witness, for He “prayed on the Cross for his persecutors.”

As the second reading, from the Book of Revelation, made clear, Christians do not possess this strength on their own. They receive it by washing their robes and “making them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

Daniele Piccini
Source: vaticannews.va/en