Mission Day of the Martyrs, witnesses of mercy
Since 1993, the Church has celebrated every March 24 the “Day of Prayer and Fasting in Memory of Missionary Martyrs”
It is an initiative conceived and promoted by the Missionary Youth Movement of the Italian Pontifical Mission Societies (today, Missio Giovani of the Missio Foundation of the Italian Episcopal Conference), but it has immediately become of the whole Church, which, every year, on March 24, remembers all the missionaries and women missionaries who have given their lives for the Gospel.
The date was not chosen at random: it is the day of the death of Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran bishop who was killed in 1980.
Indeed, his death while celebrating Mass echoes the sacrifice of all those who died “in odium fidei,” a Latin expression that Pope Benedict XVI explicated well in 2006:
“It is certainly necessary to find irrefutable evidence of the readiness for martyrdom, as an outpouring of blood and its acceptance by the victim, but it is equally necessary that the ‘odium Fidei’ of the persecutor should emerge directly or indirectly, yet still morally certain. If this element is lacking, there will be no true martyrdom according to the perennial theological and juridical doctrine of the Church.”
There are so many martyrs in the history of the Church and on every continent, and every year the list grows longer and longer, a sign of an unwavering faith that knows how to show the merciful face of Christ to the end.
Men and women who are not only willing to die in the name of the Gospel, but who are also able to forgive their executioner.
This was the case starting with the protomartyr Stephen, and then for Blessed Don Pino Puglisi, Sister Leonella Sgorbati, etc.
After all, in the introduction to this year’s martyrology, a phrase Pope Francis uttered in Tirana in 2014 is quoted:
“We can ask: How did you endure so much tribulation? They will tell us this that we heard in this passage
from the Second Letter to the Corinthians: ‘God is a merciful Father and God of all consolation. It was He who comforted us!””
According to data verified by Fides Agency, in 2024, 13 Catholic “missionaries” were killed in the world, including 8 priests and 5 lay people; the highest number is in Africa and America.
Their example, then – as Elisabetta Vitali, secretary of Missio Giovani, declares – encourages us to “renew our commitment to help the most needy, to fight injustice and to take a stand in the face of acts of arrogance, reminding us that even in the most dramatic human situations a light of Hope can be kindled.”
And, we add, of Mercy.