
monument to the martyrs of communism / sebastiangora - stock.adobe.com
CV NEWS FEED // Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco is seeking to raise awareness for martyrs of the Church who lost their lives as a result of Marxist ideology by revitalizing “the classically Catholic way to remember [their] heroic witness.”
In an op ed published by First Things Magazine on Wednesday, Archbishop Cordileone called attention to the “dangerous effect” of “our failure to remember our heroes and martyrs of communism,” and announced several plans to overcome it.
The main reason why Catholics have failed to properly remember martyrs of communism, he said, is that “we have become overly dependent on secular media and artists to tell [their] story.”
To combat this phenomenon, Cordileone announced the launch of a new multi year project to tell the stories of martyrs of communism through liturgy, hymns, paintings, poetry, plays, videos, and essays:
As the secular culture becomes more hostile, or simply indifferent, to religion, it is time to rediscover the arts as a center for evangelization. We must once again sing our own songs and tell our own stories, so that we can share the truth, goodness, and beauty of faith with the world.
The project will be carried out by the Benedict XVI Institute in partnership with the Victims of Communism museum in Washington DC.
Cordileone also announced his commission of a new Mass from Catholic composer Frank La Rocca titled, The Requiem for the Forgotten, which will premiere at the Church of the Epiphany in South Miami on March 15. The requiem Mass will focus particularly on memorializing Catholics who “withstood the persecution of Soviet Communism” in Ukraine.
“For centuries the Catholic Church, with the help of patrons, commissioned great works of art—painting, sculpture, and sacred music for the liturgy—that have lasted through the centuries and continue to teach and uplift souls today,” the Archbishop wrote. Yet, Christians who have paid the ultimate price for their faith in the past 50 years have not prompted the same level of “creative production.”
Citing a recent article by Nicaraguan human rights activist Biance Jagger, the Archbishop pointed out that religious persecution by communist regimes is being carried out today in the same manner as it was under totalitarian regimes in Russia, Cuba, and China in the 20th and 21st centuries: “Shut down the Church, because otherwise the forgotten and the persecuted will have a voice.”
Jagger declared in her article for the Independent that it is “time for the world to wake up” to the communist Ortega-Murillo regime’s “brutal” persecution of Christians in Nicaragua, which she compared to what “Castro did in Cuba during the 1960s,” and “to Joseph Stalin’s purge of religious institutions in the Soviet Union.”
The Archbishop wrote in conclusion:
The arc of communism may be long and it may disguise itself under different names, but it begins with the false promise that government without God can usher in utopia and ends with persecution of the Church for daring to speak out against oppression on behalf of the forgotten.
