498 Spanish Martyrs

The 498 Spanish Martyrs are a group of Catholics put to death in Spain in the 1930s and beatified together by Pope Benedict XVI on 28 October 2007. Most were killed in 1936, in the first months of the Spanish Civil War, when anti-clerical violence in the Republican zone reached its height; a smaller number died in the Asturias rising of 1934 or in 1937. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints treated their deaths as martyrdom in odium fidei, that is, killing motivated by hatred of the faith. The 498 persons were not a single community but the combined result of twenty-three separate diocesan and congregational inquiries that the Holy See chose to conclude in one ceremony.

Those beatified included bishops, diocesan clergy, men and women religious from many institutes, and a few lay faithful. Two bishops in the group were Cruz Laplana y Laguna, bishop of Cuenca, and Florentino Asensio Barroso, apostolic administrator of Barbastro, both murdered in August 1936. The religious came from a wide range of congregations of priests, brothers, and sisters active in education, health care, and parish life. Geographically the blesseds were drawn from numerous Spanish dioceses, reflecting how widespread the killing of clergy and religious was in the Republican rearguard, especially in Aragon, Catalonia, parts of Andalusia, Castile, and other regions where the Church was attacked in the summer of 1936.

The historical background is the collapse of public order and the outbreak of civil war in July 1936, after which revolutionary committees and militias in much of the Republican zone targeted priests, religious, and church buildings. Thousands of members of the clergy were killed in Spain between 1936 and 1939, a figure established by later historical research and by the Church's own martyrologies. Successive popes have beatified large groups of these victims: John Paul II beatified substantial numbers in several ceremonies from the late 1980s through 2001, and Benedict XVI continued the process in 2007. The 498 formed one of the largest single groups recognized up to that date. The beatifications have been controversial in Spanish public debate, with critics arguing that they appeared to take a side in memory of the civil war, while the Holy See has maintained that it was recognizing religious martyrdom rather than issuing a political verdict on the conflict as a whole.

The rite of beatification was celebrated in Saint Peter's Square on 28 October 2007. Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, then prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided in the name of Pope Benedict XVI. Tens of thousands of pilgrims, many of them relatives and members of the religious families of the new blesseds, came from Spain. In an address that day the pope presented the martyrs as examples of fidelity and as an invitation to peace and reconciliation. None of the 498 has since been canonized; they are honored with the title Blessed. As a group they have no single feast obligatory throughout the universal Church. Individual blesseds are commemorated on the days of their death or on dates assigned in diocesan and congregational calendars.