After the horrific shooting deaths of political activist Charlie Kirk and two young children who were shot while attending Mass in Minneapolis last month, the faithful are wondering if these victims might one day be considered martyrs by the Church.Father Dwight Longenecker addressed this question in regard to Charlie Kirk, who was shot to death on the campus of Utah Valley University on September 10.
In this article, Father lists the four criteria for being declared a martyr by the Catholic Church.
1. The person must have been killed.
2. The motive for the murder must have been odium fidei, which is a hatred of the Catholic faith.
3. The person must freely and consciously accept death without resistance, seeking only to witness to the faith and enduring death as an act of love and obedience to God.
4. The person must be a baptized Catholic.
Charlie fulfilled the first requirement by being killed, was fulfilled in a very public murder which took place in front of his wife and children.
Of the second criteria, Father believes that after all the evidence about the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, 22, is unearthed, “I predict that the motive will be hatred of Charlie’s religion–or opinions directly springing from his Christian faith.”
He goes on to say, “The third criteria would seem to apply since I suspect Charlie Kirk had plenty of death threats and accepted the risk as part of his calling. Finally, Charlie was not a Catholic, but reports from various Catholic sources say he was open to the Catholic religion and was probably on the path to Rome. Charlie therefore will not be included in the formal list of Catholic martyrs, but we have always recognized that sincere followers of Jesus Christ who have been baptized are also members of Christ’s church even though not in full communion.”
However, there is a second definition of martyr, which means “witness,” that certainly applies to Charlie.
“Charlie lived and died witnessing to his faith in Jesus Christ so, in that sense he is a true martyr,” Father concludes.
What about the two young children who were gunned down in Minneapolis on August 27. Harper Moyski, 10, and Fletcher Merkel, 8, were shot while attending a parochial school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church. That these children were killed in hatred of the faith is born out by the perpetrator, 23-year-old Robin Westman, who was admittedly antisemitic and anti-Catholic.
According to this article by the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Vatican experts have said that these children could one day be included on a list of “new martyrs and witnesses of the faith” that is being compiled by the Vatican.
“If the diocese or other local ecclesial entities present these figures to us as witnesses of the faith, we will examine them and see if we can include them in the list,” said Archbishop Fabio Fabene, president of the Vatican Commission of New Martyrs — Witnesses of the Faith.
As CNA explains, the commission, which was created by Pope Francis in 2023, is creating an archive of the lives of Christian martyrs, both Catholic and non-Catholic, who have been killed in the new millennium. While the selection criteria is different from that used to determine formal recognition of a martyr through beatification and canonization, this list of “new martyrs” will not qualify as a beatification, but will be used “to preserve stories and names in the heart of the Church, so that their memory is not lost.”
When the Pope established the commission in 2023, her wrote that “the martyrs ‘are more numerous in our time than in the early centuries’: They are bishops, priests, consecrated men and women, laypeople and families, who in the different countries of the world, with the gift of their lives, have offered the supreme proof of charity.”
Thus far, there are 1,640 Christians on the list, all of whom were killed “in different circumstances of persecution and hatred,” CNA reports.
As one of the commission’s members stated, “The heart of this work is memory. As St. John Paul II said, the names of those who died for their faith should not be lost.”
We can only hope that the names of Charlie Kirk, Harper Moyski, and Fletcher Merkel will one day be on that last, insuring that the price they paid for the faith will never be forgotten.
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