Vatican to Initiate Beatification Process for 35 Catholic Martyrs

October 30, 2023229 views0

Vatican to Initiate Beatification Process for 35 Catholic Martyrs

2023-10-30T10:34:39+01:00

By Church News

The Church in India has welcomed the news that the Vatican will initiate the beatification process for the 35 Catholic martyrs of Kandhamal who were killed in the 2008 Christian persecution in the remote jungle district of the eastern Odisha state.On October 25, the Catholic Church in India made public the October 18 “nihil obstat” from the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints “to initiate the process of beatification for the Servant of God Kantheswar Digal and companions, martyrs of Kandhamal,” communicated by Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli, apostolic nuncio to India.“We are happy and thrilled with the communication. It is historic to have 35 of our martyrs on the path to Vatican recognition,” Archbishop John Barwa of the Archdiocese of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, which covers Kandhamal said.“Now the archdiocesan council will meet to decide the date and plans for officially initiating the process. Since it is a large group of nearly three dozen we need to plan out everything meticulously,” Barwa pointed out.“I visited the houses of each one of them scattered in jungle villages and prepared the list of 105 martyrs,” Father Purushottam Nayak, who put together the dossier of the martyrs beginning in 2018.“Among them, there were only 36 Catholics, and the Vatican dicastery has approved the beatification process for 35 of them. Among them, 14 were killed on the spot while others died of injuries.”“We are very happy that the Vatican has approved the findings. The families here [are] all thrilled with the news,” Nayak pointed out.Father Stephen Alathara, deputy secretary general of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI), which is made up of 133 Latin-rite dioceses in India, said that the CCBI plenary in January approved the list of martyrs submitted by the archdiocese and forwarded it to the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.“Now the approval has come from the Vatican. It is a historic development. The martyrdom of poor Christians in the Kandhamal jungles has turned it into the holy land of India,” Alathara said.ALSO READ: Pope Francis Prays for Israel and Gaza