Who is being canonized these days? And who is to come?
The Church recognizes martyrs as people killed for bearing witness to Christ; martyrdom can allow beatification without a miracle, though canonization ordinarily requires one. Over the past decade, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints approved causes involving 1,068 martyrs, compared with 78 beatifications in other causes and 65 canonizations of martyrs. Martyrs account for roughly ten times as many beatifications and canonizations as candidates in other causes, reflecting the many persecutions of the 20th century, including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.
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The article describes a recent wave of Catholic recognition of martyrs, driven especially by victims of 20th-century persecution and the Spanish Civil War. It explains how martyrdom affects the path to sainthood, gives figures for cases approved over the past decade, and points to causes that may progress as dioceses and religious orders submit them; it does not identify specific people expected to be canonized next.
In Catholic usage, “saint” can refer broadly to anyone in heaven, but the article focuses on people formally declared saints after examination of their lives and deaths. Candidates generally proceed through stages of recognition as venerable, blessed and, ultimately, saint.
A martyr is someone killed for bearing witness to Christ rather than renouncing the faith. Recognition of martyrdom can allow beatification without a miracle, while canonization ordinarily requires a miracle attributed to the blessed person’s intercession, though exceptions are possible.
The article says the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints approved causes involving 1,068 martyrs over the previous decade. It compares this with 78 beatifications in other causes, including some involving the “offering of life,” and reports 65 canonization cases involving martyrs during the same period.
The Spanish Civil War accounts for the largest group in the article’s breakdown: 821 martyrdom cases approved for beatification over the decade, with none of those martyrs yet canonized. Causes are submitted over time by dioceses and religious orders, sometimes in groups of more than 100.
The article also reports approvals for 228 martyrs from the 20th century outside Spain, including victims of Nazism, communism and conflicts linked to decolonization. It lists 71 cases from earlier centuries and three martyrs killed around the turn of the millennium: Italian missionary Nazareno Lanciotti, Congolese layman Floribert Bwana Chui and Sister Maria Laura Mainetti.
Examples include St. Peter To Rot, a catechist from Papua New Guinea killed during the Japanese occupation and canonized in 2025; the 16 Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, canonized in 2024; and St. Óscar Romero of El Salvador, canonized in 2018. The article also notes recognition of Catholics killed under communist regimes in Eastern Europe, French victims of Nazi persecution, missionaries killed in Asia and victims of Islamist violence, including the martyrs of Algeria.
In 2023, Pope Francis announced that the 21 Coptic Orthodox Christians murdered by ISIS in Libya in 2015 would be included in the Roman Martyrology, the Church’s official list of saints and blesseds. The article presents this as an ecumenical gesture recognizing Christians who belonged to another Church.
The article does not name specific future canonizations. It describes a continuing pipeline of causes, particularly those submitted in batches by dioceses and religious orders, but gives no timetable or prediction for when particular Spanish Civil War martyrs or other candidates might be canonized.
Canonization shapes Catholic memory of martyrdom and historical violence
Canonization does more than preserve the names of people killed for their faith: it gives their deaths a public place in the Church’s worship and presents their lives as examples for Christians. But the Church’s memory of martyrdom is not meant to turn past violence into a simple tale of heroes and villains. The supplied teachings emphasize careful historical discernment, fidelity to Christ rather than hostility toward opponents, and remembrance that can serve peace and reconciliation.
The Church’s remembrance of martyrs has long been connected to worship. The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy traces how local calendars recorded saints’ death dates and places, and how these calendars developed into martyrologies. It describes the celebration of a saint’s feast as an especially significant expression of the community’s veneration. In this way, the Church does not remember martyrdom only as an episode in a history book: it returns to it through liturgical observance, prayer, and the example proposed to the faithful.
That public memory has a theological meaning. John Paul II explains that in venerating martyrs, the Church honors God and recognizes Christ as the source of their holiness and martyrdom. He also argues that preserving their memory matters especially when the witnesses are unknown or at risk of being forgotten. Their lives become part of the Church’s shared account of Christian witness across different places and periods.
The result is selective, but not necessarily in the sense of distorting history. Canonization gives particular people a place in the Church’s worship and proposes their holiness for veneration; it does not mean that every detail of their time, political setting, or actions is thereby declared exemplary. The supplied texts do not offer a comprehensive account of the legal or historical scope of canonization, so that distinction should not be taken as a full definition of the process. They do, however, show that the Church’s public memory is both devotional and interpretive: it remembers particular lives in order to understand what faithful witness can mean.
A crucial interpretive question is what the Church asks people to admire in a martyr. In his 2024 address on causes of saints, Pope Francis describes martyrdom as a witness to Christ, while noting that its concrete forms vary across historical contexts. He stresses that judgments about martyrdom can depend on the combined force of historical clues and evidence, rather than on a single piece of proof. The implication is that remembrance should take historical complexity seriously rather than presume that every death in a violent period has the same meaning.
Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 address makes a further distinction. The Church’s Commission for New Martyrs gathers testimony about people who died for Christ whether or not they are part of an official cause for beatification or canonization. The broader category of “witnesses to the faith” can include people killed in complex circumstances where the perpetrators’ motives cannot clearly be attributed to hatred of the faith. Leo describes this work as historical and educational, focused on the victim’s fidelity to Christ, rather than as a legal determination of martyrdom. Remembering a witness to the faith and officially recognizing a martyr are related but distinct acts.
That distinction matters when historical violence has multiple causes. A Christian may be killed while opposing injustice in the name of the Gospel, even when it is difficult to establish that the killer acted from explicit religious hatred. The Church can preserve the person’s witness without claiming more than the evidence supports about the persecutor’s motive. In that way, memory need not erase complexity in order to honor courage and fidelity.
Canonization can also shape how Christians interpret relations between communities that have been in conflict. In 1970, Paul VI addressed the canonization of Nicola Tavelić and his companions, who were martyred in a Muslim setting. He rejected the idea that their example called Christians to intensify disputes or attack the surrounding society. Instead, he interpreted their witness as arising from love—even if, in his assessment, their approach involved a mistaken judgment made from a desire to bring spiritual benefit to those who would kill them. He explicitly connected their canonization with hope for better relations between Catholics and Muslims and with a call to mutual understanding, justice, peace, and freedom.
This is an important qualification: the martyr’s courage does not make every action or strategy in a martyrdom story a model to imitate. Paul VI’s interpretation distinguishes the saints’ love and religious purpose from the way their actions helped bring about their deaths. The memory of martyrdom is therefore not a license for provocation, collective blame, or renewed hostility. It can instead call Christians to examine whether their own witness serves the Gospel without making enemies.
Nor does remembering a martyr require denying that violence occurred. Benedict XVI describes witnesses who appeared defeated by persecution and brutality, yet whose deaths, viewed in the light of the Resurrection, testify to a love that is “defenceless and victorious even in apparent defeat.” His point is theological: Christian remembrance sees the violence as real and grievous, but refuses to treat the killers’ power as the final meaning of the story. The martyr’s witness is remembered not because violence itself is good, but because fidelity and love can endure it.
The Church’s commemorative practice carries responsibilities. If remembrance is to serve truth, it must take care with evidence, acknowledge uncertainty where it exists, and distinguish an officially recognized martyr from a broader witness whose story deserves to be preserved. Francis’s emphasis on evidence and Leo’s distinction between canonical causes and the Commission’s broader historical work support that cautious approach.
The same care applies to the moral meaning drawn from the past. John Paul II urges local Churches to safeguard documentation about those who suffered martyrdom, while also seeing the remembrance of martyrs as a possible form of ecumenism: the shared witness of Christians can speak beyond divisions. Leo similarly presents witnesses to the faith as people whose example can encourage fidelity and service, not as figures advancing an ideology.
Canonization, then, shapes Catholic memory by making certain lives publicly visible as witnesses to holiness, and by asking the Church to interpret their deaths through Christ’s faithfulness and love. The supplied texts do not support treating every canonization as a definitive historical account of a conflict or of all the people involved. They support a more careful conclusion: Catholic memory honors the martyr’s witness, attends to historical complexity, and should resist using the dead to perpetuate the violence from which they suffered.