(LifeSiteNews) — San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is launching a project this Friday called the “Requiem for the Forgotten” to honor the Catholic martyrs of communism.
The Benedict XVI Institute is partnering with the Victims of Communism Museum to “rediscover the arts as a center for evangelization,” and to remember those brave men and women lost to communism, as the conservative prelate wrote recently in First Things.
In an essay titled, “Modern Martyrs of Communism,” Cordileone explained how Catholics “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.”
“This is one reason I’ve asked the Benedict XVI Institute to launch a new multiyear project telling the story of these heroic martyrs of communism—in liturgy and hymns, but also in paintings, poetry, plays, videos, and essays, partnering with the Victims of Communism museum in Washington, D.C., among others,” he wrote on March 6.
Maggie Gallagher, the center’s director, provided further comments to LifeSiteNews via email, including how this project may help younger generations who have faint, if any, memories about communism’s brutalities.
“I would hazard many of the younger generation know only a few things about the USSR and Castro, for example,” Gallagher told LifeSiteNews. “The fact that more than a third of the younger generation believes the Communist Manifesto is a better guarantee of liberty and equality than the Declaration of Independence is a testimony to educational malpractice.”
Cordileone also commented on this state from the Victims of Communism Foundation. “Our failure to remember our heroes and martyrs of communism is having a dangerous effect on what the next generation knows,” he wrote in First Things. “In 2022, the Victims of Communism Foundation released a report on U.S. attitudes toward socialism, communism, and collectivism, synthesizing data from 2,100 U.S. respondents ages sixteen and older: Thirty percent of Generation Z has a favorable view of Marxism, up 6 percentage points from 2019.”
This underscores the importance of the project, according to Gallagher.
“Stories and works of art are the most compelling witness to the reality of what Communism and related totalitarian regimes really mean. As the Archbishop says, they always start by promising a godless Utopia and then end in murder, poverty, and despair,” Gallagher said. “The Church is a source of culture because it remembers and because it is (or at least it used to be and needs to be once again) a source of patronage–offering artists a platform as well as the necessary resources. We can be a creative minority again, as the Church has been in countless eras.”
“Think of it this way: who has more resources of money and talent, America a country of 100 million Catholics? Or tiny Florence Italy with a population of 60,000 people in the 15th century,” she asked. “Where there is a will, there is a way. Archbishop Cordileone’s leadership on this is prophetic.”
Cordileone will preside at a Mass in Miami on Friday. The “Requiem for the Forgotten” “includes a new hymn, ‘Offertory for Ukraine,’ written by poet James Matthew Wilson to honor Catholic martyrs persecuted under Soviet communism,” according to Catholic News Agency.
But there are plenty more martyrs to honor in the coming years.
“Our very next work is a new hymn honoring some of the martyrs and white martyrs of Chinese Communism which will be used in a holy hour with the seminarians on May 8 at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park,” Gallagher told LifeSiteNews.
She said Wilson, the poet, “has done amazing work with the text, written to reflect the deeply condensed meaning of Chinese poetry.”
She also praised the institute’s “Composer-In-Residence” Frank LaRocca for making an “exquisite” composition.
Gallagher said a priest in Buffalo, New York “is collecting testimonies on the suffering of Vietnamese Catholics.” She mentioned other victims that could one day be declared saints.
“Cardinal Van Thuan and Joseph Thao Tien are two recently launched on the path to canonization,” Gallagher said. “Right down the road from the Archbishop buried in the Santa Clara mission is the great Cardinal Ignatius Kung, named a cardinal ‘in pectore’ by John Paul II.” “In pectore” means the pope secretly named him a cardinal, as a public announcement would have endangered his life.
The Benedict XVI Institute wants the help of the laity to make this project a success. “We are actively looking for such partners to extend the reach of this work,” Gallagher said, discussing the Victim of Communism partnership. She also asked that anyone with information about Catholic martyrs of communism to contact her at [email protected].
“This is a work in process.”