c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Controversy and confusion have clouded plans for Pope John Paul II to lead an ecumenical vespers service at Rome’s ancient Colosseum on Sunday (May 7), celebrating the faith of 20th century Christian martyrs.

The controversy centers on the omission from the ceremony of any reference to Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador and other Central American religious figures slain during the 1980s and 1990s in defense of social justice.

The confusion is over the Vatican criteria for including specific names and geographical areas in its Ecumenical Commemoration of Witnesses to the Faith in the 20th Century.

Bishop Piero Marini, master of pontifical liturgical celebrations, told a Vatican news conference last Friday (April 28) that although specific martyrs will be cited, the intention is to pay tribute to all victims of the Nazism, communism, persecution of catholicism and racial and tribal conflict from all continents and from the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant churches alike.

“At this celebration,” Marini said, “the witnesses to the faith are commemorated, not individually, but rather collectively. They are grouped in various categories in such a way as to include the different continents, the various churches and ecclesial communities and the victims of all the regimes and ideologies of the 20th century.”

Andrea Riccardi, president of the Sant’Egidio community of social activists and author of the newly published book, “The Century of the Martyr: Christians in the 1900s,” said the churches so far have documented the cases 12,692 20th century martyrs, and many more have not yet been recorded.

Critics attacked the Vatican for failing to cite Romero, a peace advocate and champion of human rights shot to death March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass, six Jesuits murdered Nov. 16, 1989, at Central American University in El Salvador or Auxiliary Juan Gerardi Condera of Guatemala City, bludgeoned to death in his garage April 26, 1998, two days after he issued a report on human rights violations committed mainly by the army and paramilitary groups during 36 years of civil war.

Instead, the Vatican chose to represent all of the Americas with Bishop Alejandro Labaka, a Capuchin missionary in the Amazon who died in Ecuador in 1987, and Bishop Jesus Emilio Jaramillo Monsalve of Arauca, Colombia, a 73-year-old Xavierian Missionary of Yarumal, kidnapped and killed by guerrillas in 1989 while visiting a rural parish.

An editorial in the May issue of Jesus, the monthly magazine of the Paulist order, which is leading a campaign for sainthood for Romero, contended the archbishop’s cause is moving slowly because the Vatican considers him “too close to those poor who, when asking for justice, appear to smell of communism.”

The evening prayer service, which falls on the Sunday when Catholics celebrate “the victory of the risen Christ over sin and death,” will begin with the pope greeting representatives of other faiths inside the Colosseum and then move outside to an open space near the equally ancient Arch of Titus.

The Colosseum was chosen because it “calls to mind the witness of faith given by the early martyrs of the church in Rome,” Marini said.

According to legend, early Christians were thrown to the lions in the amphitheater.

Marini said eight groups of witnesses to faith will be commemorated by the reading of a written testimony and a prayer. After each group, a lamp will be lit at the foot of a giant crucifix and incense will be burned.

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Chosen to represent victims of “Soviet totalitarianism” were Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tichon and an anonymous witness from a gulag in the Solovki Islands.

The witnesses from other communist countries in Europe will be Romanian Greek Catholic Bishop Joan Suciu and the Rev. Anton Luli, an Albanian Jesuit who spent 28 years in prison and at forced labor.

Two clerics sent to death camps will represent victims of “Nazism and fascism” _ German Lutheran pastor Paul Schneider, who was sent to Buchenwald, and Polish Roman Catholic Bishop Emeritus Ignacy Jego of Koszalin-Koobrzeg,

sent to Dachau.

Testimonies from Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-mei of Shanghai and a group of Anglicans killed in a concentration camp in Japan will represent martyrs of Asia and Oceania.

Two texts will commemorate the persecution of Catholics, one a document by Republican Minister Manuel Irujo during the Spanish Civil War, and the other a sermon that Bishop Jose de Jesus Manriquez y Zarate of Huejutla, Mexico, delivered in exile in Laredo, Texas, in 1927.

From Africa and Madagascar, there will be the testimony of Jolique Rusimbamigera, a seminarian who survived the massacre of 44 Hutu and Tutsi students at the minor seminary of Buta in Burundi on April 30, 1997, and of W.G.R. Jotcham, a young Canadian Baptist missionary who worked in a leprosarium at Katsina in a Muslim area of Nigeria, and died of leprosy in 1938.

From other parts of the world, the Vatican chose Abbot Christian de Cherge, one of seven Trappist monks kidnapped from their monastery at Tibhirine in Algeria and killed, and the late Armenian Apostolic Patriarch Karekin I, who wrote about the sufferings of the Armenian people.

DEA END POLK