c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ In an attempt to placate an angry Beijing, Pope John Paul II said Monday (Oct. 2) that in proclaiming 120 Chinese martyrs as saints he sought not to make judgments about history but rather to highlight the martyrs’ “heroic fidelity” to their faith.

Addressing pilgrims who came to Rome for the canonizations Sunday of the Chinese martyrs and three nuns from the United States, Sudan and Spain’s Basque country, the pope also appealed for an end to violent clashes in Jerusalem that have taken at least 47 lives and jeopardized the Middle East peace process.

“Spiritually close to the families of the so many who have lost their lives, I direct my grieved appeal to all in responsibility that the arms may fall silent, provocations be avoided and the road of dialogue be taken once more,” John Paul said of the Mideast fighting.

“The Holy Land must be the land of peace and fraternity,”he said.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said Monday that Vatican Secretary of State Jean-Louis Tauran has offered the help of the Catholic Church in efforts to end the long conflict pitting Basque separatists against Spanish authorities.

Tauran met Saturday (Sept. 30) with Spanish Interior Minister Jaime Mayor Oreja and the president of the autonomous Basque government, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, who were in Rome to represent the Spanish and Basque governments at the canonization of Mother Mary Joseph Heart of Jesus Sancho Guerra as the first Basque saint.

The spokesman said Tauran and the officials expressed “energetic condemnation” of terrorist violence and hope for a peaceful solution.

The Chinese government has been unrelenting in its attack on the canonizations of the 87 Chinese converts to Catholicism and 33 missionaries, killed from the 17th to early 20th centuries. Beijing called them “evil-doing sinners.”

Even before the Sunday canonizations, China said the act severely hampered any chance of normalization of diplomatic relations between Beijing and the Holy See.

On Monday, Beijing accused two of the new saints of crimes and called them China-hating sinners and spies.

Reuters, quoting a spokesman for China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs, said one of the new saints, Italian missionary Aldericus Crescitelli, “was notorious for taking the `right to the first night’ of each bride under his diocese.”

A second, Auguste Chatdelaine of France, instigated the second Opium War and the burning of the imperial Summer Palace in 1860, the spokesman said.

“These missionaries looted, raped and humiliated to such a degree that up to now the residents in the very dioceses still hate them,” Reuters quoted a commentary to be published Tuesday in People’s Daily as saying.

But John Paul said that giving China its first saints had “intimately united all the faithful of continental China.”

The Vatican estimates that the 8 million Catholics in China are divided equally between members of a government-sanctioned “patriotic association” and an underground church loyal to the Vatican.

The Roman Catholic pontiff noted the martyrs had died in “dramatic situations characterized by violent social upheavals.”

“With the present canonizations, the church certainly does not want to give an historical judgment on these periods nor even less to legitimize certain comportments of governments of the period, which weigh on the history of the Chinese people,” he said.

“It seeks, instead, to highlight the heroic faith of these worthy children of China, who did not let themselves be intimidated by the threat of a ferocious persecution.”

The pope also greeted pilgrims in Rome for the canonizations of Katherine Drexel, a Philadelphia socialite who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to minister to blacks and Native Americans, and Josephine Bakhita, a Sudan slave who became a Canossian sister in northern Italy.

DEA END POLK