The Catholic Church has documented 304 martyrs in Latin America since 2000, placing the region within a worldwide register that now exceeds 1,700 cases. The Vatican’s account stresses that these deaths cannot be understood solely through the older model of direct religious persecution: many of those recorded were killed while defending poor or Indigenous communities, challenging criminal groups or opposing environmental destruction.¹

Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, head of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, said many killings were connected to “drug trafficking, deforestation, or opposition to the exploitation of natural resources.”² In that view, the victims’ religious commitments brought them into conflict with illicit economies and those who controlled them. Semeraro said the common thread was that they had become “inconvenient” to criminal interests.²

The Church’s framing combines spiritual and social dimensions. The register includes missionaries and lay Catholics, not only clergy, and emphasizes people whose everyday choices reflected what Pope Francis has called the “saints next door.”¹ Semeraro argued that holiness is not confined to those formally canonized, while leaving open the possibility that some cases could later proceed to beatification or canonization.²

That approach distinguishes the Vatican project from a narrow accounting of killings based on religious identity alone. It treats the defence of the Gospel, Indigenous territory and the natural world as overlapping forms of witness when they expose people to violent retaliation. The Commission for New Martyrs continues to gather testimony from dioceses, religious congregations and lay movements, with 100 to 150 cases added globally in the past year, according to the Church’s account.¹

Historian Andrea Riccardi, the commission’s vice-president, has described the pattern as a “new era of martyrdom,” while the initiative also seeks recognition across Christian traditions.²