Portal Catholic News Agency (November 5, 2025) reports on Auxiliary “Bishop” Juan Antonio Martínez Camino’s book The 39 Martyrs of 1934 in Spain, framing the murder of clergy during the Asturian socialist uprising as a means to “recover evangelical strength.” The article credits the “bishop” with distinguishing these deaths from later Spanish Civil War martyrdoms while lamenting modern Spain’s “neo-pagan culture.” It concludes with reference to John Paul II’s 2000 Colosseum event commemorating 20th-century martyrs—a deceptive veneer masking the conciliar sect’s exploitation of martyrdom for ecumenical agendas.
Theological Subversion of Martyrdom Criteria
The article’s claim that these victims constitute martyrs ignores the sine qua non condition established by Pope Benedict XIV in De Servorum Dei Beatificatione: explicit hatred for the Catholic faith (odium fidei) as the primary motive of the persecutor. Nowhere does Martínez demonstrate how anarcho-Marxist killers specifically targeted these men for Catholic dogma rather than as class enemies. Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris condemned communism’s “satanic inspirations” but stressed that authentic martyrdom requires persecutors to “hate Christ” (§18), not merely oppose bourgeois institutions.
“They are martyrs of the revolution, not of the war. Neither the republic nor the war, as such, were directly the cause of their martyrdom.”
This equivocation exposes the neo-modernist reduction of martyrdom to generic “persecution.” The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 2105) demands proof that victims died propter fidem—specifically for revealed truths. By contrast, Martínez’s vague appeal to “the essence of Christianity” mirrors the existentialist heresies condemned in Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which warned against replacing dogma with “religious experience.”
Post-Conciliar Canonizations: Invalid Acts of a False Church
The article’s reference to John Paul II’s “ecumenical event” at the Colosseum constitutes theological fraud. The conciliar sect’s 2000 “martyr” spectacle included Orthodox schismatics and Protestants—a direct violation of Pope Eugene IV’s Council of Florence decree that “outside the Church there is no martyrdom” (Session 11). True martyrs must die in communion with the Roman Pontiff (St. Augustine, De vera religione VI), not for ecumenical abstractions.
Martínez’s lament about Spain’s “neo-pagan culture” rings hollow while he operates within the Vatican II sect that engineered this apostasy. His silence on Article 16 of the Syllabus of Errors—which condemns the idea that “man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation”—proves his complicity. The true cause of Spain’s dechristianization isn’t abstract “neo-paganism” but the conciliar heresies of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae) and collegiality that dismantled Christ’s Social Kingship.
Omission of the Revolutionary Ideology’s Theological Roots
The “bishop” carefully avoids naming the theological errors enabling Marxist violence. The 1934 revolutionaries didn’t arise in a vacuum but were spiritual heirs of:
- The French Revolution’s cult of Reason (condemned in Pius VI’s Caritas Quae)
- Freemasonic anti-clericalism (anathematized in Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus)
- Modernist biblical criticism that reduced Christianity to social activism (Pius X’s Lamentabili Sane, Proposition 64)
Pius IX’s Quanta Cura explicitly linked socialism to the “pernicious errors” of religious indifferentism. Yet Martínez dares not condemn the Second Spanish Republic’s masonic foundations—unsurprising for a sect that removed the Freemasonry condemnation from its 1983 “Code of Canon Law.”
Sacrilegious Exploitation of Martyrdom for Ecumenism
The article’s closing reference to “21st-century martyrdom” cases like Diego Valencia prepares the ground for further conciliar deceptions. When Bergoglio’s sect canonizes “martyrs of immigration” or “climate martyrs,” it completes the modernist reduction of martyrdom to secular activism—precisely as the Syllabus of Errors warned against in Proposition 15 (equating all religions).
True Catholic martyrology follows the model of St. Thomas More, who died defending papal supremacy against state encroachment. These Spanish victims—however pious—remain uncanonized because the post-1958 sect lacks jurisdiction to elevate saints. As Pope Paul IV decreed in Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio, heretics occupying the Holy See cannot validly exercise canonization authority. Thus, Martínez’s entire project rests on sand.
The tragedy deepens when considering these martyrs’ liturgical memory. Their 1934 deaths occurred under the authentic Roman Missal of Pius V. Yet commemorations today employ the invalid Novus Ordo rite—a mockery of their sacrifice. As the Council of Trent taught (Session XXII), the Mass exists primarily as propitiatory sacrifice. The table meal invented by Annibale Bugnini cannot honor those who died for the True Faith.
Source:
By learning story of Spanish martyrs, ‘we will recover evangelical strength,’ bishop says (catholicnewsagency.com)
Article date: 05.11.2025