EWTN News reports that Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), declared at a Swiss pilgrimage that “today, there are more martyrs than in the first centuries of the Church,” emphasizing that “Christians are not persecuted because they belong to a particular church but because of their faith in Christ,” and invoking the expression “ecumenism of blood” coined by the antipope Francis. This statement, far from being a mere pastoral observation, is a calculated theological weapon that dissolves the Catholic Church’s exclusive claim to truth into the murky waters of pan-Christian relativism, effectively canonizing heretics and schismatics as witnesses of Christ while the conciliar sect systematically dismantles the very faith for which the martyrs died.
The “Ecumenism of Blood”: A Heretical Category Masquerading as Pastoral Sensitivity
The expression “ecumenism of blood,” first coined by the antipope Francis and now parroted without the slightest critical examination by Cardinal Koch, is not a harmless turn of phrase. It is a theological category that flatly contradicts the defined dogma of the Catholic Church. The Church has always taught, with the full weight of her infallible Magisterium, that extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the Church there is no salvation. This is not a disciplinary opinion subject to revision; it is a truth of divine faith, defined by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Council of Florence (1439-1445), and reaffirmed by countless popes.
When Koch asserts that “dictators do not distinguish between Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans, or Protestants” and that “the blood that has been shed unites Christians beyond their divisions,” he is not merely stating a factual observation about the indiscriminate nature of persecution. He is drawing from it a theological conclusion that is formally heretical: that the blood of those who die outside the Catholic Church — indeed, while professing errors condemned by the Church — constitutes a form of unity that transcends the visible boundaries of the one true Church. This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, which anathematized the proposition that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church” (Proposition 18).
The martyrs of the early Church shed their blood precisely because they professed the Catholic faith in its fullness — the divinity of Christ, the Real Presence, the sacramental priesthood, the primacy of Peter. They died against heretics and schismatics, not alongside them as though their respective confessions were equally valid paths to God. To place the blood of a Catholic martyr and the blood of a Protestant “witness” on the same plane is to deny that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of revealed truth and to adopt the very indifferentism that the Church has consistently condemned.
The Erasure of Catholic Identity in the Face of Persecution
Koch’s statement that “Christians are not persecuted because they belong to a particular church but because of their faith in Christ” is a masterwork of modernist ambiguity. On the surface, it sounds pious. In reality, it erases the theological distinction between the true Church and false confessions. The implication is clear: it does not matter which “church” one belongs to, since what counts is a generic “faith in Christ.”
But the Church has never taught that a vague, undefined “faith in Christ” is sufficient. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), taught that Christ’s reign extends over all men and that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The salvation that comes through Christ comes through His Church, which He established as “a perfect society” endowed with “full freedom and independence from secular authority.” The Church is not one option among many; she is the sole ark of salvation.
By reducing martyrdom to a generic “Christian” phenomenon, Koch effectively severs the link between martyrdom and the Catholic faith. A Lutheran who dies for professing sola fide is not a martyr in the Catholic sense; he dies in a state of heresy. An Orthodox who dies rejecting the primacy of Peter dies in schism. To call their deaths equivalent to the death of a Catholic who dies in odium fidei — in hatred of the Catholic faith specifically — is to perpetrate a theological fraud that would have been inconceivable before the conciliar revolution.
This is the very error that St. Pius X condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), which rejected the proposition that “the Church is incapable of effectively defending evangelical ethics, because it steadfastly adheres to its views, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress” (Proposition 63). The modernist mentality, as diagnosed by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, consistently seeks to dissolve defined dogma into vague, universal categories that offend no one — and therefore save no one.
The Statistical Manipulation: Manufacturing a Narrative</h2
The article cites the Open Doors report claiming that "more than 388 million Christians worldwide suffer persecution and discrimination" and that "4,849 were killed between October 2024 and September 2025," with the majority of killings in Nigeria. While the suffering of the faithful is real and must be met with prayer and material aid, the uncritical deployment of such statistics in an ecumenical context demands scrutiny.
Who counts as a “Christian” in these statistics? The Open Doors World Watch List, which serves as the primary source for such figures, includes adherents of confessions that the Catholic Church has formally condemned as heretical or schismatic. When Koch invokes these numbers to support the “ecumenism of blood,” he is implicitly including Protestants, Anglicans, and Orthodox among the “martyrs” — thereby canonizing, by statistical association, those who profess doctrines condemned by the Church.
Moreover, the claim that “today there are more martyrs than in the first centuries of the Church” is a rhetorical device designed to normalize and trivialize the unprecedented apostasy within the Church herself. While Christians suffer externally, the far greater danger — the one that St. Pius X identified as the “synthesis of all heresies” — is the modernist destruction of the faith from within. The conciliar sect, of which Koch is a prominent member, has done more to destroy the faith than any external persecutor. The suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass, the promotion of false ecumenism, the embrace of religious liberty, the dialogue with false religions — these constitute a systematic demolition of the faith for which the martyrs died.
It is a bitter irony that the very structures Koch serves — the post-conciliar Vatican — have abandoned the missionary mandate to convert all nations, replacing it with a “dialogue” that treats heresy as a legitimate partner. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei, taught that the state “is never allowed to forget” that it must “respect the authority of the Church” and that “to neglect or reject” this duty is “to act with injustice.” The conciliar sect has not merely neglected this duty; it has actively repudiated it.
Aid to the Church in Need: A Pontifical Foundation in the Service of the Conciliar Sect
The article describes ACN as supporting “the Catholic Church in its evangelization work among the world’s most needy, discriminated-against, and persecuted communities.” But which “Catholic Church” does ACN serve? It serves the conciliar sect — the post-1958 structure that has systematically emptied the faith of its content while maintaining the external trappings of Catholicism.
ACN’s funding of “pastoral and humanitarian emergency projects across 137 countries” is not directed toward the preservation of the integral Catholic faith. It is directed toward the maintenance of the neo-church’s institutional apparatus — its schools, its parishes, its “bishops” — all of which operate within the framework of the conciliar revolution. The “Catholic schools serving vulnerable communities” in Lebanon, mentioned in the article, are schools that teach the religion of Vatican II: religious liberty, ecumenism, the “spirit of Assisi” — all of which were condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium.
Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” (Proposition 77). The entire ecumenical enterprise, of which ACN is a financial instrument, is built upon this condemned proposition. Koch’s leadership of ACN is not a service to the Church; it is a service to the apostasy.
The Silence About the True Enemy
Perhaps the most damning aspect of Koch’s remarks is what he does not say. There is no mention of the modernist apostasy within the Church — the very apostasy that St. Pius X identified as the greatest danger. There is no mention of the suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass, which is the true liturgical expression of the Catholic faith. There is no mention of the fact that the conciliar “reforms” have emptied churches across the Western world while the structures Koch serves celebrate “interfaith dialogue” with the very religions that persecute Christians.
The article from EWTN News — itself a product of the conciliar milieu, despite its occasional use of traditional language — presents Koch’s remarks without the slightest critical distance. This is symptomatic of the total capture of Catholic media by the conciliar narrative. The faithful are fed a diet of external persecution stories while the far greater internal persecution — the systematic destruction of their faith by the very men who claim to be their shepherds — goes unmentioned.
Pope Pius IX, in his allocution Maxima quidem (1862), condemned the proposition that “all action of God upon man and the world is to be denied” (Proposition 2). The modernist project, of which Koch is a willing agent, effectively denies God’s action by reducing religion to a human phenomenon — a matter of “witness” and “dialogue” rather than objective truth and supernatural grace. The “ecumenism of blood” is the logical endpoint of this reduction: if the faith is merely a human experience, then the blood of all “Christians” is equally precious. But if the faith is the depositum fidei, entrusted by Christ to His Church alone, then only those who die in that faith — and not those who die professing errors condemned by it — are true martyrs.
Conclusion: The Blood of Martyrs Demands the Truth
The blood of the martyrs is indeed semen Christianorum — the seed of Christians, as Tertullian taught. But that seed bears fruit only when it falls on the soil of truth. The “ecumenism of blood” is a poisoned seed, planted in the soil of religious indifferentism, and it bears the fruit of apostasy.
Cardinal Koch, as a prominent member of the conciliar sect, has no authority to speak on behalf of the Catholic Church. His appointment by the antipope Leo XIV to lead ACN is an appointment within a paramasonic structure that has usurped the See of Peter. His words about martyrdom, however moving they may sound, are deployed in the service of an ecumenical agenda that denies the exclusive salvific mission of the Catholic Church.
The true martyrs — from St. Stephen to the Cristeros to the victims of communist persecution — died for the Catholic faith, not for a generic “Christianity.” To honor their witness is to profess the faith they died for — the unchanging, integral Catholic faith that the conciliar sect has betrayed. And to profess that faith today is to stand against the very men who claim to honor the martyrs while dismantling everything the martyrs died to preserve.
Source:
Cardinal Koch: ‘Today there are more martyrs than in the early centuries of the Church’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 11.06.2026