At his noon Angelus address Oct. 28, the Pope said the 498 martyrs beatified in St. Peter’s Square that morning were “heroic witnesses of the faith who, moved exclusively by love for Christ, paid with their blood for their fidelity to Him and His church.”

The new martyrs were killed during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War by supporters of the Spanish revolutionary government. Opposing the government was the fascist National Movement led by Gen. Francisco Franco. Most Spanish church leaders supported Franco during the 1930s because of the anti-clerical policies of the revolutionary government.

Pope Benedict, addressing the estimated 30,000 pilgrims gathered at the Vatican for the beatification, said he hoped the martyrs’ “words and gestures of forgiveness toward their persecutors” would lead Christians today to “work tirelessly for mercy, reconciliation and peaceful co-existence.”

As the Vatican beatification Mass was ending, a group of young Roman leftists, calling themselves the “Militants,” marched in front of Rome’s Basilica of St. Eugene, a church entrusted to the care of Prelature of Opus Dei, the predominantly lay movement founded in Spain. The protesters carried a banner that read, “One who has killed, tortured and exploited cannot be beatified.” They also carried a large copy of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting, Guernica.

The Italian news agency ANSA reported that a scuffle broke out when several parishioners tried to confiscate the banner and painting. Police were called to break up the confrontation.

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, presided over the Mass and beatification of the 498, who included bishops, priests, nuns, seminarians and laypeople killed in 1934, 1936 and 1937 in different cities of Spain.

In an Oct. 28 Vatican Radio interview, the cardinal said the atmosphere in Spain in the 1930s was clearly anti-clerical. The cardinal said the Republicans’ “hatred of the faith ... inspired and pushed them to try to silence the church once and for all.”

Presiding Oct. 29 over a thanksgiving Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, said the martyrs’ “existence certainly speaks to us of faith, strength, generous courage and ardent charity in the face of a culture that sometimes tries to marginalize or scorn the moral and human values the Gospel teaches us.”

“These martyrs have not been proposed for veneration by the people of God for political reasons nor in a struggle against whomever, but because they offered their existence as a witness of love for Christ,” Bertone said.