NEW ROMAN MARTYROLOGY IS PRESENTED

VATICAN CITY, OCT 2, 2001 (VIS) - Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estevez and Archbishop Francesco Pio Tamburrino, respectively prefect and secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of Sacraments, presented the new Roman Martyrology this morning at the Holy See Press Office.

Cardinal Medina explained that, "The type of publication of the Roman Martyrology that we offer today to the Church has been preceded by others. The last was in 1956. Since that publication there have been numerous beatifications and canonizations: under the pontificate of His Holiness John Paul II alone, beatifications have reached 1,200 and canonizations have surpassed 200. This is an updated publication that is
heir to those of the past."

For his part, Archbishop Tamburrino said that the current Roman Martyrology, which has 6,538 postulators, "includes saints and blesseds whose cult has been officially recognized by the Church, excluding all those where there are doubts deriving from spurious, unsure traditions or from legends. It includes only those whose existence is empirically proven through the memory 'ab immemorabili' of a cult from which it lends."

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