The Peace and All Good Column

Archbishop Gregory J. Hartmayer, OFM Conv., is the seventh Archbishop of Atlanta. In “Peace and All Good,” he shares pastoral reflections.

On the eve of All Saints, the Church in Georgia received a gift more than four centuries in the making. In Savannah on Oct. 31, Cardinal Frank Leo of Toronto, representing our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, proclaimed that Friar Pedro de Corpa and his four companions—Friars Blas Rodríguez, Miguel de Añón, Antonio de Badajoz and Francisco de Veráscola—may now be venerated with the title “Blessed.”

We now use that title for the men who gave their lives on the very soil many of us walk daily. It was the first beatification ever celebrated in Georgia, and the first in the American South.

I confess that I stood in that assembly with a full heart. When I served as Bishop of Savannah, I was privileged to carry forward a cause that my predecessors, Bishop Raymond Lessard and Bishop Kevin Boland, had faithfully nurtured, and which Bishop Stephen Parkes continued. The Franciscans first sought this cause in 1950; Bishop Lessard formally opened it in 1984. Many who prayed and labored for this day did not live to see it. I remembered them at the altar, and I trust they rejoiced with us.

Who were these men? In the closing years of the 16th century, a small band of Spanish Franciscans came to the Georgia coast to serve the Guale people. They learned the Guale language, lived among the villages, endured the heat, the insects and the isolation of that frontier and preached Christ with patience. Many Guale received baptism.

At the mission of Tolomato, near present-day Darien, Friar Pedro de Corpa cared for a young baptized Guale man named Juanillo, heir to the chieftaincy. Having promised at his baptism to live in faithful marriage with one wife, Juanillo sought to take a second. Friar Pedro admonished him, and Friar Blas Rodríguez at the nearby mission supported that. Juanillo left in anger and gathered warriors. Between Sept. 14 and 17, 1597, five friars were killed. A sixth was taken captive and survived to tell what had happened.

Tradition holds that Friar Blas, knowing what was coming, asked to celebrate Mass one final time before he died. I find that detail unforgettable. He went to his death the way every priest is meant to live—from the altar, offering himself with Christ.

Martyrs for the  truth of marriage

These friars did not die for an abstraction. They died because they would not tell a baptized man that the promise he had made before God no longer mattered. In an age when the meaning of marriage is so often obscured, Blessed Pedro and his companions remind us that the covenant between husband and wife is holy, that it is worth defending, and that fidelity is itself a form of witness.

Archbishop Gregory J. Hartmayer, OFM Conv., is photographed at the solemn Vespers on the eve of the beatification of the Georgia Martyrs, Oct. 30, at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah.  Photo by Julianna Leopold

That witness does not belong only to the married. It speaks also to those whose marriages have been wounded or broken, to the young discerning their vocations, and to all who serve families in the Church. The friars held truth and charity together; they were firm because they loved. We are called to the same balance—never to soften the Gospel, and never to wield it without mercy.

The Church does not beatify an era; she beatifies persons whose faith was proven unto death. We can honor these friars while also remembering honestly that the arrival of Europeans brought great suffering to the native peoples of this land, including the Guale. The friars’ own lives—learning a people’s language, living among them, and laying down their lives rather than taking up arms—point us toward a different way. Their beatification invites all of us, in a divided time, to set aside the weapons of contempt and to seek the reconciliation that only Christ can give.

Sons of St. Francis

As a Franciscan myself, I cannot help but note the providence of the timing. These friars were raised to the altars in the year the whole Church marks the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi in 1226. Francis sent his brothers into the world with little more than the Gospel and their own poverty. Blessed Pedro and his companions took that mandate to the edge of the known world and to the end of their lives. Their witness belongs to all of us now, but my brothers and I give thanks that they are sons of St. Francis, the Poverello. It is fitting that they were beatified on the vigil of All Saints. The next morning, we celebrated the great multitude of holy men and women, known and unknown, who now behold the face of God.

Few of us will be asked to shed our blood for Christ. All of us are asked to be faithful—in our marriages, our vows, our promises and our daily duties. That quieter martyrdom of fidelity is the soil in which saints grow.

I invite every parish, school and family in our archdiocese to come to know these new Blesseds. Visit the bronze monument to the martyrs at Nativity of Our Lady Church in Darien, or the painting of them at Holy Spirit Church here in Atlanta. Learn their story at thegeorgiamartyrs.org. Above all, ask for their intercession, especially for marriages and families, and share any favors received through their prayers.

Their path to canonization continues, and it may well pass through the prayers of the faithful of Georgia. Tertullian wrote that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. In 1597 that seed fell on our coast. Four centuries later, we have seen it bear fruit.

Blessed Pedro de Corpa and Companions, pray for us.