People attend a vigil at Lynnhurst Park to mourn the dead and pray for the wounded after a gunman opened fire on students at Annunciation Catholic School on Aug. 27, 2025, in Minneapolis. / Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Vatican City, Sep 8, 2025 / 09:15 am (CNA).

Vatican experts said on Monday that the two children killed in last month’s shooting at a Minneapolis church could one day be included on a list they are compiling of “new martyrs and witnesses of the faith.”

Harper Moyski, 10, and Fletcher Merkel, 8, were killed while attending a parochial school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church on Aug. 27 — prompting some to ask whether they could be considered martyrs killed “in hatred of the faith.”

“If the diocese or other local ecclesial entities present these figures to us as witnesses of the faith, we will examine them and see if we can include them in the list,” said Archbishop Fabio Fabene, president of the Vatican “Commission of New Martyrs — Witnesses of the Faith.”

The commission, created by Pope Francis in 2023 under the Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints, is compiling an archive of the lives of Christian martyrs, both Catholic and non-Catholic, who have been killed in the new millennium.

As Fabene and other experts explained on Sept. 8, the commission’s selection criteria are not the same used by the Church to formally recognize a martyr through beatification and canonization. “They are two totally distinct things,” the archbishop said.

Andrea Riccardi, commission vice president and founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, said the work of the commission is “to preserve stories and names in the heart of the Church, so that their memory is not lost.” Inclusion on the commission’s list of “new martyrs” does not qualify as a beatification, he said.

Riccardi and experts spoke about the Minneapolis shooting victims, in response to a reporter’s question, during a news conference to present an ecumenical prayer service to be led by Pope Leo XIV on Sept. 14.

The service, commemorating martyrs and witnesses of the faith of the 21st century, will be held at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross — which also happens to be Leo’s 70th birthday.

Sept. 14 was chosen for the liturgy “because it is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross,” Fabene said. “We are very happy about this [coincidence of the pope’s birthday] also to wish him a happy birthday.”

Delegates from 24 Christian churches and traditions will attend the ecumenical service, including Metropolitan Anthony Sevryuk, the chairman of the Department for External Church Relations for the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Sept. 14 event recalls a similar ecumenical liturgy held in the Colosseum during the 2000 Jubilee Year.

When Francis established the new martyrs commission in 2023, he wrote that “the martyrs ‘are more numerous in our time than in the early centuries’: they are bishops, priests, consecrated men and women, laypeople and families, who in the different countries of the world, with the gift of their lives, have offered the supreme proof of charity.”

Looking ahead to the 2025 Jubilee of Hope, Pope Francis asked the commission to compile an updated list of Christian men and women who were killed for their faith in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Experts said on Monday that their catalog, which they hope eventually to publish, consists so far of 1,640 Christians killed in different circumstances of persecution and hatred around the world.

“The heart of this work is memory,” Riccardi said. “As St. John Paul II said, the names of those who died for their faith should not be lost.”