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Thousands gathered in Southeast Poland for the beatification of the Ulma Family. It was the first time the Catholic Church beatified an entire family at once: Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children, who were martyred during World War II for sheltering two Jewish families from the Nazis. The seventh Ulma child to die was the couple’s unnamed son, who was in the process of being born. The boy had been incorrectly described in some news reports as the first unborn child to be beatified, a key detail that the Vatican recently clarified. Though there was no time to baptize the child, what transpired instead was what the Church calls a “baptism of blood.” “It would be misleading if the day of the beatification of the Ulma family served only to bring back to memory the terror of the atrocities perpetrated by their executioners, on whom, by the way, the judgment of history already weighs heavily,” Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, said Sept. 10 in his homily at a beatification Mass attended by some 30,000 people in the family’s village of Markowa in southeastern Poland. “Instead,” the cardinal continued, “we want today to be a day of joy, because the page of the Gospel written on paper has become for us a lived reality, which shines brightly in the Christian witness of the Ulma couple and in the martyrdom of the new Blesseds.” #catholic #blessed #newborn #ulmafamily #prolife