Secondly, there are those who were killed for their political views and their meddling in the secular affairs of the State or those who intolerantly murdered or tortured others and were then killed in revenge. These include Stanislas of Poland (+ 1079), Thomas Becket (+ 1170)
They cannot be considered to be Saints because they were not actually martyrs i.e. witnesses...Such cases include the mainly native Roman Catholics so cruelly slain in Japan, especially at Nagasaki, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with children among them, monastics in revolutionary France in the eighteenth century, those in Korea, Vietnam, China and Uganda in the nineteenth century, those in revolutionary Spain in the twentieth century, as well as murder-victims such as the innocent Italian child Maria Goretti in 1902.
The above aren't saints!? Absurd!
"The above aren't saints!? Absurd!"
They may be saints for the RCs, not for the Orthodox. I see little to be gained by attacking them. I just don't venerate them. I suppose if one wants to debate their sanctity, one might start a new string on the subject of Western saints whom the Orthodox refuse to venerate.
Instead of getting all in a lather about these "saints", how about the Western saints who seem to have been left by the wayside but yet remain very popular with the Orthodox? One might, for example, check out the saints portrayed in the border of the Russian Orthodox icon of the Glastonbury Mother of God and many other saints of the Orthodox West.