Vatican City, Oct 17, 2024 / 18:10 pm
Among the 14 people who will become the Catholic Church’s newest saints on Sunday is a priest whose intercession led to the miraculous healing of a man mauled by a jaguar, a woman who convinced a pope to call for a worldwide novena to the Holy Spirit, and 11 men killed in Syria for refusing to renounce their faith and convert to Islam.
While not household names, the 14 soon-to-be saints each exemplified heroic virtue and witnessed to holiness within their unique vocations, including two married men — a father of eight and a father of five, respectively — and three founders of religious orders who have generations of spiritual children who have continued their spiritual legacy throughout the world.
Pope Francis invited all Catholics this week to get to “learn about these new saints and ask for their intercession” in anticipation of the canonization in St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 20.
“They are a clear testimony of the Holy Spirit’s action in the life of the Church,” the pope said.
Mother Elena Guerra (1835–1914)
Known as an “apostle of the Holy Spirit,” Blessed Elena Guerra helped to convince Pope Leo XIII to exhort all Catholics to pray a novena to the Holy Spirit leading up to Pentecost in 1895.
Guerra is the foundress of the Oblates of the Holy Spirit, a congregation of religious sisters recognized by the Church in 1882 that continues today in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.
A friend of Pope Leo XIII and the teacher of St. Gemma Galgani, Guerra is remembered for her spiritual writings and her passionate devotion to the Holy Spirit.
“Pentecost is not over,” Guerra wrote. “In fact, it is continually going on in every time and in every place, because the Holy Spirit desired to give himself to all men and all who want him can always receive him, so we do not have to envy the apostles and the first believers; we only have to dispose ourselves like them to receive him well, and he will come to us as he did to them.”
For much of her 20s, Guerra was bedridden with a serious illness, a challenge that turned out to be transformational for her as she dedicated herself to meditating on Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers. She felt the call to consecrate herself to God during a pilgrimage to Rome with her father after her recovery and went on to form the religious community dedicated to education.
During her correspondence with Pope Leo XIII, Guerra composed prayers to the Holy Spirit, including a Holy Spirit Chaplet, asking the Lord to “send forth your spirit and renew the world.”
Father Giuseppe Allamano (1851–1926)
Blessed Giuseppe Allamano remained a diocesan priest in Italy his entire life yet left a global legacy by founding two missionary religious orders — the Consolata Missionaries and the Consolata Missionary Sisters — that went on to spread the Gospel in Kenya, Ethiopia, Brazil, Taiwan, Mongolia, and more than two dozen other countries.
Allamano told the priests in the order he founded in northern Italy in 1901 that they needed to be “first saints, then missionaries.”
“As missionaries then, you must not only be holy, but extraordinarily holy. All the other gifts are not enough to make a missionary! It takes holiness, great holiness,” he said.
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Allamano set the example by “combining the commitment to holiness with attention to the spiritual and social needs of his time,” Pope John Paul II said at his beatification. “He had a deep conviction that ‘the priest is first and foremost a man of charity,’ ‘destined to do the greatest possible good,’ to sanctify others ‘with example and word,’ with holiness and knowledge.”
He was deeply influenced by the spirituality of the Salesians and St. John Bosco, who served as his spiritual director, as well as the witness of his saintly uncle, St. Joseph Cafasso.
Allamano is being canonized after the Vatican recognized a unique medical miracle attributed to his intercession — the healing of a man who was attacked by a jaguar in the Amazon rainforest.
Sorino Yanomami, an Indigenous man who lived in the Amazon rainforest, was mauled by a jaguar in 1996, fracturing his skull. Due to his remote location, it took eight hours before he could be airlifted to a hospital. While he was being treated in the ICU, six Consolata missionary sisters, as well as a Consolata priest and brother, waited with the man’s wife, praying with a relic of Blessed Allamano for his intercession. The sisters also prayed a novena to Allamano asking for the man’s healing, and 10 days after his operation he woke up without any neurological damage and suffered no long-term consequences of the attack, according to the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
Fifteen Consolata missionaries are bishops today, mostly in Africa and South America, including Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, the apostolic prefect of Ulaanbataar, Mongolia.
More than 1,000 members of the Consolata orders are traveling to Rome for their founder’s canonization, Father James Lengarin, the order’s superior general, told CNA.
Mother Marie-Léonie Paradis (1840–1912)
Canadian sister Blessed Marie-Léonie Paradis founded the Little Sisters of the Holy Family.
Born Virginie Alodie in the Acadian region of Quebec, the blessed founded her institute, whose purpose was to collaborate with and support the religious of Holy Cross in educational work, in 1880 in New Brunswick.
Before founding her religious order, Paradis also spent eight years in New York serving in the St. Vincent de Paul Orphanage in the 1860s before moving to Indiana in 1870 to teach French and needlework at St. Mary’s Academy.
At the request of the bishop of Montreal, Paradis founded the Little Sisters in 1880. An important part of the the spirituality and charism of the order is support for priests through both intense and constant prayer, but also through taking care of the cooking at laundry in seminaries and rectories in “humble and joyful service” in imitation of “Christ the Servant” who washed the feet of his disciples.
Today her sisters work in over 200 institutions of education and evangelization in Canada, the United States, Italy, Brazil, Haiti, Chile, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Pope John Paul II called Paradis the “humble among the humble” as he beatified her during his visit to Montreal in 1984, the first beatification to take place on Canadian soil.
“She was not afraid of the different forms of manual work, which are the burden that falls to so many people today, while it was held in honor in the Holy Family, in the very life of Jesus in Nazareth. There she saw the will of God for her life. With the sacrifices inherent in this work, but offered out of love, she knew a profound joy and peace,” John Paul II said.
“She knew she was referring to the fundamental attitude of Christ, ‘who came not to be served, but to serve.’ She was completely pervaded by the greatness of the Eucharist: This is one of the secrets of her spiritual motivations,” he added.
The miracle attributed to Paradis’ intercession involved the healing of a newborn baby girl who suffered from “prolonged perinatal asphyxia with multi-organ failure and encephalopathy” during her birth in 1986 at a hospital in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Canada, according to the Vatican.
Martyrs of Damascus, Syria (m. 1860)
The Church will also gain 11 new martyr saints who were killed for refusing to renounce their Christian faith and convert to Islam. The “Martyrs of Damascus” were murdered “out of hatred for the faith” in the Franciscan Church of St. Paul in Damascus, Syria, on July 10, 1860.
Eight of the martyrs are Franciscan friars — six priests and two professed religious — all missionaries from Spain except for Father Engelbert Kolland, who was from Salzburg, Austria.
The three others are laymen who were also killed in the raid on the Franciscan church that night: Francis, Mooti, and Raphael Massabki, who were all brothers from a Maronite Catholic family.
Francis Massabki, the oldest of the brothers, was a father of eight children. Mooti was a father of five who visited the Church of St. Paul daily for prayer and to teach catechism lessons. The youngest brother, Raphael, was single and was known to spend long periods of time praying in the church and helping the friars.
Their martyrdom took place during the persecution of Christians by Muslims and Shia Druze in Lebanon to Syria in 1860, which resulted in thousands of victims.
Late at night extremists entered the Franciscan convent, located in the Christian quarter of Bab-Touma (St. Paul) in the Old City of Damascus, and massacred the friars: Father Manuel Ruiz, Father Carmelo Bolta, Father Nicanor Ascanio, Father Nicolás M. Alberca y Torres, Father Pedro Soler, Kolland, Brother Francisco Pinazo Peñalver, and Brother Juan S. Fernández.
ACI Mena, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner, provided an account of the martyrdom of the three Massabki brothers who were also in the church that night: The assailants told Francis Massabki that his life and the lives of his brothers would be spared on the condition that he denied his Christian faith and embraced Islam, to which Francis replied: “We are Christians, and in the faith of Christ, we will die. As Christians, we do not fear those who kill the body, as the Lord Jesus said.”
He then looked at his two brothers and said: “Be courageous and stand firm in the faith, for the crown of victory is prepared in heaven for those who endure to the end.” Immediately, they proclaimed their faith in Christ with these words: “We are Christians, and we want to live and die as Christians.”
Upon refusing to renounce their Christian faith and convert to Islam, the 11 martyrs of Damascus were brutally killed, some beheaded with sabers and axes, others stabbed or clubbed to death.
Every year on July 10, the liturgical calendar of the Custody of the Holy Land commemorates these martyrs. In the Syrian capital, the Latin and Maronite communities often celebrate this day together.
