VATICAN CITY — The Vatican hung banners of the Catholic Church's
newly canonized saints four days before the Mass that would officially
recognize that they are in heaven with God.
While the hanging of the banners Oct. 10 did not coincide with
the Mass, it did coincide with the kickoff of exhibits, conferences, prayer
vigils and other celebrations focused on the new saints from Brazil, England,
India, Italy and Switzerland.
For the dozens of Brazilians at the Synod of Bishops for the
Amazon, most of the attention was on Blessed Maria Rita Lopes Pontes, popularly
known as Sister Dulce.
Born in 1914, she was a member of the Missionary Sisters of the
Immaculate Conception and founded the first Catholic workers' organization in
the state of Bahia, started a health clinic for poor workers and opened a
school for working families. She created a hospital, an orphanage and care centers for the elderly and disabled and became known as "the mother of
the poor."
St. John Paul II, who called her work "an example for
humanity,'' met her in 1980 during his first trip to Brazil and, returning in
1991, he visited her in the hospital. She died in 1992 at the age of 77 with
tens of thousands attending her funeral and even more gathering for her
beatification in 2011.
Among English-speakers, though, most of the attention was on
soon-to-be St. John Henry Newman, the theologian, poet and cardinal who lived
from 1801 to 1890.
Sally Axworthy, British ambassador to the Holy See, led the
inauguration Oct. 10 of an exhibit about the four visits Blessed Newman made to
Rome: first as an Anglican, then as a Catholic seminarian, later as founder of
the first communities in England of the Congregation of the Oratory of St.
Philip Neri, and finally, when he came to be made a cardinal in 1879.
The canonization was causing a lot of excitement in England, she
said, and Prince Charles was planning to travel to the Vatican for the Mass
Oct. 13.
"Cardinal Newman was really a very important figure. He was
a giant of the 19th century," Axworthy said.
"The first half of his life he was Anglican, and he was a
major figure in the Anglican Church," influencing the church to draw more
deeply from its Catholic roots and from the early Christian theologians,
Axworthy said. "He defined Anglicanism as a middle way between Catholicism
and Protestantism."
Once he joined the Catholic Church, she said, "he had a
similarly great impact" on this new community, "particularly with his
ideas on the development of doctrine, which I understand opened the way to
Vatican II, and also his ideas about conscience, about conscience being the
voice of God in every one of us."
Cardinal Newman already is honored as a saint on the Anglican
calendar — on Aug. 11, the day of his death. His feast day on the Catholic
calendar is Oct. 9, the date he joined the Catholic Church at the age of 44.
In London on the eve of Cardinal Newman's beatification in 2010,
Pope Benedict XVI said the cardinal had been an "important influence"
in his own life and thought.
At the beatification Mass the next day in Birmingham, England,
Pope Benedict paid special tribute to Blessed Newman's vision of education,
which combined intellectual training, moral discipline and religious
commitment.
He quoted the theologian's appeal for a well-instructed laity and
said it should serve as a goal for catechists today: "I want a laity not
arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their
religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they
hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an
account of it."
In addition to Blessed Newman and Blessed Dulce, the three others
to be canonized Oct. 13 are:
— Blessed Marguerite Bays, a laywoman from Switzerland known for
her service to the poor, her simplicity of life and her devoted faith in the
face of great physical suffering. St. Bays also was known as a mystic and for
bearing the stigmata of Christ. She died in 1879 at the age of 63.
St. John Paul II beatified her in 1995, lauding her as an example
for all lay Catholics. "She was a very simple woman with a very normal
life," he had said. "She did not accomplish anything extraordinary,
yet her existence was a long and silent progression on the path toward
holiness."
— Blessed Josephine Vannini, an Italian who co-founded the
Daughters of St. Camillus, adding to the usual vows — poverty, chastity and
obedience — a fourth, which is to serve the sick, even if it means risking
death.
Born in 1859, she was orphaned at a young age and was sent to
live with the Daughters of Charity, an order she later applied to join. After
leaving the novitiate because of illness, though, she was not readmitted. She
and her spiritual director, Blessed Luigi Tezza, founded the Daughters of St.
Camillus. She died in 1911.
— Blessed Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan, the Indian founder
of the Congregation of the Holy Family, a religious order dedicated to helping
couples and families and serving the poor, the sick and the dying. Born in 1876
to a well-off farming family, she insisted on living a life of austerity,
sleeping on the gravel floor instead of a bed, for instance.
When she received the stigmata in 1909, her bishop ordered that
an exorcism be performed. But she continued with her prayer life and serving
local families.
Under direction of the local bishop in 1913, her spiritual
director set up a "house of solitude" where Thresia could go to pray.
Three friends joined her in the house, and in 1914, she received canonical
permission to launch the Congregation of the Holy Family. She died in 1926.