News that an Italian teen could soon be canonized — the first from the "millennial" generation — has enthralled his devotees in the U.S.

On May 23, Pope Francis formally recognized a second miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Carlo Acutis, clearing the way for him to be formally recognized as a saint of the Catholic Church.

Along with Acutis, the pope also advanced the sainthood causes of a group of Franciscan martyrs, six men and one woman in the same promulgation.

Acutis — who is credited with interceding for the 2022 healing of a head injury in a young Costa Rican woman  — died of leukemia in 2006 at age 15, having lived a brief life of extraordinary holiness that was marked by a profound devotion to Christ and the Eucharist. Acutis' desire to foster awareness of the Blessed Sacrament, along with his formidable computer skills, led him to create a database of eucharistic miracles throughout the world.

The sunny-faced teen — who was born in London in 1991 and grew up in Milan, Italy — displayed an early attraction to the spiritual life, reciting the rosary and attending Mass daily, serving as a catechist, volunteering at a church soup kitchen and tutoring children with their homework. At the same time, Acutis was known for his enthusiasm for typical teenage interests, such as video games, pets, soccer and music.

"Blessed Carlo Acutis is an inspiration and intercessor for all young people, but especially for those who are drifting away or alienated from the Church or who are skeptical about religion," Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minn., chair of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, told OSV News. "He demonstrates that having a clear reference point in Jesus Christ opens up the possibilities of a joy-filled and creative mission, but also and most importantly imparts a holiness through which the meaning and purpose of life is revealed."

"Carlo really was a regular kid," said Michael Norton, president of the Malvern Retreat Center in Malvern, Pa., which is home to the Blessed Carlo Acutis Shrine and Center for Eucharistic Encounter.

The center, which is seeking to attain diocesan shrine status, contains a permanent exhibit featuring 100 Eucharistic miracles as well as a Blessed Carlo Reading Room and a permanent altar for group Eucharistic adoration during scheduled events.

In October 2023, the center hosted the teen's mother, Antonia Acutis, who shared her reflections on being the mother of a saint who speaks especially to the younger generation.

Norton told OSV News he is "over the moon" about Acutis' pending canonization — as is Malvern board member Mary Bea Damico, who was what Norton called the "visionary" for the Acutis center at Malvern.

The announcement of Acutis' impending sainthood also has thrilled Catholic schools named in his honor.

"We prayed this day would come but never dreamed it would arrive less than two years after opening Blessed Carlo Acutis Academy, an online, Catholic school for students in grades 5-12," located in the Diocese of Madison, Wis., said Michael Lancaster, diocesan superintendent of Catholic schools, in a statement to OSV News.

For Blessed Carlo Acutis Catholic High School in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the canonization's timing is especially ideal, since construction has only just begun and the name can be easily updated from "Blessed" to "Saint."

"We chose Blessed Carlo Acutis as the namesake for this school so that our students could easily see themselves living out their faith in this modern world," said Sandra Palazzo, board chair of Edmonton Catholic Schools, a publicly funded school division in Edmonton. "He was a shining example of sharing the love of God. We look forward to having the students of Edmonton Catholic Schools journey alongside Carlo Acutis on the path to sainthood.

ORLANDO, Fla. — When five missionary priests of Brittany, France, volunteered to serve people suffering in Shreveport, La., they knew they were risking their lives.

Yet they sacrificed their own welfare during a pandemic to journey with the dying and bring the Eucharist to the faithful. Their names might not be familiar to the entire U.S. Church, but those in northwest Louisiana know the men as the "Shreveport martyrs."

"They demonstrated heroic charity during the third worst pandemic in U.S. history," said Bishop Francis I. Malone of Shreveport, who added the priests' example during the yellow fever epidemic of 1873 "resounds beyond the Catholic world," as the men ministered to the sick regardless of religious affiliation.

"Even in dark times and in dark places, human beings are spiritual beings who sacrifice themselves for humankind for the common good," he said.

Bishop Malone made those remarks June 15 during the U.S. bishops' spring plenary assembly at the Omni Championsgate in the southern part of the Diocese of Orlando. He, along with Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki of Milwaukee, offered the consultation on the cause of the priests' beatification and canonization.

Fathers Jean Pierre, Jean Marie Biler, François Le Vézouët, Isidore Quémerais and Louis Marie Gergaud were all young men, ages 26 to 27, Bishop Malone said. They came to the United States as missionaries from France, and volunteered to serve the sick and dying of Shreveport from September through October of 1873. Yellow fever killed a quarter of the population in the area, including all five priests.

The prospect of death was never a secret to the men. They knew they could, and most likely would, die.

"Fathers Jean Pierre and Father Isidore were the first to volunteer," Bishop Malone said. "Father Isidore worked tirelessly until Sept. 15, when he collapsed and died, one week after his 26th birthday. Father Jean Pierre died the following day."

At those men's bedside was Father Biler, who gave them final sacraments. He cared for more than 900 sick and dying people. When he became infected and knew he was going to die, he telegraphed pleas for assistance. Father Gergaud, who was some 37 miles away, answered, as did Father Le Vézouët, who was in Natchitoches, La., some 76 miles away.

"When someone told Father Le Vézouët, 'You are going to your death,' Father Le Vézouët said, 'I believe it, it is the surest and shortest path to heaven,'" Bishop Malone recounted. "They all willingly entered a quarantined city to face horrible death."

In 1945, the year he died, Bishop Daniel F. Desmond of Alexandria, La., whose territory at the time included Shreveport, said, perhaps one day these sons of France could be found worthy to be included in the Church's calendar of saints. Perhaps fittingly, Bishop Malone officially opened the cause of canonization for the martyrs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After introducing the martyrs and their histories, the USCCB assembly floor was open for comments and questions from fellow bishops. Bishop Earl K. Fernandes of Columbus, Ohio, had known about the martyrs after reading the book "Shreveport Martyrs of 1873: The Surest Path to Heaven." He said the priests' service is especially a source of inspiration for priests during the Eucharistic Revival because they worked to provide the sacraments to a population others might not touch.

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler, Texas, thanked BIshop Malone for taking up the canonization task. Since Tyler is just across the state border from Shreveport, Catholics of northeast Texas share the heritage of those in northwest Louisiana, he said. "This will be a great boost to the faith" of both communities along with the growing population of Catholics within the Bible Belt, he said.

Under the terms of the 2007 Vatican document "Sanctorum Mater," the diocesan bishop promoting a sainthood cause must consult at least with the regional bishops' conference on the advisability of pursuing the cause.

SHREVEPORT, La. (CNS) — The sacrifice of five Catholic priests who gave their lives ministering to people in Shreveport during the 1873 yellow fever epidemic is memorialized in stained glass at Holy Trinity Church in downtown.

Their stories have been regularly recounted across nearly 150 years of news reports and histories of Shreveport. The city's Pierre Avenue is named in honor of one of them, Father Jean Pierre, the first pastor of Holy Trinity.

And now their story will be widely known in the Catholic Church in the U.S. and beyond with the formal opening of their sainthood cause.

"It is my joy, on this feast of the Immaculate Conception and from this historic church, to announce that we may refer to them as 'Servants of God,'" Shreveport Bishop Francis I. Malone said at a Dec. 8 news conference at Holy Trinity Church.

"I am still within my first year here as the bishop of the 16 northernmost (civil) parishes of Louisiana, but I learned quickly of the extraordinary zeal of these earliest of missionary priests to our area, which culminated in the free offer of their lives in the yellow fever epidemic of 1873," said the prelate, who was ordained and installed as Shreveport's bishop Jan. 28.

"The stories of their lives, up to their deaths in the epidemic, are truly extraordinary," he said. The diocese has a website that tells their stories: https://shreveportmartyrs.org.

In the late summer of 1873, Shreveport was besieged by the third-worst epidemic of yellow fever recorded in U.S. history, losing one-fourth of its population. One Catholic priest who refused to leave the sick and the dying and four others who knowingly entered the quarantined areas were among the city's dead.

"Each priest made the free and voluntary offer of life and heroic acceptance of a premature and horrific yellow fever death, in the act of charity," the diocese said in a news release.

Father Pierre was the first Catholic pastor in Shreveport. He came from Saint-Brieuc, a town in the Brittany region of France, as a missionary priest to what was then the Diocese of Natchitoches, La., established in 1853.

He first went to the tiny community of Bayou Pierre, Louisiana, which today is called Carmel. In 1856, he was assigned to Shreveport and was tasked with founding a new church — Holy Trinity. He also ministered in the civil parishes of Caddo, Bossier, DeSoto, Webster and Claiborne, Louisiana.

The other four priests are:

• Father Isidore A. Quemerais, first assistant priest of Shreveport, who also served in Rapides and Avoyelles civil parishes.

• Father Jean-Marie Biler, chaplain of the Convent and Novitiate of St. Vincent's in Shreveport.

• Father Louis Gergaud, first pastor of St. Matthew Church in Monroe, Louisiana, who also ministered in Ouachita, Morehouse, Union, Webster, Claiborne, Caldwell and Franklin civil parishes.

• Father Francois LeVezouet, founding pastor of St. John the Baptist Church in Many, Louisiana, who ministered throughout Sabine and Natchitoches civil parishes.

The Vatican's Congregation for Saints' Causes has reviewed their stories and granted the Diocese of Shreveport permission to begin the process of gathering evidence of the sanctity of the priests' lives and the devotion to them.

It is the first step on the road to sainthood. The next step is a declaration by the Vatican they lived lives of extraordinary and heroic virtue and they will be granted the title "Venerable."

The next two steps are beatification and canonization: In general, each step needs verification of a miraculous cure or event attributed to the intercession of the sainthood candidate.

"The culmination of this process may very well, in fact, most likely will take place in a number of decades," said Bishop Malone, who before being appointed to Shreveport by Pope Francis Nov. 19, 2019, was a pastor and chancellor for ecclesial affairs in the Diocese of Little Rock..

"Today is the needed first step toward that goal," he added.

According to the diocese there has never before been any sainthood cause from northern Louisiana, "making this an especially historic development for the region."

The fact that the five priests' cause "is proceeding during a time of pandemic is a noteworthy historic parallel," it said.

The groundwork needed to be able to officially open the priests' sainthood cause has led to extensive research into their lives for a book-length manuscript, podcast and graphic novel project currently underway by Father Peter Mangum, rector of the Cathedral of St. John Berchmans in Shreveport, local historian W. Ryan Smith and Cheryl White, a history professor at Louisiana State University Shreveport.

The trio's project sets the biographies of the priests in the broader narrative of the 1873 Shreveport epidemic. Their soon-to-be-published book is titled "The Surest Path to Heaven: 1873 Shreveport Martyrs."

For what could be the first time in the 176-year history of the Diocese of Little Rock, a diocesan tribunal submitted formal documentation to the Vatican on an alleged healing miracle of a former Arkansas college student.

“We served as a fact-finding gathering source for the Holy See,” said Father Greg Luyet, JCL, judicial vicar of the diocese, who oversaw all canonical procedures of those involved.

The documentation prepared for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome is one possible step for the beatification cause for Venerable Henriette Delille, who founded the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans. She was declared venerable for “heroic virtues” nine years ago, according to an Aug. 15 article in the Clarion Herald, the official publication of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. If her canonization cause continues, she could be the first black saint from the U.S.

 

What happened

Christine McGee was a 19-year-old college student when the alleged healing happened in Little Rock, said Sister Doris Goudeaux, co-director of the Henriette Delille Commission Office.

In December 2007, McGee was hospitalized for an aneurism. Sister Doris said her mother was told “she was very sick and they should try to get to the hospital as soon as they could … it looked like she was going to die.”

“Her mother said she had been devoted or was devoted to Henriette Delille. From the time she learned about her sickness, she started to pray and prayed to Henriette the whole time. Even though it seemed like things weren’t going to work, she held onto that belief,” Sister Doris said.

The doctors said McGee was “still unresponsive in a coma” even when things started to look better, Sister Doris said. While things did get worse before they were better, McGee was released in January 2008. She endured physical therapy but, “she got her master’s degree from Loyola (University in New Orleans) this past summer” and is able to drive and take care of herself, Sister Doris said she was told.

The sisters were first informed about the alleged miracle in 2014 by McGee’s mother. Sister Doris said the story was published in the order’s newsletter and officials in Rome saw it. The order then started the official process.

Sister Doris also said she had limits on what details she could share regarding the case, but stated the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has issued “a decree of juridical validity,” signed Dec. 7, 2018, confirming the Diocese of Little Rock met the standards for collecting the required facts within their documentation. No contact information for McGee was shared with Arkansas Catholic, but Sister Doris said she doesn’t live in Arkansas any longer.

Citing norms issued by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to maintain secrecy of the process, including the questions asked and those who participated, in order to protect the integrity of the process, Father Luyet said he was not able to discuss anything about the alleged miracle or individuals involved.

 

Diocese’s role

Dr. Andrea Ambrosi of Rome, the postulator of Venerable Henriette’s cause, according to the Archdiocese of New Orleans article, received word from the Holy Family sisters regarding the alleged miracle. The Diocese of Little Rock then received a formal request to embark on a fact-finding mission, as the alleged miracle occurred in Arkansas.

“An advocate in Rome came to the U.S. and asked our bishop if he’d consider opening an investigation here in the Diocese of Little Rock” and Bishop Anthony B. Taylor said yes, Father Luyet said. Before the bishop came to Arkansas in 2008, he was the first episcopal delegate for the canonization cause for Father Stanley Rother in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. On Sept. 23, 2017, Blessed Stanley Rother was the first U.S.-born priest to be beatified.

Father Luyet said the diocese opened the fact-finding case regarding the alleged miracle through the intercession of Venerable Henriette in 2015 and finished in May 2018.

The tribunal of miracles, which was named by Bishop Taylor, included the bishop; an episcopal delegate, a person who represents the bishop; a notary; medical expert; and a promoter of justice, who makes sure all Church law and teachings are followed.

Before a person can be deemed a saint, they must first be named “venerable” — which Sister Henriette was named March 27, 2010, by Pope Benedict XVI — then “blessed,” which requires either martyrdom or an “inexplicable medical event,” or miracle, attributed to that person’s intercession.

Sister Doris said Sister Sylvia Thibodeaux and Dr. Virginia Gould, a historian assisting the sisters with the beatification cause, visited Bishop Taylor in Little Rock the end of May.

“We wanted to tell him how much we appreciate their work with the inquiry on this last alleged miracle, and we appreciate everything they did,” she said.

WASHINGTON — Catholics in Oklahoma have been preparing for a long time for this moment. Many, like Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City, had faith it would come, but there’s still a sense of awe, to think that a farm boy, one of their own, is about to take a step toward official sainthood.

On Sept. 23, Oklahomans will get a front row seat to the beatification of Father Stanley Rother, an ordinary man from an ordinary town, who died extraordinarily as a martyr in Guatemala while serving in a mission. He knew well the dangers of the Guatemalan highlands, where government forces tortured and killed anyone suspected of dissent during the most politically tumultuous moments in the country’s history.

 However, Father Rother refused to abandon the community he so loved from 1968 until his 1981 assassination. Like many of the poor and persecuted he served, he died long before he had to at age 46, shot in the head in the parish rectory.

“People are justly proud of this native son, but one wouldn’t expect something like this, such a recognition to be accorded to somebody from Okarche, Oklahoma,” said Archbishop Coakley in a phone interview with Catholic News Service.

Okarche (pronounced oh-car-chee) is a small farming town with a lot of windmills, said Archbishop Coakley, and one that’s increasingly receiving visitors and pilgrims wanting to learn more about the tranquil setting that was home to Father Rother. He left it behind because he wanted to serve the Church in a place where priests were needed and, in the late 1960s, priests were needed in the remote highlands of Guatemala, where the Oklahoma City Archdiocese had a mission in the town of Santiago Atitlan.

Though his heart, physically and otherwise, was left in Guatemala, the rest of his remains returned to Okarche. For years, people stopped by to pray at his grave at the Holy Trinity Cemetery in town, said Archbishop Coakley, even before he was declared a martyr by the Vatican in late 2016. His remains have since been exhumed as part of the beatification process and moved to a chapel in Oklahoma City, where the ceremony declaring him Blessed Stanley Rother will take place.

Though Oklahoma is not a predominantly Catholic state, there’s a lot of interest outside of Catholic circles, particularly with the upcoming beatification. Archbishop Coakley said he has tried to meet with local groups eager for information about the event and recently gave a presentation to religious leaders of various faith traditions who wanted to know more about the priest and the significance of his beatification. 

“Some of them undoubtedly plan to attend the beatification,” he said. “It’s touching people well beyond our Catholic community.”

Two of Father Rother’s siblings as well as a delegation from Guatemala will attend the ceremony at the Cox Convention Center. Guatemalans from Santiago Atitlan will participate in the liturgy, which will include the prayers of the faithful in their local dialect. A large banner that will be unveiled at the time of the beatification will display elements of Guatemalan culture, said Archbishop Coakley. 

He said he wants Catholics to understand that a martyr and a holy person such as Father Rother can come from an ordinary beginning. 

“There was nothing exceptional about him,” said the archbishop about Father Rother. “But he was extraordinarily faithful to his calling, to his vocation, to grace. He’s a witness to all of us that God chooses the humble, the lowly, as he always does, to accomplish great things for those who allow themselves to be used by God.”

In addition to the beatification, the archdiocese also is in the midst of its first capital campaign, which includes raising $55 million — half will go toward a shrine honoring Father Rother.

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City announced that one its native sons, Father Stanley Rother, a North American priest who worked in Guatemala and was brutally murdered there in 1981, will be beatified Sept. 23 in Oklahoma.

“It’s official! Praised be Jesus Christ! Archbishop Coakley received official word this morning from Rome that Servant of God Father Stanley Rother will be beatified in Oklahoma City in September!” the archdiocese announced March 13 on its website.

Pope Francis recognized Father Rother’s martyrdom last December, making him the first martyr born in the United States.

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor said the Mass will take place at 10 a.m. at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City.

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor expected that day would come when Pope Francis would recognize the martyrdom of Father Stanley Rother.

“His case was so clear,” the bishop said of the only American-born martyr who was recognized by the Vatican Dec. 2. “It fits the pattern of so many others who gave their life for the faith in Guatemala in that period.”

Bishop Taylor, who met the Oklahoma City priest briefly one time, was the episcopal delegate for the sainthood cause for Father Rother from 2007 until he was named the bishop of Little Rock in 2008. He personally interviewed 50 people in Spanish and Tz’utujil, a Mayan language, about their knowledge of Father Rother and the virtues he displayed.

Bishop Taylor and 20 other Arkansans visited Guatemala in July for the 35th anniversary of Father Rother’s death.

The recognition of his martyrdom clears the way for his beatification, the final stage before canonization. Bishop Taylor expects the Mass to take place in Oklahoma City in 2017.

Bishop Taylor believes this case taken by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City is important because there are hundreds of other named and unnamed martyrs in Guatemala who will probably never be recognized officially by the Church.

Because Father Rother was killed in Guatemala, his cause should have been undertaken there. But the local church lacked the resources for such an effort. The Guatemalan bishops’ conference agreed to a transfer of jurisdiction to the Oklahoma City Archdiocese.

A book called “Faithful Witnesses to the Gospel” listing dozens of catechists, priests and sisters was presented to St. John Paul II when he visited the country in 1996.

“I am very pleased that the Congregation (for the Causes of Saints) has recognized that Father Rother is a martyr, that he gave his life for Christ, that he was killed out of hatred for the faith,” the bishop said.

Father Rother, born March 27, 1935, on his family’s farm near Okarche, Okla., was brutally murdered July 28, 1981, in a Guatemalan village where he ministered to the poor.

He went to Santiago Atitlan in 1968 on assignment from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. He helped the people there build a small hospital, school and its first Catholic radio station. He was beloved by the locals, who called him “Padre Francisco.”

Many priests and religious in Guatemala became targets during the country’s 1960-1996 civil war as government forces cracked down on leftist rebels supported by the rural poor.

The bodies of some of Father Rother’s deacons and parishioners were left in front of his church and soon he received numerous death threats over his opposition to the presence of the Guatemalan military in the area.

Though he returned to Oklahoma for a brief period, he returned to the Guatemalan village to remain with the people he had grown to love during the more than dozen years he lived there.

He was gunned down at the age 46 in the rectory of his church in Santiago Atitlan. Government officials there put the blame on the Catholic Church for the unrest in the country that they said led to his death. On the day he died, troops also killed 13 townspeople and wounded 24 others in Santiago Atitlan, an isolated village 50 miles west of Guatemala City.

Many priests and religious lost their lives and thousands of civilians were kidnapped and killed during the years of state-sponsored oppression in the country.

While his body was returned to Oklahoma, his family gave permission for his heart and some of his blood to be enshrined in the church of the people he loved and served. A memorial plaque marks the place.

Father Rother was considered a martyr by the Church in Guatemala and his name was included on a list of 78 martyrs for the faith killed during Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war.

News of the recognition was welcomed in Oklahoma.

“This comes as a great joy to all of us here not only in Oklahoma, but I think it’s a great blessing to the Church in the United States,” Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City told Catholic News Service Dec. 2.

He also called the recognition of the priest’s martyrdom a gift to the Catholic Church in Guatemala.

Archbishop Coakley recalled how both he and Father Rother are alumni of Mount St. Mary Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md. He remembered a ceremony at the school a few months after the priest’s death in which a plaque was erected in his honor.

“His witness has marked me from my earliest days in priestly formation,” the archbishop said. “It’s a blessing to be the archbishop now who has the opportunity to bring to fruition the work of my predecessor Archbishop (Eusebius J.) Beltran.”

The sainthood cause for Father Rother was officially opened in 2007.

Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda, author of a 2015 biography of the priest, “The Shepherd Who Didn’t Run: Fr. Stanley Rother, Martyr from Oklahoma,” wrote in an e-mail that the martyrdom recognition was “an incredible gift not only to the United States, but to the universal Church.”

“I am delighted and grateful that more people will come to know and be changed by his beautiful story,” Scaperlanda said. “Not only because of his death as a martyr. But even more significantly, because his life and his priestly service remain a testament to the difference that one person can, and does, make.”

Catholic News Service contributed to this article.

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Twenty Arkansans attended a pilgrimage to Guatemala July 25-29 to observe the 35th anniversary of the death of Servant of God Father Stanley Rother.

Father Rother was a priest for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City where Bishop Anthony B. Taylor was ordained in 1980.

Bishop Taylor and 65 others visited Father Rother’s Santiago Atitlan parish July 28 to remember his death in 1981 at the hands of assailants. The country’s civil war lasted for 36 years until 1996.

The five-day pilgrimage included stops at the room where he was killed that is now a shrine and another shrine in the church where his heart is buried. Joining Bishop Taylor, who was the archdiocese’s episcopal delegate for Father Rother’s sainthood cause until he became bishop of Little Rock in 2008, were several of Father Rother’s family members, Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul S. Coakley and retired Archbishop Eusebius Beltran. Nineteen priests, deacons and seminarians from the Diocese of Little Rock also attended.

Father Stephen Bird, pastor of Epiphany of the Lord Church in Oklahoma City and worship and spiritual life director for the archdiocese, has visited Guatemala six times and coordinated the pilgrimage. Father Bird was awarded the Father Stanley Rother Faithful Shepherd Award this year to recognize his commitment to the spiritual lives of his parishioners.

“On July 28, the church was emptied and the benches were placed in the courtyard. In other years there were 800 to 1,000 people (inside the church),” he said. “But we guessed there were almost 3,000 people there in the plaza for the Mass. What that means is that the interest in Father Rother is growing. His death happened 35 years ago. Anyone 35 years old and younger wasn’t even alive. Most people really had no knowledge of Father Rother. They are learning about him from the older people in town.”

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor delivered this homily July 31 for the Arkansas Catholic Charismatic Conference.

Friday night I returned from a pilgrimage to Guatemala in which we commemorated the 35th anniversary of the death of Father Stanley Rother, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City who stayed with his flock and died for the faith during Guatemala’s civil war.

I presided at the vigil Mass on Wednesday of this week and the Gospel reading was, quite fittingly, the parables in which Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a treasure buried in a field and a pearl of great price, both of which are worth sacrificing everything to obtain.

In today’s Gospel of the rich fool — which happened to be the Gospel for my first Mass as a priest 36 years ago — we have the opposite scenario: a man who puts his trust in the things of this world. And here Jesus unpacks for us the difference between the true riches of the kingdom of God and the false riches of the kingdom of this world.

A fitting warning for all of us, especially a newly ordained priest and a message that has marked my ministry ever since. Today’s Gospel of the rich fool starts with the younger of two brothers complaining that the older brother refuses to give him his share of their inheritance. The elder brother would rather leave the inheritance undivided — such joint ownership was highly esteemed in those days. The younger brother has other ideas though, and so he appeals to Jesus. Jesus for his part however, refuses to give a decision, primarily because he considered the possession of property to be irrelevant to the message of the coming of the kingdom that he had come to proclaim — not evil, simply of no importance. What is important is our relationship with God — riches can affect that relationship, and it is this danger that Jesus is warning us about.

And so to make his point of how riches can harm our relationship with God, Jesus tells us the parable of the rich fool. There was a farmer whose land was so fertile that it produced more grain than his barns could hold. He became proud in his self-sufficiency and built even bigger silos for his grain and for all the riches he was able to buy with that grain. He felt more and more self-sufficient and saw himself as the self-made man — he got to where he was by his own hard work, rags to riches — he laid back plenty for a good retirement, looking forward to many years of the “good life” — eating, drinking, being merry.

Jesus calls this man a “fool,” why? He sounds to me like a responsible provider for his family, a man in control of his destiny. Why does Jesus call this man a fool? The reason this man is a fool is that he let the very riches that God had given him separate him from God. In his feelings of self-sufficiency, he counts his prosperity to be the result of his own hard work — in practice he denies God’s existence. In his planning for his future retirement, the “good life” that he thought lay before him, he forgot to take God — and those whom he could use his riches to help — into account and this blindness was due to the fact that he had made himself (not God or the needs of his neighbor) but himself the measure of all things.

There is an old proverb that said that “money is like sea-water, the more a person drinks, the thirstier he becomes.” So long as a person centers his life on his own struggles for self-sufficiency and forgets those in need and the God who has made all this possible, his desire will always be to get more. This attitude, against which we all have to struggle, is the very reverse of Christianity.

And this is why the witness of Father Rother is so powerful to me. He was a priest of my home Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, and I met him only once when I was less than a year ordained and only two months before his death, but my life has been intertwined with his ever since. He had served our mission parish in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, for 13 years and remained there during their darkest days. He said the shepherd cannot run when the wolf threatens the flock. In time, 16 of his catechists and around 300 of his parishioners were killed by paramilitary death squads sponsored by the Guatemalan military and he knew that they might well come for him too, but he remained and died a brutal death.

His funeral in Oklahoma City fell on Aug. 3, which was coincidentally the first anniversary of my first Mass. And then a few months later I received into my rectory at Sacred Heart Parish in Oklahoma City the only eyewitness to the events of Father Rother’s death. He stayed with me until I found a family in the parish with whom he could live. Oklahoma City continued to staff the parish there after his death and I visited the parish there three times in the 1980s. Later I was put in charge of his cause of canonization and interviewed many people in Guatemala regarding his life starting in 2007.

I would be happy to share with you his whole story, but it would be far too long for a homily even for charismatics who say they like long homilies. But suffice it to say that from all of this, I think I know  Father Rother pretty well, and I can tell you that, using the images in today’s Gospel compared to last Wednesday’s Gospel, Father Rother was no rich fool. Instead, he found his treasure buried in a field by Lake Atitlán and he sold everything he had to buy that field. He had been searching for a fine pearl and when he found it here in Guatemala; he gave everything he had in order to acquire it. Jesus was that great treasure and it was in the Jesus that he encountered in Guatemala that he found his role in God’s plan. He gave his heart to Jesus and to the people entrusted to his care and they gave their hearts to him. 

And this is how it must be for any of us who truly wants to share the life of the kingdom of God regarding which Jesus makes two points: 1) the kingdom is greater than we could possibly imagine — a treasure worth everything we have, a pearl worth sacrificing everything to acquire, everything that rich fool was stockpiling in his barns, and 2) to share in this kingdom, we have to respond with all our heart and soul, with everything we have and are.

For Father Rother this meant leaving his family and friends, everything that was familiar and coming to Guatemala. In Father Rother’s mind, his parishioners were a treasure worth dying for. Which is another way of saying that for him, Jesus — the kingdom of God — was a treasure worth dying for. As it also should be for us even though for you and me this may mean something else. The sacrificial love with which I try to live my vocation as a priest and bishop, the sacrificial love with which you try to live your vocation as parents raising children — and some of you grandparents raising children — the sacrificial love with which young people consider what role God has for them in his plan. But in every case it means entering into a deep relationship with Jesus and finding in him, and in the kingdom he came to establish, the greatest treasure in our life. And then placing ourselves fully into his hands.

Thirty five years ago the Church was enduring severe persecution. More than a dozen priests were killed in Guatemala, many by death squads like Father Rother, as were hundreds of catechists and thousands of simple people who were innocent victims of the violence of those days. At that time there were those who sought to find treasure in the bloody field of war against the government and others in the bloody field of military repression and even genocide, but there was no treasure to be found in those fields, only hatred, fear and destruction. The only treasure available is in the field of justice and peace, in the field of respect and mercy, in the field of forgiveness, reconciliation and — if necessary — non-violent resistance to evil.

In other words, the only treasure available is in the field of the kingdom of God, for which Father Rother gave his life. This kingdom is greater than we could possibly imagine and certainly greater than any human government even under the best of circumstances. And it is a treasure that — like Father Rother — we too must be willing to sacrifice everything to acquire.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis has approved a miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Teresa of Kolkata, thus paving the way for her canonization.

Pope Francis signed the decree for Blessed Teresa's cause and advanced three other sainthood causes Dec. 17, the Vatican announced.

Although the date for the canonization ceremony will be officially announced during the next consistory of cardinals in February, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Vatican office organizing the Holy Year of Mercy events, had said it would be Sept. 4. That date celebrates the Jubilee of workers and volunteers of mercy and comes the day before the 19th anniversary of her death, Sept. 5, 1997.

The postulator for her sainthood cause, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, said the second miracle that was approved involved the healing of a now 42-year-old mechanical engineer in Santos, Brazil.

Doctors diagnosed the man with a viral brain infection that resulted in multiple brain abscesses, the priest said in a statement published Dec. 18 by AsiaNews, the Rome-based missionary news agency. Treatments given were ineffective and the man went into a coma, the postulator wrote.

The then-newly married man's wife had spent months praying to Blessed Teresa and her prayers were joined by those of her relatives and friends when her dying husband was taken to the operating room Dec. 9, 2008.

When the surgeon entered the operating room, he reported that he found the patient awake, free of pain and asking, "What am I doing here?" Doctors reported the man showed no more symptoms and a Vatican medical commission voted unanimously in September 2015 that the healing was inexplicable.

St. John Paul II had made an exception to the usual canonization process in Mother Teresa's case by allowing her sainthood cause to be opened without waiting the usual five years after a candidate's death. He beatified her in 2003. 

The order she started — the Missionaries of Charity — continues its outreach to the "poorest of the poor."

Among the other decrees approved Dec. 17, the pope recognized the heroic virtues of Comboni Father Giuseppe Ambrosoli, an Italian surgeon, priest and missionary who dedicated his life to caring for people in Uganda, where he also founded a hospital and midwifery school before his death in 1987. His father ran the highly successful Ambrosoli honey company. 

The pope also recognized the heroic virtues of De La Salle Brother Leonardo Lanzuela Martinez of Spain (1894-1976) and Heinrich Hahn, a German surgeon.

Born in 1800, the lay Catholic doctor was the father of 10 children and dedicated much of his activity to providing medical care to the poor. He was also involved in public service, even serving in the German parliament. He founded the St. Francis Xavier Mission Society in Germany and the "Giuseppino" Institute for those suffering from incurable illnesses. He died in 1882.