14 new saints who will be canonized this weekend

Among the 14 people who will become new saints of the Catholic Church 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 a global novena to the Spirit Santo, and 11 men killed in Syria for refusing to renounce their faith and convert to Islam.

While not household names, the 14 future saints exemplified heroic virtue and bore witness to holiness within their unique vocations, including two married men—a father of eight children and a father of five, respectively—and three founders of religious orders that have generations of spiritual children who have continued their spiritual legacy throughout the world.

Pope Francis invited to all Catholics this week “to meet these new saints and ask for their intercession” in anticipation of the canonization in St. Peter’s Square on October 20.

“They are a clear testimony of the action of the Holy Spirit 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 convince Pope Leo XIII to exhort all Catholics to pray a novena to the Holy Spirit before Pentecost in 1895.

Guerra is the founder of the Oblates of the Holy Spirit, a congregation of nuns recognized by the Church in 1882 that continues today in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

Friend of Pope Leon XIII and teacher of Santa Gemma Galgani, Guerra is remembered for her spiritual writings and his passionate devotion to the Holy Spirit.

“Pentecost is not over,” Guerra wrote. “In fact, it is happening continuously at all times and in all places, because the Holy Spirit wanted to give himself to all men and everyone who wants it can always receive it, so we do not have to envy the apostles and the first believers. We just have to prepare 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 proved transformative for her as she dedicated herself to meditating on Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers. He felt the call to consecrate himself to God during a pilgrimage to Rome with his father after his recovery and went on to form the religious community dedicated to education.

During his correspondence with Pope Leo XIII, Guerra composed prayers to the Holy Spirit, including a Chaplet of the Holy Spirit, asking the Lord to send His Spirit “and renew the world.”

P. Giuseppe Allamano (1851-1926)

Blessed Giuseppe Allamano remained a diocesan priest in Italy all his life, but left a global legacy by founding two religious missionary orders, the Missionaries of the Consolata and the Missionary Sisters of the Consolata, who continued to spread the Gospel in Kenya, Ethiopia, Brazil , Taiwan, Mongolia and more than two dozen other countries.

Allamano told the priests of the order he founded in northern Italy in 1901 that they needed to be “first saints, then missionaries.”

“So, as missionaries, you must not only be holy, but extraordinarily holy. All other gifts are not enough to make a missionary! Holiness is needed, great holiness,” he said.

Allamano set the example by “combining a 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 above all a man of charity’, ‘destined to do the greatest possible good’, to sanctify others ‘by example and word’, with holiness and knowledge.”

He was deeply influenced by the spirituality of the Salesians and St. John Bosco, who was his spiritual director, as well as by the testimony of his holy uncle, St. Joseph Cafasso.

Allamano will be 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 living in the Amazon rainforest, was attacked by a jaguar in 1996, fracturing his skull. Due to his remote location, it was eight hours before he could be airlifted to a hospital. While he was receiving treatment in the intensive care unit, 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 without suffering long-term consequences from the attack, according to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

15 Consolata missionaries are bishops today, mainly in Africa and South America, including Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, Apostolic Prefect of Ulan Bataar (Mongolia).

More than 1,000 members of the Consolata orders are traveling to Rome for the canonization of their founder, Father James Lengarin, the order’s superior general, told CNA.

Madre 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 and support the religious of the Holy Cross in educational work, in 1880 in New Brunswick.

Before founding his religious order, Paradis also spent eight years in New York serving at St. Vincent de Paul’s orphanage in the 1860s, before moving to Indiana in 1870 to teach French and sewing 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 spirituality and charisma of the order It is the support to priests through intense and constant prayer, but also through taking care of the kitchen, in the laundry of the seminaries and rectories, in a “humble and joyful service” in imitation of “Christ the Servant.” who washed the feet of his disciples.

Today her sisters work in more than 200 educational and evangelization institutions in Canada, the United States, Italy, Brazil, Haiti, Chile, Honduras and Guatemala.

Pope John Paul II called Paradis the “humble among the humble” when he beatified her during his visit to Montreal in 1984, the first beatification to take place on Canadian soil.

“He was not afraid of the different forms of manual labor, which are the burden that falls on so many people today, while it was considered an honor in the Holy Family, in the very life of Jesus in Nazareth. There he saw God’s will for his life. With the sacrifices inherent to this work, but offered out of love, he knew deep joy and peace,” said John Paul II.

“I knew it was referring to the fundamental attitude of Christ, ‘that he did not come to be served, but to serve.’ She was completely impregnated with the greatness of the Eucharist: this is one of the secrets of her spiritual motivations,” he added.

The miracle attributed to Paradis’s intercession involved the healing of a newborn girl who suffered from “prolonged perinatal asphyxia with multiple 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 (d. 1860)

The Church will also gain 11 new martyred saints who were killed for refusing to renounce their Christian faith and convert to Islam. The “Martyrs of Damascus” They were murdered “out of hatred for the faith” in the Franciscan church of Saint 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 Father Engelbert Kolland, who was from Salzburg (Austria).

The other three are laymen who also died in the assault on the Franciscan church that night: Francis, Mooti and Raphael Massabki, all brothers from a Maronite Catholic family.

Francis Massabki, the eldest of the brothers, was the father of eight children. Mooti was a father of five children and visited St. Paul’s Church every day to pray and give catechism lessons. The younger brother, Rafael, was single and was known to spend long periods of time praying in church and helping the friars.

His martyrdom took place during the persecution of Christians by Muslims and Shiite Druze from Lebanon to Syria in 1860, which left thousands of victims.

Late at night, the extremists entered the Franciscan convent, located in the Christian neighborhood of Bab-Touma (Saint Paul) in the Old City of Damascus, and massacred the friars: Fr. Manuel Ruiz, Fr. 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 —-EWTN News Arabic news agency—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 that of his brothers would be spared on the condition that he denied his Christian faith and embraced Islam, to which Francis responded: “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.”

Then he looked at his two brothers and said to them: “Be brave and stand firm in the faith, for the crown of victory is prepared in heaven for those who persevere 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.”

Refusing to renounce their Christian faith and convert to Islam, the 11 martyrs of Damascus were brutally murdered, some beheaded with sabers and axes, others stabbed or beaten 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.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Prensa team. Originally published in CNA.