By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi, August 7, 2022: Pope Francis has raised five Servants of God, including an Indian mystic nun, to the status of Venerable, the second stage in the canonization process.
The Pope on August 5 recognized the martyrdom of a Ukranian priest and approved him for beatification, one step of ahead of being declared as a saint.
The Indian mystic nun is Sister Maria Celina Kannanaikal, a member of the Ursulines of Mary Immaculate congregation. She was persecuted within her congregation during the novitiate because of mystical experiences that created doubts in the superiors and upset the novices.
Kananaikil’s holiness was recognized, but many suggested that she not be admitted her to profession. After a six-month extension of the novitiate – beyond the canonical two years – she was admitted to her first religious profession on June 20, 1957.
Soon after her profession, she became seriously ill with frequent febrile episodes, headaches and vomiting with traces of blood. No one was able to make a definite diagnosis.
She died in 1957 at the age of 26, just 35 days after her religious profession in the congregation’s then headquarters in Cannanore (now Kannur), a town in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
She was born February 13, 1931 at Kundanoor in Kerala’s Trichur diocese, as the second of seven children of Philomina and Francis Kannanaikal. She had four brothers, including Father Jose Kannanaikal, a member of the Patna Jesuit province, and one sister.
She taught in two primary schools, including one in Koorachund village in Kozhikode district, before joining the congregation on June 24, 1954.
She entered the novitiate on December 26, 1954.
As a novice, she suffered extraordinary trials and tribulations causing untold physical pain and mental anguish. Novitiate directress Mother Stefania Murelli helped her endure the suffering. She was favored with visions and ecstasies. Jesus and the Little Flower appeared to her many times and asked her to pray for sinners.
The congregation’s records show that she had total abandonment of her will to God, utterly depending on God and submission to His Will manifested through her superiors.
On her day of profession Jesus appeared to her and told her that He would come soon to take her to heaven with Him. Sister
She was buried on July 26, 1957 in the cemetery at Cannanore. Many favors attributed to her prayers and intercession. The cause for her beatification was initiated on July 29, 2007. Her body was exhumed on February 29, 2012 and reburied in a new tomb in the chapel of the Mother House of at Payyambalam, a beach in Kannur.
Pope Francis also recognized the murder of Father Petro Paolo Oros in hatred of the faith of a priest from the Greek-Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, Ukraine, who was killed in 1953 in the Soviet Union, and authorizes the promulgation of decrees recognizing the heroic virtues of five new Venerables, including the director of “Radio Aparecida”, Vittorio Coelho de Almeida, and the founder of “Sorriso Francescano”, Capuchin Umile da Genova.
A few hours after celebrating a clandestine Divine Liturgy on August 28, 1953, he died when a pistol shot from the Soviet communists entered his chin, crossed his neck and exited his shoulder. He was a priest if the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, Ukraine.
He died in Siltse. The Pope recognized his martyrdom in the August 5 audience with the Cardinal Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Marcello Semeraro.
Father Oros will now be beatified.
He was born on July 14, 1917, in the Hungarian village of Biri. His father was a Greek Catholic priest and disappeared when Petro was 2 years old. At 9, he lost his mother. In 1937, he entered the seminary in Uzghorod, Transcarpathia, on the Ukrainian-Hungarian border.
On June 18, 1942, he was ordained a celibate priest of the Greek-Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, Ukraine, and began his pastoral service in a number of villages as vice-parish priest, immediately making himself known for his zeal and love for the poor.
In 1943, due to the war, he attended a course for military chaplains in Barca, near Košice, the capital of the region of the same name in Slovakia. He returned to his parish, which, in 1944, ended up, like the entire territory of Transcarpathia, under occupation by Soviet troops of the Red Army and united to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, then to the USSR.
With the forced annexation, the persecution of the Greek Catholic Church began. In 1946, Oros was transferred to Bilky, in the Irshava district, as a parish priest.
Even then, he received pressure to transfer to the Russian Orthodox Church. He resisted, remaining faithful to the Pope.
In 1949, pastoral activities were then forbidden and all Greek Catholic churches were closed. The Eparchy Mukachevo was also suppressed.
When, in 1949, the Greek Catholic Church was outlawed and personalities systematically eliminated, the servant of God continued to clandestinely carry out his ministry.
An arrest warrant against him was issued in 1953. He tried to escape, but on August 28 a policeman stopped him at the railway station in the village of Siltse and killed him. The priest’s body remained hidden until the break-up of the Soviet Union. His memory remained impressed on the faithful and endures to this day.
Others raised to the status of venerable are Jesús Antonio Gómez Gómez, a Colombian priest who was rector of colleges and professor of dogmatic theology. He was particularly dedicated to the confessions and spiritual direction of priests, seminarians, religious, nuns and also lay people. People called him ‘the lamp of the Blessed Sacrament’ for the many hours he spent in Adoration, even when ill.
Capuchin Father Umile da Genova, born Giovanni Giuseppe Bonzi, founded in the immediate post-war period of Sorriso Francescano, a place of assistance for poor, orphaned and abandoned children. For them, the priest went begging daily for the necessary money. He was also able to found the Congregation of the Little Handmaids of the Child Jesus Sisters.
The Pope acknowledged the heroic virtues of Father Giovanni Sánchez Hernández, a Spanish priest of the Sodality of the Diocesan Worker Priests of the Heart of Jesus, founder of the Institute of the Secular Servants of Jesus Christ the Priest, established with the aim of helping priests in their ministry.
Father Vittorio Coelho de Almeida, was a Brazilian Redemptorist who provided pastoral service at the Marian shrine of Aparecida, where he had been transferred while convalescing from tuberculosis. The period of his illness was an opportunity for him to become familiar with the medium of radio.
He joined the team of Radio Aparecida from the start of broadcasting in 1951, becoming deputy director in 1958 and general manager in ’65. Appreciated for his simplicity in communicating, he soon became famous and many people turned to him for advice and help. In 1969, Radio Aparecida’s broadcasts were suspended by order of the military regime, which deemed his 1 January speech commenting on the ‘Declaration of Human Rights’ subversive.
With inputs from Vatican News