Feast day of St. Paul VI added to Church’s universal calendar

Having considered the holiness of St. Paul VI and the influence of his ministry for the church worldwide, Francis has approved putting the on the Church’s universal calendar of feast days as an optional — not obligatory — memorial.

The celebration of the late pope is May 29 on the General Roman Calendar, the universal schedule of holy days and feast days for the Latin rite of the .

On Feb. 6, the Vatican published the decree, issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments.

Pope Francis, who canonized Paul VI in October 2018, approved the optional memorial in light of “the petitions and desires of the people of God,” said the decree, signed by Cardinal Robert Sarah and Archbishop Arthur Roche, the congregation’s prefect and secretary, respectively.

It said “considered this pope’s holiness of life, witnessed to by his works and words” and took into account “the great influence of his apostolic ministry for the church throughout the whole world.”

The new memorial “will be inserted into all calendars and liturgical books for the celebration of the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours; the liturgical texts to be adopted,” it said, “must be translated, approved and, after the confirmation of this dicastery, be published by the episcopal conferences.”

Cardinal Sarah said in a commentary that making the decree took into account “both the universal importance of his actions and the example of holiness given to the people of God.”

He said the feast day is the anniversary of the date of St. Paul’s priestly ordination in 1920, given that the date of his death, Aug. 6, is the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord

New ‘risked everything’ for love of Christ, Pope says

Carrying Pope Paul VI’s pastoral staff and wearing the blood-stained belt of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, Pope Francis formally recognized them, and five others, as saints of the Catholic Church.

Thousands of pilgrims from the new saints’ home countries — , El Salvador, Spain and Germany — were joined by tens of thousands of others Oct. 14 in St. Peter’s Square to celebrate the universal recognition of the holiness of men and women they already knew were saints.

Carolina Escamilla, who traveled from San Salvador for , said she was “super happy” to be in . “I don’t think there are words to describe all that we feel after such a long-awaited and long-desired moment like the ‘official’ canonization, because Archbishop Romero was already a saint when he was alive.”

Each of the new saints lived lives marked by pain and criticism — including from within the church — but all of them dedicated themselves with passionate love to following and caring for the weak and the poor, Pope Francis said in his homily.

The new saints are: Paul VI, who led the last sessions of the Second Vatican Council and its initial implementation; Romero, who defended the poor, called for justice and was assassinated in 1980; Vincenzo Romano, an Italian priest who died in 1831; Nazaria Ignacia March Mesa, a Spanish nun who ministered in Mexico and Bolivia and died in 1943; Catherine Kasper, the 19th-century German founder of a religious order; Francesco Spinelli, a 19th-century priest and founder of a religious order; and Nunzio Sulprizio, a layman who died in in 1836 at the age of 19.

“All these saints, in different contexts,” put the Gospel “into practice in their lives, without lukewarmness, without calculation, with the passion to risk everything and to leave it all behind,” Pope Francis said in his homily. A group from Archbishop Oscar Romero High School in Edmonton, led by Father Marc Cramer, right, celebrates after witnessing the martyred Salvadoran archbishop's canonization on Oct. 14 at the Vatican.Courtesy Father Marc Cramer

The pope, who has spoken often about being personally inspired by both St. Paul VI and St. Oscar Romero, prayed that every Christian would follow the new saints’ examples by shunning an attachment to money, wealth and power, and instead following Jesus and sharing his love with others. And he prayed the new saints would inspire the whole church to set aside “structures that are no longer adequate for proclaiming the Gospel, those weights that slow down our mission, the strings that tie us to the world.”

Among those in St. Peter’s Square for the Mass was Rossi Bonilla, a Salvadoran now living in Barcelona. “I’m really emotional, also because I did my Communion with Romero when I was eight years old,” she told Catholic News Service.

“He was so important for the neediest; he was really with the people and kept strong when the repression started,” Bonilla said. “The struggle continues for the people, and so here we are!”

Claudia Lombardi, 24, came to the canonization from Brescia, Italy — St. Paul VI’s hometown.

Her local saint, she said, “brought great fresh air” to the church with the Second Vatican Council and “has something to say to us today,” particularly with his 1968 encyclical “” on human life and married love, especially its teaching about “the conception of life, the protection of life always.”

In his homily, Pope Francis said that “Jesus is radical.” “He gives all and he asks all; he gives a love that is total and asks for an undivided heart,” the pope said. “Even today he gives himself to us as the living bread; can we give him crumbs in exchange?”

Jesus, he said, “is not content with a ‘percentage of love.’ We cannot love him 20 or 50 or 60 percent. It is either all or nothing” because “our heart is like a magnet — it lets itself be attracted by love, but it can cling to one master only and it must choose: either it will love God or it will love the world’s treasure; either it will live for love or it will live for itself.”

“A leap forward in love,” he said, is what would enable individual Christians and the whole church to escape “complacency and self-indulgence.”

Without passionate love, he said, “we find joy in some fleeting pleasure, we close ourselves off in useless gossip, we settle into the monotony of a Christian life without momentum where a little narcissism covers over the sadness of remaining unfulfilled.”

The day’s Gospel reading recounted the story of the rich young man who said he followed all the commandments and precepts of Jewish law, but he asks Jesus what more he must do to have eternal life.

“Jesus’ answer catches him off guard,” the pope said. “The Lord looks upon him and loves him. Jesus changes the perspective from commandments observed in order to obtain a reward, to a free and total love.”

In effect, he said, Jesus is telling the young man that not doing evil is not enough, nor is it enough to give a little charity or say a few prayers. Following Jesus means giving him absolute first place in one’s life. “He asks you to leave behind what weighs down your heart, to empty yourself of goods in order to make room for him, the only good.”

“Do we content ourselves with a few commandments or do we follow Jesus as lovers, really prepared to leave behind something for him?” the pope asked people gathered in St. Peter’s Square, including the 267 members of the Synod of Bishops and the 34 young people who are observers at the gathering.

“A heart unburdened by possessions, that freely loves the Lord, always spreads joy, that joy for which there is so much need today,” Pope Francis said. “Today Jesus invites us to return to the source of joy, which is the encounter with him, the courageous choice to risk everything to follow him, the satisfaction of leaving something behind in order to embrace his way.” Canadian bishops stoked birth-control controversy that continues today

Canada’s bishops have released a statement on Humanae Vitae, but controversy began long before Pope Paul VI issued his controversial encyclical.

Humane Vitae was released 50 years ago, on July 29, 1968, at a time when the pill had become commonplace and expectations were high that the Church would relax its teaching on contraception. Instead, Humane Vitae reaffirmed the Church’s teaching on married and family life and rejected artificial contraception.

The encyclical was greeted with protests and petitions across the Catholic world. In Canada, the national bishops conference held their annual plenary meeting that September and, in an attempt to maintain unity in the Canadian Church, issued what became known as the Winnipeg Statement.

But rather than calm the situation, the statement inflamed tensions with some claiming it opposed the Pope by proposing that a decision to use artificial contraception within a marriage is a matter of conscience.

In truth, though, the Canadian discussion had begun much earlier. In 1943, Canada’s greatest and most studied theologian, Jesuit Father Bernard Lonergan, wrote an essay titled, Finality, Love, Marriage.

Lonergan questioned the Catholic tendency to limit the conversation about marriage, sex and morality to the issue of procreation. Procreation and education of children are essential, but sex is also about a married couple’s progress in perfection and holiness — and that is what married life is really about for Christians, said Lonergan.

Lonergan’s essay was not controversial. He believed it was wrong to reduce people’s deepest striving and yearning for the divine to black and white rulings that drew a line between who is in the Church and who isn’t.

Twenty years later, the Second Vatican Council – which addressed the Church in the modern world – seemed to agree with him. But then Blessed Pope Paul VI issued Humane Vitae, which clearly ruled artificial contraception is “intrinsically wrong.”

“Each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life,” he wrote — contrary to the majority opinion of a commission struck by Pope John XXIII to scientifically, theologically and pastorally research the subject, and in spite of the opinion of a majority of bishops who responded to Pope Paul’s own request for advice. Doug Roche

As the Pope was writing his best-remembered encyclical, former Canadian Senator Doug Roche — then a journalist working for the Western Catholic Reporter — was writing a book on the great council of 1962 to 1965 called The Catholic Revolution. The encyclical forced Roche to add an afterword to his book, which said:

“The repercussions of Humanae Vitae will be enormous; millions of parents will disregard the Pope’s teaching and lose interest in the changing Church; the defection of priests who find it impossible to pass on this key moral teaching will increase; ecumenical progress will be seriously retarded; collegiality will be scoffed at, since the bishops obviously were excluded from the decision-making; and, worst of all, youth around the world will feel confirmed in their quick judgments that the Church is not relevant to the problems of modern man.”

Roche’s sense of trouble was at least in part shared by Canada’s bishops. As they met in Winnipeg two months after Humanae Vitae was published, newspapers were full of derision. The bishops felt they had to say something.

“What we were trying to achieve was that confessors and other guides of morality would assure those who could not live up to this high ideal that the Church was not excommunicating them, not pushing them away,” Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter said years later.

“It was meant as pastoral guidance, not at any time as dissent from the Holy Father.” Pope Paul received the Canadian bishops’ statement “with satisfaction.”

But for years partisans on the side of Humanae Vitae treated the Winnipeg Statement as dissent and blamed former Second Vatican Council theological expert Father Gregory Baum for somehow leading Canada’s bishops astray.

The truth is that Carter, then bishop of London, Ont., wrote the Winnipeg Statement. He leaned particularly on the pastoral advice and theological acumen of Toronto’s Archbishop Philip Pocock.

“It was all based on Pocock’s theological interpretation of (German theologian) Bernard Haring,” Pocock’s official biographer and principal of Vancouver’s St. Mark’s College Peter Meehan told The Catholic Register.

However much Pocock and Carter may have wished to avoid Humanae Vitae becoming a sword of division among Catholics, that’s exactly what it became, said Meehan.

“It just became one of those things that just changed the way people viewed their faith,” he said. “That was what the bishops were trying to avoid with the pastoral directive in the first place.”

The bishops cautioned that the Winnipeg Statement was provisional and they would publish a more fulsome guide. Over the years, there have been several, starting with a 1973 essay On the Formation of Conscience.

Eventually the bishops decided documents weren’t enough and founded Family Action in 1983, which became the Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF) in 1995.

Michel MacDonald

COLF executive director Michel MacDonald is up front about Catholic division over Humanae Vitae. “Let’s be realistic. There are people who don’t accept the teaching. I think maybe the bigger point is maybe a lot of people don’t know the teaching,” he said.

A graduate of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C., MacDonald is the father of seven.

“When it came out it was framed in terms of a big ‘no’,” MacDonald said. “I always like to sort of frame it as a yes — a yes to life, a yes to really living life fully, a life that Christ calls us to in imitation of God who is love and life.”

MacDonald argues, along with many others, that Humanae Vitae was prophetic in its embrace of an integrated, natural sexuality in marriage.

“It talks about responsible parenthood and that persons can have recourse to the natural fertility cycle, which unfortunately today, I think, many doctors don’t know about,” he said.

Humanae Vitae goes deeper than the good-Catholic-versus-bad-Catholic debate that has dominated for 50 years, Montreal Archbishop Christian Lepine told a COLF conference marking Humanae Vitae’s anniversary.

“It’s about the nature of things,” he said. “There is a nature of things, a nature of marriage, a nature of human beings. When I do something as a human being that goes against nature, I will never be happy because I don’t live according to how I am made.”

Meehan argues that the pastoral approach of the Winnipeg Statement was ahead of its time — a foreshadowing of Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia and the Year of Mercy.

“We’ve spent a lot of time wagging moral fingers of judgment at people for doing things that have basically — without maybe intending to, but we basically told them they’re out. They’re out of the Church because they’ve done those things,” Meehan said.

“And I think that’s what the (Canadian) bishops were trying to avoid. If you understand what your informed moral conscience is all about, then you’re never out.” Pope will add Italian teen to list of new saints this fall

Pope Francis added an Italian teenager to the list of people he will formally recognize as saints Oct. 14 during the monthlong meeting of the world Synod of Bishops on young people.

During an “ordinary public consistory” July 19, Pope Francis announced he would declare Blessed Nunzio Sulprizio a saint the same day he will canonize Blesseds Oscar Romero, Paul VI and four others. Blessed Romero is the namesake of a high school in west Edmonton.

An ordinary public consistory is a meeting of the pope, cardinals and promoters of sainthood causes that formally ends the sainthood process.

Sulprizio was born April 13, 1817, in the Abruzzo region near . Both of his parents died when he was an infant and his maternal grandmother, who raised him, died when he was nine.

An uncle took him under his guardianship and had the young boy work for him in his blacksmith shop. However, the work was too strenuous for a boy his age and he developed a problem in his leg, which became gangrenous.

A military colonel took care of Sulprizio, who was eventually hospitalized in Naples. The young teen faced tremendous pain with patience and serenity and offered up his sufferings to God.

He died in Naples in 1836 at the age of 19. He was declared blessed in 1963 by Blessed Paul VI, who will be canonized together with the teen.

During the ceremony, Blessed Paul had said, “Nunzio Sulprizio will tell you that the period of youth should not be considered the age of free passions, of inevitable falls, of invincible crises, of decadent pessimism, of harmful selfishness. Rather, he will rather tell you how being young is a grace.”

Together with Blesseds Paul and Romero, Sulprizio will be canonized along with: Father Francesco Spinelli of Italy, founder of the Sisters Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament; Father Vincenzo Romano, who worked with the poor of Naples, Italy, until his death in 1831; Mother Catherine Kasper, the German founder of the religious congregation, the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ; and Nazaria Ignacia March Mesa, the Spanish founder of the Congregation of the Missionary Crusaders of the Church. The Oct. 14 date for the had already been announced during an ordinary public consistory in mid-May.

Fifty years later, Pope’s birth control predictions still controversial – and true

It’s been 50 years since Pope Paul VI released Humanae Vitae, his controversial encyclical.

A reaffirmation of the Church’s opposition to artificial contraception, experts say the Pope’s predictions on the consequences of artificial contraception on society have turned out to be correct.

“I think Blessed Pope Paul VI was very accurate in terms of the general lowering of morality, (with) the mainstreaming of contraception from governments. I think the predictions have come true,” said Monsignor Brian Bransfield, general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“So I think it’s exceedingly relevant to say that procreation and unity are at the centre of married love.”

Bransfield, an author and professor of moral theology, was the featured speaker at the 2018 Catholic Family Life Conference in Lac Ste. Anne June 29-July 2. Pope Paul VI

Humanae Vitae — meaning “Of Human Life” — was published in 1968 in response to a Vatican study, which argued that the Church should allow couples to use artificial contraception.

The Church and Humanae Vitae taught that artificial contraception violates God’s intended purpose for sex, which strengthens the family by uniting the husband and wife and allowing them to have the gift of children. Pope Paul VI notably predicted that the using contraceptives would lead to increased marital infidelity, lower moral standards in society and even lead to dehumanizing women.

In response to contraception and its consequences, Bransfield said the Church offers an alternative and more attractive perspective to human sexuality.

“With human sexuality, we always teach that with the dignity and worth of the person, a person can never be treated as an object,” said Bransfield. “People are a gift and must be treated with reverence and dignity.”

Humanae Vitae was immediately met with controversy by Catholics upon release, as most Christian denominations already allowed the use of artificial contraception by 1968.

Many rejected the Church’s teaching in 1968, and continue to do so today. In Canada, an estimated three-quarters of women have used an oral contraceptive — also known as ‘the pill’ — at least once during their life, according to Statistics Canada.

Prof. Paul Flaman Paul Flaman, a professor of human sexuality and bioethics at St. ’s College, says Humanae Vitae does allow a way to regulate births — through .

There are several versions of natural family planning, but all involve becoming familiar with the woman’s fertility cycle, so that the couple can regulate births and understand each other’s bodies.

“Some people consider the Church’s moral teaching archaic,” said Flaman. (But) there are no health risks added with the use of natural family planning.”

Not only does this help regulate births, Flaman said, it also encourages communication between spouses.

Flaman noted that many of his students in his human sexuality classes tell him they have tried contraception and premarital sex, but the experience didn’t lead to happiness.

“They’re open minded. They want to look and ask ‘What does the Church have to offer?’”

Monsignor Bransfield said it’s essential that Catholics learn about Humanae Vitae, since its teachings are grounded in respect for the human person, created by God “with dignity and worth.

“A person can’t be used as an object, so the teaching of the Church is very clear on the dignity and high-calling of the human person, and I think that’s relevant for every age.”

Fifty years later, birth-control predictions even ‘crazier than he thought’

Humanae Vitae’s predictions of contraception’s effects proved far worse than Pope Paul VI prophetic vision said speakers at an event marking the document’s 50th anniversary.

“Pope Paul VI got a lot of things right, but it’s gotten crazier than he thought,” said Professor Janet E. Smith, author of Humanae Vitae: a Generation Later; and editor of Why Humanae Vitae was Right: a Reader. The encyclical “more or less hit the world and the Church as a kind of explosive,” said Smith. “The Church has never been the same since 1968.”

It had a “profound effect” because it ignited dissent within the Church because the Pope did not, as expected, endorse the birth control pill, Smith told the Catholic Organization for Life and Family’s (COLF) conference on The Joy of Marriage: Embracing God’s Vision. Humanae Vitae at 50 May 31-June 1.

When the pill was invented, it was expected to ensure sexual freedom, advance happiness, make for fewer unplanned pregnancies, fewer and control overpopulation, a big fear at the time, said Smith.

It would result in happier marriages because couples could have sex without fear of pregnancy.

“Contraception has not done that,” Smith said. “It has done the opposite.” “I don’t think the expectations were unrealistic,” she said. “But if you want to control fertility, it has to be done morally.”

Pope Paul VI

Pope Paul VI, who will be canonized a saint in late October, made several predictions about the effects of contraception, among them: the general lowering of morality; and lessening of respect for women, said Smith. “Whoever thought we would have the scourge of pornography we have today.”

“He predicted coercive control by governments over sexuality,” she said. Since then, we have seen the one child policy in China, and forced sterilizations in others, where doctors sterilize women without their knowledge or consent because their government forces them to meet quotas.

“He predicted we would treat our bodies would become machines,” she said, noting the rise of reproductive technologies and infertility treatments.

“One of the biggest demands for reproductive technologies comes from same-sex couples,” she said.

No one even 25 years ago predicted same sex ‘marriage’ or the transgender phenomenon.

The contraceptive pill has been “bad for male female relationships,” and has greatly changed the relationship, she said.

Tests have shown men are more attracted to women with fertile cycles because of the hormones they give off. Women on hormone pills that trick the body into thinking it is pregnant are attracted to a different type of man when her fertility is suppressed.

In a test where men were divided between more aggressive males likely to be successful, and “losers” who were more like “couch potatoes,” women were more likely to choose aggressive men when fertile, she said. “Contracepting females chose the losers.”

Pope Paul VI also had no idea about the higher incidence of breast cancer among women using hormonal contraception, she said.

It’s bad for the health of women and it facilitates sex outside of marriage, she said. It also contributes to poverty and social breakdown. In Detroit, where she teaches at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, 80 per cent of babies are born outside of wedlock, she said.

For the United States as a whole, the rate is 42 per cent. Children raised by single moms, living on welfare, “on the edge, really impoverished” is a “national disaster,” she said.

One out of five Americans is said to have an incurable sexually transmitted disease, she said. “Contraception causes and leads to , because many forms of contraception are abortifacients.”

The pill contributes to divorce, she said, noting the divorce rate doubled between 1960 and 1975.

Though people had sex before marriage prior to the pill, they had less, and they “knew having sex led to babies and babies needed married partners,” she said. “Now people have multiple sexual partners before marriage. They don’t make good choices and they don’t work on establishing a relationship before marriage.”

Hormonal contraception is also harmful to the environment, she said. The hormones a woman puts into her body are secreted into the water supply.

“Fish can change gender because of hormones in water,” she said, noting that a study showed fish upstream of a sewage treatment plant in Boulder, Colorado were 50/50 male and female, but below the plant, females made up 80 per cent fish population.

“Whole fish populations are dying out,” she said. “Male fertility is being harmed.”

Separating sex from its procreative function “paves the way for same sex unions,” she said. “Once you say sex doesn’t have anything to do with procreation, but only about expressing physical desire for another person, why not same sex or multiple partners?”

Patrick Coffin

“The document turns 50 this year, but the truth doesn’t turn 50,” said Patrick Coffin, author of The Contraception Deception, radio host and founder and CEO of Patrick Coffin media.

Contraception means to go against the beginning, “a desire, an action to go against the beginning of human life,” Coffin said. “Contraception is the theory. Abortion is the practice.”

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council ended. The Council Fathers made an effect to return to the Sources of Christian revelation, the Church Fathers and Sacred Scripture to “make the teachings of the Church relevant,” he said.

As the Church updated, and “recalibrated its relationship with the world, Catholics began recalibrating their relationship with the Church,” he said, noting many priests and nuns left their vows at this time and many Catholics began picking and choosing what beliefs they would hold. In 1968, the so-called “Summer of Love,” we “began to see the beast of our culture unleased,” Coffin said, describing this false god as “the non- procreative orgasm.”

“Women always were the guinea pigs,” he said. “The birth control pill worked out really well for men because it enabled them to be beasts.”

“In this anti-authoritarian milieu, Humanae Vitae dropped into the height of the summer of 1968,” he said.

“If you believe that love and life go together in the marital act, all of opinions you have will be forged in one direction,” Coffin said. “If you believe they are uncoupled, the dominoes are going to fall in another direction in your life.”

“The teaching of Humanae Vitae is almost a perfect litmus test for Catholic orthodoxy in other areas,” Coffin said. “I never met a gay activist who believes in Humanae Vitae.”

The document of 31 paragraphs, in a “gentle, fatherly tone,” says that “true romance has to be human, faithful, fruitful and total,” he said.

“The world wants to tell us that unplanned pregnancies happen because of broken condoms, or the pill was forgotten, or an IUD malfunctioned,” Coffin said. “Pregnancy happens because of sexual intercourse.”

He objected to the language of “protection” in contraception, because “in sex, I’m protecting myself against a little innocent baby.”

Each country that liberalized contraception had to have their abortion law adjusted because of the “increased pool of people willing to have this ‘protected sex,’” Coffin said.

“The answer to the abortion scourge is not better contraception, it’s no contraception,” he said.

Smith pointed out all Christian churches opposed contraception until the Anglican Lambeth Conference permitted it under rare circumstances in 1930. Catholics were well-catechized in the teachings on contraception until after Vatican II. You could tell Catholics “by the size of their families”, she said.

Archbishop Romero among those moving closer to sainthood

Pope Francis has cleared the way for the canonizations of Blesseds Paul VI and Oscar Romero.

At a meeting March 6 with Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, Pope Francis signed decrees for the causes of 13 men and women — among them a pope, an archbishop, two young laywomen and a number of priests and nuns.

He recognized a miracle attributed to Blessed Paul, who, according Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, will be declared a saint in late October at the end of the Synod of Bishops on youth and discernment. Blessed Paul, who was born Giovanni Battista Montini, was pope from 1963 to 1978.

Pope Francis also formally signed the decree recognizing the miracle needed to advance the sainthood cause of Archbishop Romero of San Salvador.

El Salvador’s ambassador to the Holy See, Manuel Roberto Lopez, told Catholic News Service March 7 that the news of the pope’s approval “took us by surprise.”

“They told us before that the process was going well and that all we needed was the approval of the miracle, and it turns out the pope approved it yesterday,” he said.

Lopez told CNS that he was happy that Blessed Oscar Romero’s canonization was imminent and that his holiness was recognized alongside one of his earliest supporters.

“To see that he will be canonized along with (Blessed) Paul VI, who was a great friend of Archbishop Romero and supported his work, is a great blessing,” Lopez said.

The Vatican did not announce a date for Blessed Romero’s canonization.

Blessed Romero’s namesake high school is located in west Edmonton.

The pope also recognized the miracles needed for the canonization of: Father Francesco Spinelli of Italy, founder of the Sisters Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament; Father Vincenzo Romano of Italy; and Mother Maria Katharina Kasper, founder of the religious congregation, the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ.

He recognized the miracle needed for the of Maria Felicia Guggiari Echeverria, a Discalced Carmelite from Paraguay whom Pope Francis has upheld as a model for the youth of Paraguay. Affectionately called, “Chiquitunga,” she died from an unexpected illness in 1959 at the age of 34 before she could make her final vows.

The pope also recognized the martyrdom of a 16-year-old laywoman from Slovakia. Anna Kolesarova, who lived from 1928 to 1944 in the eastern town of Pavlovce, was murdered during Slovakia’s occupation by the Soviet army in World War II after refusing sexual favors to a Russian soldier.

In causes just beginning their way toward sainthood, the pope signed decrees recognizing the heroic virtues of Polish Redemptorist Father Bernard Lubienski, who entered the congregation in England and then returned to Poland to re-found the Redemptorists there in the 20th century, and Sandra Sabattini, a young Italian lay woman who was active in helping the poor with the Pope John XXIII Community. She was hit by a car and died in 1984 at the age of 22.

The pope also recognized the heroic virtues of Antonio Pietro Cortinovis of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin (1885-1984) and three Italian women — two who founded religious orders and a laywoman who founded a lay fraternity.