Myanmar missionary to be proclaimed blessed

The beatification of John Paul II has rocked the whole world like a hurricane. “But there are also other exemplary witnesses of Christ, much less known, whom the Church joyfully points out for the veneration of the faithful”: this is what Benedict XVI said at the “Regina Cæli” two Sundays ago.

Humble, ordinary saints – including those who will never get a halo – are a key theme in the preaching of pope Joseph Ratzinger. For him, the saints are “the greatest apologia for our faith.” Together with art and music, he has often added; and much more than the arguments of reason.

Made by a pope who is a great theologian and thinker, this statement might come as a surprise. But it is perfectly in line with another of his characteristic traits: that of putting theology at the service of the “faith of the simple.”

The saints – Benedict XVI has said on various occasions – are the “great luminous trail on which God passed through history, we see that there truly is a force of good which resists the millennia; there truly is the light of light.”

One of these lights will be lit to wider attention on June 26, the day of the feast of Corpus Domini, when in Milan a priest will be beatified, Clemente Vismara, who died in 1988 at the age of 91, years spent to the last in missionary territory, in a remote corner of Burma.

His biography is the account of that ordinary sanctity which so pleases this pope who has called himself a “humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord.”

– Sandro Magister

FULL STORY

In the Jungle of Myanmar. The Story of a Missionary Proclaimed Blessed (www.chiesa)