The New Saints and Blesseds of 2024

Fifteen new saints and sixteen new blesseds were honored in the two canonization ceremonies and eleven beatification ceremonies that took place in 2024. Then, a week before Christmas, sixteen Discalced Carmelite nuns were canonized through the relatively rare act of equivalent (equipollent) canonization.

A 2005 curial document notes that “canonization is the supreme glorification by the Church of a Servant of God raised to the honors of the altar with a decree declared definitive and preceptive for the whole Church, involving the solemn Magisterium of the Roman Pontiff.” Canonization is typically preceded by the papal approval of a miracle attributed to the saint’s intercession.

Beatification, the document continues, “consists in the concession of a public cult in the form of an indult and limited to a Servant of God whose virtues to a heroic degree, or martyrdom, have been duly recognized.” Beatification is thus typically preceded by (a) the papal recognition of martyrdom or (b) a decree of heroic virtues declaring the Servant of God “venerable,” followed by the papal approval of a miracle. The document notes that the liturgical cult of the blessed, according to the formula of beatification, is limited in locis ac modis iure statutis (“in places and modes established by law”).

St. María Antonia (Mama Antula)

On February 11, Pope Francis canonized St. Maria Antonia de San José (1730-1799), an Argentine woman colloquially known as Mama Antula. As noted in a previous CWR article, St. María Antonia was a beata: a consecrated woman who made private vows and lived in a beaterio (convent) whose direction was entrusted to priests of the Society of Jesus.

In 1767, King Charles III of Spain expelled the Jesuits from his empire. María Antonia spent the remaining decades of her life continuing the Jesuit apostolate of spiritual exercises. Walking thousands of miles across Argentina and Uruguay, she organized retreats preached by non-Jesuit priests. She eventually settled in Buenos Aires, where she founded a community of consecrated women now known as the Hijas del Divino Salvador (Daughters of the Divine Savior).

María Antonia was declared venerable in 2010 and beatified in 2016. The miracle attributed to her intercession prior to her canonization was “the rapid, complete and lasting healing of a sixty-year-old father of a family, from ischemic stroke with hemorrhagic infarction in several areas, sepsis, deep coma, and resistant septic shock with multiple organ failure, in July 2017.”

During the canonization Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica (video), Pope Francis preached that St. María Antonia was a “‘wayfarer’ of the Spirit. She travelled thousands of kilometers on foot, crossing deserts and dangerous roads, in order to bring God to others. She is a model of fervor and apostolic courage. When the Jesuits were expelled, the Spirit ignited in her a missionary fire grounded on trust in Providence and perseverance.”

Blessed Giuseppe Rossi

Father Giuseppe Rossi (1912-1945), a priest of the Diocese of Novara, Italy, was beatified as a martyr in Novara Cathedral on May 26 (video).

Rossi was born in Varallo Pombia, a small town in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy. Ordained a priest in 1935, he was named pastor of the parish in the hamlet of Calasca Castiglione the following year.

Following the fall of the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1943, Nazi troops invaded northern Italy and installed Mussolini as the head of the puppet Republic of Salò, or Italian Social Republic (map). There, the Fascist Black Brigades battled against the resistance movement of Italian partisans who opposed Nazi and Fascist rule.

As a parish priest, Father Rossi “did not take a position on politics but, although he was aware of the danger he was running, he tried to give himself with the utmost charity, listening to everyone and trying to help anyone who was in a difficult situation,” the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints recounts. Five months before his death, he wrote in his diary:

I throw myself desperately into the arms of Jesus, whose footsteps I must follow towards the Cross, Calvary. Human storms are unleashed that seem to overwhelm everything: with God I am beyond the gray cloud of passions, in the serene atmosphere of infinite blue, in divine peace. Then I suffer with joy because I am united to my God on the Cross.

After a clash between the Black Brigades and partisans in Father Rossi’s hamlet, the Black Brigades took vengeance on local civilians, burning houses and taking the priest and some other residents hostage. The hostages were freed; the others fled the town, but Father Rossi refused to abandon his parish and was again detained.

“After being forced to dig his own grave with his bare hands, he was repeatedly beaten, hit on the head with a 15-pound boulder, which caused his skull to be smashed, then finished with a stab wound and a gunshot,” according to the dicastery. After the war, the head of the Fascist brigade platoon asked Father Rossi’s mother, and the priest who succeeded Rossi at the parish, for forgiveness.

Pope Francis paid tribute to Blessed Rossi as “a parish priest who was zealous in charity. He did not abandon the flock during the tragic period of World War II but defended it even to the shedding of his blood. May his heroic witness help us to face the trials of life with fortitude.”

Blessed Michał Rapacz

Blessed Rossi was martyred by Fascists on account of his pastoral charity; Father Michał Rapacz (1904-1946), beatified at the Divine Mercy Sanctuary in Kraków on June 15 (video), was martyred by Communists for similar reasons.

Born to a farming family in Tenczyn in southern Poland, Father Rapacz was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Kraków in 1931. Six years later, he was named administrator of the parish in the village of Płoki. The priest “prayed the Stations of the Cross daily; he was known to spend entire nights in Eucharistic adoration,” one article notes. “Every night – the documents and testimonies tell us – he entered the church, stood in front of the tabernacle, [and] prostrated himself on the ground in the form of a cross,” Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the dicastery, preached at his beatification.

Briefly detained by the Gestapo following the Nazi conquest of Poland, the priest refused to fly the Nazi flag at the parish and offered assistance to members of the Polish resistance. After World War II, as Communism became more entrenched, he was targeted by Communist activists.

Fr. Pawel Ptasznik, the postulator of his cause, said that Blessed Rapacz “was simply a good pastor with a deep prayer life who was inclined to help those in need, even if they were indifferent or even hostile towards the Church.”

Cardinal Semeraro preached that “the Eucharist was the foundation of his life as a man of God. Spreading love for Christ present in the consecrated Bread was for him the only effective antidote to atheism, materialism and all those visions of the world that threaten human dignity. From the gift of Jesus on the altar our new Blessed drew the greatest love, the one that does not remain paralyzed in the face of hatred, violence and everything that is frightening: the charity of the pastor of souls.”

The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints notes that “on May 11, 1946, shortly before midnight, a group of 20 armed men attacked the rectory of Płoki … The attackers took Fr. Michał, still dressed in a cassock, to a nearby wood, where he was murdered. At first he was knocked out, then he was killed with two gunshots.”

Pope Francis said that Blessed Rapacz was “a priest and martyr, a pastor according to the heart of Christ, and a faithful and generous witness of the Gospel. He experienced both Nazi and Soviet persecution and responded with the gift of his life.”

Blessed Istifan al-Duwayhi

Maronite Patriarch Istifan al-Duwayhi (Stephen Douayhy, 1630-1704) was beatified in Bkerke, Lebanon, on August 2. A scholar and historian educated in Rome, he emphasized Christian education and advocated for his people against Ottoman oppression.

“He was patriarch of the Maronite Church for over 30 years in very difficult times due to persecution from outside and internal dissensions,” Cardinal Semeraro preached in his beatification homily. “For all these years, it may be said, he will not know a single day of peace, serenity. Indeed, it happened that several times he was forced to leave the patriarchal see to find refuge in places that were certainly safer, but in difficult conditions.”

“He was a shepherd who suffered for and with his flock and did everything he could to defend, protect, and make it grow,” he continued. “But he was also prudent and even diplomatic. One of his letters to King Louis XIV of France is well known, in which he exposes all the sufferings of the people and asks to welcome them under his protective wings.”

Pope Francis noted that the Patriarch led his Church “during a difficult time marked also by persecution. A teacher of the faith and an attentive pastor, he was a witness of hope always close to the people.”

Blessed Luigi Cararra and companions

On August 18, a Congolese priest and three Italian missionaries, slain in 1964, were beatified in Uvira, Democratic Republic of the Congo, during an outdoor Mass (video). Blesseds Luigi Carrara and Giovanni Didonè were Xaverian priests; Blessed Vittorio Faccin was a Xaverian brother; and Blessed Albert Joubert, the son of a Frenchman and an African woman, was a diocesan priest.

Their killing on November 28, 1964, took place during the Simba rebellion of the Maoist Pierre Mulele, “in an atheistic and anti-religious context characterized by a magical-superstitious background,” the dicastery recounts. “The Christian religion was violently opposed, with churches looted [and] tabernacles and sacred images desecrated.”

“Their martyrdom crowned a life spent for the Lord and for their brothers and sisters,” Pope Francis said. “May their example and intercession foster paths of reconciliation and peace for the good of the Congolese people.”

Blessed Ján Havlík

Blessed Ján Havlík (1928-1965), a Vincentian seminarian, was beatified as a martyr at Slovakia’s principal Marian shrine on August 31 (video).

Havlík became a Vincentian novice in 1949, after Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime came to power. His 1951 arrest after commencing underground seminary studies led to eleven years of cruel and degrading treatment in prison, where he saw himself as a missionary and assisted, when possible, with the clandestine celebration of Mass.

“The harsh living conditions and forced labor contributed to a constant deterioration of his health, with a consequent serious heart failure, without receiving adequate care,” according to the dicastery. “His health conditions progressively worsened also due to the administration of drugs by the jailers, which caused him mental problems … He died prematurely three years after his release as a result of the physical and mental abuse he suffered during his imprisonment.”

“May his perseverance in bearing witness to faith in Christ encourage those who still suffer similar trials,” Pope Francis said of Havlík.

Blessed Moisés Lira Serafín

Father Moisés Lira Serafín (1893-1950) was beatified in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City on September 14 (video).

In his beatification homily, Cardinal Semeramo preached that Serafín could be a “model for many people who had an emotionally poor childhood and youth.” Following his mother’s death when he was five, Moisés experienced an unstable childhood because of “the continuous movements he was forced to make for the work of his father, who also remarried, entrusting Moisés to the curate. Despite everything, his character remained cheerful.”

The young Serafín advanced on the path of spiritual childhood, and his spiritual journey was marked by an ever-deepening sense of being a son of God the Father.

In 1910, he entered the diocesan seminary, and in the summer of 1914, he met Venerable Félix de Jesús Rougier, founder of the nascent Missionaries of the Holy Spirit. Four months later, Serafín became the institute’s first novice. Ordained to the priesthood in 1922, he was sent to Rome during intense years of persecution in Mexico (1926-1929). Upon his return to Mexico, he founded a women’s community, the Missionaries of Charity of Mary Immaculate. Cardinal Semeramo preached that Father Serafín had a special charism of spiritual direction: he spent six to eight hours a day in the confessional.

Father Serafín was declared venerable in 2013. The miracle attributed to his intercession, approved by Pope Francis prior to the beatification, was “the rapid, complete and lasting healing of a mother of a family from San Felipe, Guanajuato (Mexico) from late generalized fetal hydrops (hydrops fetalis) with multiple visceral non-immunological effusions at the sixth month of her pregnancy.”

Blessed Serafín “died in 1950, after a life spent helping people to advance in faith and in love of the Lord,” said Pope Francis. “May his apostolic zeal encourage priests to give themselves unreservedly, for the spiritual good of the holy people of God.”

Blessed Ana de Jesús

Pope Francis beatified Venerable Ana de Jesús, O.C.D. (1545-1621), on September 29, at an outdoor Mass in Brussels (video), during his apostolic journey to Belgium.

Orphaned at seven, Ana was raised by a grandmother. At ten, she made a vow of virginity and promised to enter the strictest order of nuns she could find. She later entrusted herself to the spiritual direction of a Jesuit priest and, after meeting St. Teresa of Ávila, entered the Discalced Carmelite order at twenty-five.

Formed by St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, Ana became a prioress and collected St. Teresa’s writings upon her death. She later helped establish the order in France, Poland, and Belgium, where she died. The dicastery notes that she “founded nine convents personally and more than 50 through her daughters.”

“In a time marked by painful scandals, within and outside of the Christian community, she and her companions brought many people back to the faith through their simple lives of poverty, prayer, work and charity,” Pope Francis preached. “She intentionally left no writings to posterity. Instead, she committed herself to putting into practice what she had learned, and by her way of life she helped lift up the Church at a time of great difficulty.”

Her cause was introduced in 1878, and she was declared venerable in 2019. The miracle attributed to her intercession was the sudden 1621 healing, in the presence of Blessed Ana’s corpse, of Sister Joan of the Holy Spirit, O.C.D., from years of paralysis.

October canonization Mass

On October 20, during a Mass in St. Peter’s Square (video), Pope Francis canonized fourteen saints: Saints Manuel Ruiz López and seven companions, and Francis, Mooti, and Raphael Massabki, martyrs in Damascus (1860); St. Giuseppe Allamano, I.M.C. (1851-1926); St. Marie-Léonie Paradis, P.S.S.F. (1840-1912); and St. Elena Guerra, O.S.S. (1835-1914).

As noted in an earlier CWR article, eight Franciscan friars and three Maronite laymen were martyred during the destruction of the Christian quarter in Damascus, Syria, in 1860. Pope Pius XI beatified them in 1926; their canonization followed a petition from the Order of Friars Minor and the Holy Synod of Maronite Bishops.

As a teenager in Turin, Italy, Giuseppe Allamano had St. John Bosco as his spiritual director. Allamano entered the archdiocesan seminary, was ordained to the priesthood in 1873, and after a brief time of parish ministry, returned to the seminary as spiritual director. From 1880 to 1926, he was rector of the Shrine of the Virgin of Consolation; according to the dicastery, he transformed it from a place in ruins to the spiritual center of Turin. Moved by zeal for the missions, he founded the Consolata Missionaries in 1901 and the Consolata Missionary Sisters in 1910.

Pope St. John Paul II declared him venerable in 1989 and beatified him in 1990. The miracle attributed to his intercession prior to his canonization was “the rapid, complete, and lasting healing of a twenty-five year-old indigenous Yanomami from the Amazon rainforest in the state of Roraima (Brazil), from a fractured and split skull, and without sequelae, after being attacked by a jaguar on 7 February 1996, and eight hours without receiving adequate care, at a hospital in Boa Vista (Brazil).”

Born in Québec as the third of six children, Marie-Léonie Paradis had a “personality imbued with sweetness and inclined to charity towards others,” according to the dicastery. Educated by the Sisters of Notre Dame, she entered a convent of the recently founded Marianites of Holy Cross at thirteen. She was assigned to convents in Québec, New York, Indiana, and New Brunswick.

In 1870, at the age of thirty, she founded the Little Sisters of the Holy Family, dedicated to the spiritual and material support of priests, from “the care of the kitchen, the laundry and the other living areas of colleges and seminaries, to the maintenance of the sacristy and the church in parishes,” according to the dicastery. At the time of her death in 1912, the institute had 635 members in over forty convents.

Pope St. John Paul II declared her venerable in 1981 and beatified her in 1984. The miracle attributed to her intercession, approved prior to her canonization, was the “healing of a newborn baby from prolonged neonatal asphyxia and multiple organ failure in 1986.”

Born into a wealthy family in Lucca, Italy, Elena Guerra developed a deep devotion to the Holy Spirit after she was confirmed at the age of eight. Her mother preferred that she learn embroidery, music, and painting, but her brother quietly taught her Latin at night.

In her twenties, Elena was active in women’s lay associations and suffered a long illness. Recovering her health, she visited cholera victims and began to educate hundreds of girls, including St. Gemma Galgani. At thirty-seven, she founded a Catholic school, gradually forming a community of consecrated women teachers who originally did not live in common—to the consternation of many, including Lucca’s archbishop. A decade later, she left home, used her family patrimony to purchase a palazzo where she and five other women could live in community, and formally founded the Institute of St. Zita, later renamed the Oblates of the Holy Spirit.

In the meantime, Guerra wrote on a variety of topics, from women and education to devotion to the Holy Spirit. Guerra’s correspondence with Pope Leo XIII helped lead him to promote a deeper devotion to the Holy Spirit throughout the Church, culminating in his 1897 encyclical Divinum Illud Munus.

Following accusations by her fellow sisters that she was wasting the institute’s funds on her publications, Guerra’s archbishop induced her to resign as superior in 1906 and forbade her to publish additional writings. She wrote in the diary that obedience was a “supreme act of adoration and perfect adherence to the will of God” as well as “a transformation of the most humiliating situation into the most perfect action that the creature can do.” She lived to see her institute receive papal approval in 1911 and died on Holy Saturday in 1914, after she kissed the floor and said, “I believe!”

Pope Pius XII declared her venerable in 1953, and St. John XXIII beatified her in 1959. The miracle attributed to her intercession, whose approval preceded her canonization, took place in 2010: “the survival and subsequent rapid, comprehensive and lasting recovery of a man from Brazil from very serious cranial-encephalic trauma, suspected brain death, [and] systemic complications such as pneumonia and hepatitis.”

Blessed José Torres Padilla

Blessed José Torres Padilla (1811-1878) was beatified at Seville Cathedral in Spain on November 9 (video).

Born in the Canary Islands, he was orphaned at ten and raised by a brother and an aunt. Ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Seville in 1836, he spent most of his priesthood as a seminary professor while also serving in parish ministry. In 1869, he moved to Rome, as he was named a papal consultor to the Commission for Ecclesiastical Discipline at the First Vatican Council (1869-1870).

In 1871, he was named a canon at Seville Cathedral, where he spent hours each day in the confessional. Throughout his priesthood, he was known for his visits to the poor and the sick, as well as his work as a spiritual director to many, including St. Ángela of the Cross, with whom he founded the Sisters of the Company of the Cross in 1875.

The miracle attributed to his intercession, approved before his beatification, was the 2018 healing of a nun of the Sisters of the Company of the Cross; she had suffered congestive heart failure.

Blessed José Torres Padilla “lived in nineteenth-century Spain, and distinguished himself as a priest confessor and spiritual guide, bearing witness to great charity with those in need,” said Pope Francis. “May his example sustain priests in their ministry.”

Albanian martyrs

Blessed Luigj Paliq, O.F.M. (1877-1913) and Blessed Gjon Gazulli (1893-1927) were beatified as martyrs at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Shkodër, Albania, on November 16 (video).

Born in a small town in Kosovo—a largely Muslim territory—Paliq, like two of his brothers, became a Franciscan friar. Paliq was ordained to the priesthood in 1901 and was assigned to the parish in Peja, Albania, in 1912. The following year, during the First Balkan War, soldiers from Montenegro took control of the area and attempted to force local Catholics and Muslims to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. After urging his parishioners to remain faithful, the soldiers tortured and killed Father Paliq. His dying words were “O Jesus, may it be for your love.”

Gazulli, a native of a village in northern Albania, was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Shkodrë in 1919. He was assigned to the parish in Koman in 1925, at a time when repression under the nation’s autocratic ruler led many priests to leave Albania. Gazulli founded a parish school, angering civil authorities who put him on trial, tortured him, and executed him by hanging in the public square. As he died, he forgave his killers and professed his fidelity to Christ and the Church.

Blessed Max Josef Metzger

Blessed Max Josef Metzger (1887-1944) was beatified as a martyr at Freiburg Minster in Germany on November 17 (video).

Ordained to the diocesan priesthood in 1911, Father Metzger served as a military chaplain in World War I and “revolted against the senseless horrors of a war that achieved nothing, that only brought about moral and physical destruction,” as Father Thomas Merton recounted in an essay. Between World War I and World War II, Father Metzger became a leading German pacifist, as well as an advocate for Christian unity. He also founded the Christ the King Institute, dedicated to peace and works of mercy, and now a secular institute.

In 1934, 1938, and 1939, Father Metzger was arrested by the Gestapo for his advocacy for peace. In 1943, he was arrested again after sending a peace proposal to a Swedish archbishop. He was sentenced to death for high treason during a trial in which the Nazi regime’s aversion to the Catholic faith was clear.

“I offered my life to God for the peace of the world and the unity of the churches,” he said before his execution by guillotine in a Berlin prison.

Barcelona martyrs

Gaietà Clausellas i Ballvé and Antoni Tort i Reixachs were beatified as martyrs in Sagrada Família in Barcelona on November 23 (video).

Father Clausellas i Ballvé (1863-1936) was ordained an archdiocesan priest in 1888 and spent the last twenty years of his priestly ministry as chaplain of a home for the elderly. During the Spanish Civil War, he decided not to abandon these elderly residents, even though he knew that by remaining in Barcelona he was putting his life at risk. Seized on August 14, 1936, he was martyred the following day.

Tort i Reixachs (1895-1936) was a husband and father of eleven who hid priests and religious in his home, even though he knew that by doing so, he was putting his life at risk. Imprisoned on December 1, 1936, and mistreated on account of his faith, he was executed three nights later.

“They were killed, in hatred of the faith, in Spain, in 1936,” Pope Francis said. “Let us give thanks to God for the great gift of these exemplary witnesses to Christ and the Gospel.”

Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne

In 1794, Sister Thérèse of St. Augustine and her fifteen companions—all Discalced Carmelite nuns of Compiègne—were martyred out of hatred for the faith during the French Revolution.

In the summer of 1792, officials of the new regime had asked the Carmelites to set aside their religious habits, but they refused. The nuns then “offered themselves to the Lord in sacrifice so that the Church and the State would find peace,” according to the dicastery.

That autumn, they were forced to abandon their monastery, dress in civilian clothes, and live separately, but Sister Thérèse, the prioress, was able to continue to direct them through letters.

In 1794, they were arrested and sent to a Paris prison. The dicastery notes that “while they were led together, placed in two carts, for the execution, they sang the Psalms and, having reached the foot of the guillotine, they sang the Veni Creator, renewing one after the other their vows to the Prioress, who had prepared them in an edifying way for martyrdom and the offering of their lives, so that the evil that raged in society would end.”

Pope St. Pius X beatified the nuns in 1906. Interest in them grew in the twentieth century with the publication of Gertrud von Le Fort’s Song at the Scaffold (1931) and George Bernanos’ Dialogues des Carmélites (1949).

In 2022, the Discalced Carmelites and the local bishop asked Pope Francis to canonize the nuns through equipollent canonization. On December 18, the Pope acceded to their request and canonized them, extending their cult to the universal Church.