The Blesseds of 2023

This past year was a rare but not unprecedented year that saw no canonizations. No saints were canonized in thirteen of the past sixty years (1965, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1994, 2020, 2023).

Eight beatifications took place in 2023, half of them of martyrs who did not require a miracle attributed to their intercession prior to their beatification. All of the newly beatified lived during the past two centuries.

Blesseds Henri Planchet, Ladislas Radigue, and companions

Following the Siege of Paris and France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, men inspired by the spirit of the French Revolution gained control of the city. In May 1871, during the waning days of the two-month Commune of Paris, different groups of priests and religious were executed, some in prison, most on the Rue Haxho. 

Most prominent among the victims was Archbishop Georges Darboy, a neo-Gallican prelate who had so strongly opposed the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council that he worked unsuccessfully with Emperor Napoleon III to scuttle a vote. (Darboy assented to the definition upon its adoption.)

Archbishop Darboy — now the Servant of God Georges Darboy — is among the members of four groups of martyrs of the Paris Commune whose canonization processes were initiated between 1896 and 1964. The members of one of the groups — Blesseds Henri Planchat, Ladislas Radigue, and their three companions — were beatified at Saint-Sulpice in Paris on April 22 (video), in the first of the eight beatifications of 2023.

Father Yvon Sabourin, the postulator of their cause, explained in 2021 that interest in promoting the causes languished during the twentieth century for various reasons, including a desire not to provoke the secular French government and a romanticized view of the Commune that took hold after 1968. 

Blessed Henri Planchet, a member of the Congregation of Religious of Saint Vincent de Paul, was known as the “apostle of the suburbs” because of his decades of ministry among the poor. Blessed Ladislas Radigue and the other martyred priests were members of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, also known as the Picpus Fathers.

Father Sabourin recalled that the priests were marched through the streets to the accompaniment of a brass band with drums; some of the onlookers jeered, while others wept. After civil officials debated their fate, they were executed. 

“Father Planchat received eight gunshots,” said Father Sabourin. “His neck was broken with a bayonet. His arms were broken.”

Pope Francis paid tribute to the five beatified priests in his April 23 Regina Caeli address: “pastors inspired by apostolic zeal, they were united in their witness to the faith to the point of martyrdom.” 

Blessed María de la Concepción Barrecheguren García

Blessed María de la Concepción (“Conchita”) Barrecheguren García (1905-1927) was beatified in Spain’s Granada Cathedral on May 6 (video, website).

The only child of a wealthy and devout couple, Conchita was educated at home, principally by her father, because she was sickly. “In addition to her studies and domestic work with her mother, she spent several hours [daily] praying in the oratory at home, praying the Rosary and teaching catechism to the domestic helpers, walking with her father and performing some pious exercises with him,” according to the Redemptorist order’s website.

The Madrid Redemptorist website explains that each morning she attended Mass and received Holy Communion before praying for an hour. At noon, she made a half-hour meditation. Each day, she also prayed the Rosary, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Stations of the Cross. 

“My love will be a crucified God,” she once wrote. “My weapon, prayer. My strength, the Eucharist. My recreation, the Child Jesus. My motto, trust in God and despising of myself. My refuge, the arms of Our Lady. My desire, to aspire to love Jesus more and more.”

Because of her sickliness — she suffered from an intestinal inflammation — Conchita could not fulfill her desire to become a Carmelite nun. She was not the only one in her family who suffered from illness: her mother was temporarily placed in a sanatorium because of mental illness. 

In 1926, Conchita made a pilgrimage to Lisieux, where she contracted tuberculosis. The manner in which she suffered during the remaining months of her life led to a reputation for holiness after her death. “Confined to bed by a serious illness, she bore her sufferings with great spiritual fortitude, inspiring admiration and consolation in all,” Pope Francis said on the day after her beatification.

The cause of her canonization was introduced in 1938, shortly after her mother’s death.

Conchita’s widowed father, Francisco Barrecheguren Montagut, later entered the Redemptorist order and was ordained a priest at sixty-eight. Pope Francis declared father and daughter venerable on the same day in 2020. 

The miracle attributed to Conchita’s intercession that paved the way for her beatification involved the “the rapid, complete and lasting healing of a sixteen-month-old girl, from toxic shock syndrome with multiorgan failure caused by group A streptococcus, in March 2014.”

Blessed Jacinto Vera y Durán

Jesuits and Franciscans established missions in what is now Uruguay in the 1620s. The regional Spanish governor founded the city of Montevideo, now the South American nation’s capital, in 1726. A century later, in 1830, Uruguay gained its independence.

The son of immigrant farmers from the Canary Islands, Blessed Jacinto Vera (1813-1881) was known for his intelligence, strength, and good humor. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1841, during the Uruguayan Civil War, and named vicar apostolic of Montevideo in 1859; at the time, his jurisdiction encompassed the entire nation. According to the website of the Archdiocese of Montevideo:

The vicariate had few churches, few priests (almost all foreigners), and very limited resources. There was no seminary, no diocese, no money to solve any of these problems. A man of great command and an excellent leader, with the vision of a statesman, Don Jacinto built the Uruguayan Church in every sense … He usually rose at four o’clock in the morning, because he never lost his space for personal prayer and meditation, and he continued to hear confessions until eleven o’clock at night.

As vicar apostolic, Father Vera made missionary journeys on horseback and celebrated the sacraments. He was ordained a bishop in 1865, and the apostolic vicariate was raised to the dignity of a diocese in 1878.

“He does not carry out his apostolate in halls covered with gold-embroidered tapestries, nor from a desk, sunk in a soft armchair with armrests, but at the bedside of the dying, in the smelly slum of the beggar he visits and helps in person, in the confessional in which he locks himself up for long, very long days, dispensing to his hungry sheep the bread of counsel and forgiveness,” an Italian Salesian missionary wrote to St. John Bosco toward the end of Bishop Vera’s life. “Everyone knows and says that in the city of Montevideo the bishop hears more confessions than all the priests put together.” 

Bishop Vera’s canonization cause was opened in 1935, and Pope Francis declared him venerable in 2015. The miracle that allowed for his beatification was “the rapid, complete and lasting healing of a fourteen-year-old girl, from appendicitis, retroperitoneal pelvic abscess, and sepsis, on 8 October 1936.”

Bishop Vera was beatified in an outdoor Mass in Montevideo on May 6 (video), the same day as Blessed Conchita. “A pastor who took care of his people, he bore witness to the Gospel with generous missionary zeal, promoting social reconciliation in the tense atmosphere of the civil war,” Pope Francis said the following day.

Blessed Elisabetta Martinez

Born in Galantina in the Italian province of Lecce, Elisabetta (Elisa) Martinez (1905-1991) was the eldest of eight children in a middle-class Italian family. From her father, she learned “sound moral principles and broad-mindedness”; from her mother, a “robust faith” and a “vast culture,” according to Msgr. Sabino Amedeo Lattanzio, the postulator of her cause.

As she grew up, Elisa was drawn to attend daily Mass. Her father, fearing Eliza might become a nun, “looked for all the ways to divert her, organizing continuous parties,” the postulator wrote. “Elisa, however, did not allow herself to be involved, preferring to withdraw in prayer, to taste the intimacy of her beloved Jesus whom she had already chosen as the spouse of her life.”

When she was twenty-three, Eliza’s father at last permitted her to enter the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd. Four years later, she had to leave the congregation because of ill health.

She was gradually drawn to found her own religious institute, and in 1938, with the assistance of a priest and the approval of her bishop, she founded what became the Congregation of the Daughters of St. Mary of Leucca. Imbued with a Marian spirituality, Madre Elisa’s institute has ministered to single mothers and their children, to prisoners, and to immigrants. By the time of her death in 1991, the congregation had grown to 600 sisters in eight countries.

Madre Elisa was declared venerable in 2021, just five years after her cause was introduced. The miraculous cure that paved the way for her beatification took place in 2018, when an Italian mother in her fifth month of pregnancy was advised to abort her child because of lack of amniotic fluid and fetal defects. Following a novena to Madre Elia, “an ultrasound scan performed at the Regional Prenatal Diagnosis Center in Loreto detected a regular amount of amniotic fluid and regular fetal fluximetry, astonishing the doctors,” Msgr. Lattanzio wrote. In time, a healthy baby girl was born. 

Madre Elisa Martinez was beatified on June 25, during a Mass celebrated outside the Marian shrine in Leucca (video).

The Ulma family

Blesseds Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children, one of them unborn, became the most well-known blesseds of 2023, their beatification covered by AP, Reuters, and other non-Catholic news agencies.

This ten-minute documentary tells their story well, as does Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center:

Jozef Ulma was a farmer and lived with his wife Wiktoria and their six young children in the small town of Markowa in the county of Lancut, district of Rzeszow. Ulma cultivated his farm and engaged in photography. With his camera he documented his family and life in his rural town. 

The Ulmas, like other residents of Markowa, had witnessed the execution of the Jews of their small town in the summer of 1942. The Jews were taken out of their homes, shot and buried in a former animal burial ground. Some managed to escape and went into hiding in the surrounding area …

In the fall of 1942, while the hunt for Jews was going on in the entire area, a Jewish family from Lancut by the name of Szall came to Markowa to find shelter. When they asked Josef and Wiktoria Ulma to hide them, the couple agreed, and took them in along with two sisters – Golda and Layka Goldman. 

“These Jews stayed on the premises of the Ulmas and slept in the garret of the house… They never hid in particular, since all of them were busy helping to run the Ulmases’ farm,” reported Stanislaw Niemczak, a neighbor of the Ulma family. Although the Ulma house was at the outskirts, the Jews’ presence on the farm was soon discovered … 

[On] the night of 23-24 March 1944 German police came to Markowa from Lancut. They found the Jews on the Ulma farm and shot them to death. Afterwards they murdered the entire Ulma family — Jozef, Wiktoria, who was seven month[s] pregnant, and their six small children — Stanislawa, Barbara, Wladyslawa, Franciszka, Maria, and Antoni. 

On the eve of the beatification, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints issued a statement on the Ulmas’ unborn child: “At the time of the massacre, Mrs. Wiktoria Ulma was in an advanced state of pregnancy with her seventh child. This child was born at the time of his mother’s martyrdom … in the martyrdom of his parents, he received the baptism of blood.”

Twenty years after their cause was introduced, the members of the Ulma family were beatified as martyrs on September 10 during an outdoor Mass in Markowa (video, website). 

They were “an entire family exterminated by the Nazis on 24 March 1944 for having given shelter to a number of persecuted Jews,” Pope Francis said. “They opposed the hatred and violence that characterized that time with evangelical love. May this Polish family, which represented a ray of light in the darkness of the Second World War, be for all of us a model to imitate in the zeal for goodness and service to those in need.”

Blessed Giuseppe Beotti

Four months after the martyrdom of the Ulma family, Father Giuseppe Beotti (1912-1944) was martyred by Nazi forces in the hamlet of Sidolo, near the small town of Bardi in northern Italy.

Don Beotti grew up as one of six children in a farming family and was ordained to the priesthood in 1938. He “immediately distinguished himself for his assiduous charitable work on behalf of the needy and his commitment to the education of young people,” Vatican News reported. In Sidolo, he “rescued and sheltered fleeing soldiers; prisoners who had escaped from the war; and those who were persecuted, including some hundred Jewish people that he [hid] in cottages with the help of his parishioners.”

On July 20, 1944, Don Beotti was arrested and shot. His canonization cause was introduced in 2002. On September 30, he was beatified as a martyr in Piacenza Cathedral (video).

“Dear brothers and sisters, Father Giuseppe Beotti, killed in hatred of the faith in 1944, was beatified in Piacenza, Italy, yesterday,” Pope Francis said the following day. “He was a pastor according to the heart of Christ who did not hesitate to give his life to protect the flock entrusted to him.”

Blesseds Manuel González-Serna Rodríguez and companions

Father Manuel González-Serna Rodríguez and his nineteen companions were among the many groups of priests. religious, and laity slain out of hatred for the faith before and during the Spanish Civil War.

This group of twenty martyrs — ten priests of the Archdiocese of Seville, a seminarian, and nine other laymen — were killed during the summer of 1936.

Born in 1880, Father Manuel González-Serna Rodríguez was arrested in the parish he had led for twenty-five years and was killed in the sacristy. The seminarian was martyred with his father; the slain laity included two lawyers, a deputy mayor, a pharmacist, and a sacristan for the Poor Clare nuns.

Nine years after the introduction of their cause, the twenty martyrs were beatified in Seville Cathedral on November 18 (video). 

“Dear brothers and sisters, Manuel González-Serna, diocesan priest, and 19 companions, priests and laypeople, killed in 1936 in the Spanish Civil War’s climate of religious persecution, were beatified in Seville yesterday,” Pope Francis said the following day. “These martyrs bore witness to Christ up to the end. May their example comfort the many Christians in our times, who are discriminated against because of their faith.”

Blessed Eduardo Pironio

The son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Blessed Eduardo Pironio (1920-1998, website) was the last person beatified in 2023.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1943, Pironio rose rapidly through the Church hierarchy, becoming a bishop at forty-three, the head of a curial dicastery at fifty-four, and a cardinal at fifty-five. He worked as secretary-general (1968-1972) and president (1972-1975) of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) before leading the Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes (1976-1984) and the Pontifical Council for the Laity (1984-1996). As the pontifical council’s president, he helped organize the first seven World Youth Days.

At his funeral Mass in 1998, Pope St. John Paul II recalled:

His was a faith learned at his mother’s knee. A woman of solid yet simple Christian background, she was able to impress the genuine Gospel meaning of life on her children’s hearts. 

“In the history of my family,” the late cardinal said one day, “there is something miraculous. When she gave birth to her first son, my mother was barely 18 years old and fell seriously ill. After her recovery the doctors told her that she would not be able to have any more children without risking her own life. So she went to consult the Auxiliary Bishop of La Plata, who told her: ‘Doctors can be mistaken: put yourself in God’s hands and do your duty as a wife.’” 

“My mother then gave birth to 21 more. I am the last, and she lived until she was 82. But the story does not end here, for in later years I was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of La Plata, replacing the very bishop who had blessed my mother. On the day of my episcopal ordination,” Cardinal Pironio continued, “the archbishop gave me that bishop’s pectoral cross without knowing the story behind it. When I told him that I owed my life to the cross’s owner, he wept.”

Pope St. John Paul II continued:

How could his great contribution to the celebration of the World Youth Days be forgotten? Here I would like to make public my heartfelt gratitude to this brother who was a great help to me in the exercise of the Petrine ministry. 

His constant cooperation became even more apostolic in his last years marked by illness … Cardinal Pironio’s faith was sorely tried in the crucible of suffering. Physically weakened by a serious illness, he was able to accept the heavy trial demanded of him with resignation and patience. Of this arduous experience he has written: “I thank the Lord for the privilege of the Cross. I am very happy to have suffered so much. I am only sorry for not having endured it better and for not always having relished my cross in silence. Now at least I would like my cross to begin to shine and bear fruit.”

The Argentine prelate was declared venerable in 2022, sixteen years after the opening of his canonization cause. The miraculous cure, attributed to his intercession, that paved the way for his beatification was “the rapid, complete and lasting healing of a fifteen-month-old infant from acute intoxication by porphyrin, acute bronchopneumonia from inhalation of porphyrin and its gastric contents, and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, between 4 to 6 December 2006 at the Hospital Interzonal Especializado Materno Infantil in Mar del Plata [Argentina].”

“He was a living example of fidelity to the Gospel, the Church and the Magisterium of the Pope,” Cardinal Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, Pironio’s former secretary, preached at his beatification Mass, held outside the Basilica of Our Lady of Luján in Argentina (video).

“He communicated the truth of the Gospel and the integrity of its tradition,” the prelate continued. “His spiritual life was nourished by Eucharistic piety, great Marian devotion and the veneration of the saints. He was a missionary by word and by example.”

The day after Pironio’s beatification, Pope Francis paid tribute to him as “a humble and zealous pastor, a witness of hope, defender of the poor. He collaborated with Saint John Paul II in the promotion of lay people and World Youth Day. May his example help us to be a Church that goes out, that accompanies everyone on their way, especially the weakest.”