Six decrees approved by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints authorise the beatification of Patriarch Elias Hoyek and 80 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, as well as recognizing four new venerables, including an Italian missionary in India and a young Cameroonian Carmelite.
By Benedetta Capelli
Pope Leo XIV on Thursday authorized the promulgation of six decrees from the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, paving the way for the beatification of the Lebanese Maronite Patriarch Elias Hoyek and 80 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War.
The decrees, approved during an audience with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery, also recognized four new venerables: Salesian missionary Fr. Costantino Vendrame, Discalced Carmelite Br. Jean-Thierry of the Child Jesus and the Passion, Spanish religious Mother MarÃa Ana Alberdi Echezarreta, and Capuchin lay brother Fra Nazareno da Pula, affectionately remembered as “the saint with the sweets”.Â
Spanish martyrs
The 80 martyrs of Santander were killed during the anti-Catholic persecution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Among them were 67 priests, three Carmelite religious, three seminarians and seven laypeople.
Their stories include prisoners thrown into the sea with their hands and feet bound and stones tied to their bodies, others who disappeared aboard the prison ship Alfonso Pérezand others still who were executed, burned, or died in makeshift concentration camps.
One of the group is Fr. Francisco Gonzáles de Córdova, pastor of Santa MarÃa del Puerto parish in Santoña. Refusing to abandon his flock despite threats and prohibitions against celebrating Mass or administering the sacraments, he was eventually imprisoned aboard a ship converted into a jail. Even in captivity he continued hearing confessions and leading the Rosary. Before his execution, he asked to be shot last so he could absolve and bless his companions. When he died, he was 48 years old.
Elias Hoyek, Lebanese ‘founding father’
The miracle recognized for the beatification of Patriarch Elias Hoyek dates back to 1965 and concerns the healing of Nayef Abou Assi, a Druze officer in the Lebanese army who suffered from chronic bilateral spondylolysis. According to reports, he awoke completely healed after dreaming of the patriarch.
Born in Helta, Lebanon, on Dec. 4, 1843, Hoyek entered the seminary at 16 and later traveled to Rome to study theology, where he was ordained a priest in 1870. Returning to Lebanon, he co-founded the Congregation of the Maronite Sisters of the Holy Family with Mother Rosalie Nasr, the first female apostolic religious institute in the Maronite Church.
Elected Maronite Patriarch of Antioch in 1899, Hoyek dedicated three decades to clerical formation and catechesis while becoming a leading voice for Lebanese independence from the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, he opened monasteries and convents to the hungry and displaced regardless of religion. Ottoman authorities sentenced him to deportation, but the intervention of the Pope and Austro-Hungarian diplomacy prevented this from occuring.
Hoyek also played a key role in negotiations that led to the establishment of the state of Lebanon in 1920. He died in Bkerké in 1931, remembered as a man of dialogue, pastoral charity and evangelical poverty, widely revered a Lebanese ‘founding father’.
Praying for vocations
Among those declared venerable is Br. Jean-Thierry of the Child Jesus and the Passion, a young Cameroonian Discalced Carmelite who died in Italy in 2006 at the age of 23 after battling bone cancer.
Known for his deep Marian devotion and constant praying of the Rosary, his vocation began in childhood through contact with an Oblate missionary in Cameroon. After entering the Carmelites in 2003, he learned the following year that he had cancer and underwent the amputation of a leg.
Transferred to Italy for treatment, he realized his recovery was unlikely and instead offered his suffering for vocations. On Dec. 8, 2005, as he lay dying, he made his solemn religious profession. His final words reportedly were: “So much light, so much light… How beautiful Jesus is!â€
L to R: Brother Nazareno da Pula; Brother Jean Thierry; Spanish with MarÃa Ana Alberdi Echezarreta
Holiness through charity
Mother MarÃa Ana Alberdi Echezarreta, a Spanish Conceptionist Franciscan nun born in the Basque Country in 1912, has also been declared venerable.
Orphaned at the age of seven, she began working early in life before discovering her religious vocation through a priest. She entered religious life in Madrid in 1932 and made her solemn profession four years later.
The Spanish Civil War forced her to flee her convent, but she later returned and eventually became novice mistress and then abbess in 1953, serving multiple terms. She guided her community through the difficult years following the war and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, helping revise the order’s constitutions. Remembered for her gentleness and wisdom, she dedicated her life to “becoming holy through love.â€
“Poor among the poorâ€
Salesian Fr. Costantino Vendrame, another new venerable, spent much of his priesthood serving the poor in India.
Born in the province of Treviso in 1893, he joined the Salesians and was ordained in Milan in 1924. Soon afterward he departed for India, where he served first in Assam and later in Tamil Nadu.
Known for traveling long distances on foot and living in extreme simplicity, he became a beloved missionary figure among the poor. During World War II he was imprisoned along with many others, yet continued to sustain fellow prisoners with his spiritual strength and optimism.
Afflicted later in life by severe arthritis, he died in Dibrugarh, India, on Jan. 30, 1957, the eve of the feast of St. John Bosco.
The ‘Saint with the sweets’
Fra Nazareno da Pula, born Giovanni Zucca in Sardinia in 1911, earned the nickname “the saint with the sweets†because of his habit of distributing orange and lemon sweets while encouraging people to pray a Hail Mary as they ate them.
A veteran of World War II who spent four years as a prisoner of war in Ethiopia, he later met Padre Pio and expressed a desire to remain with him as a friar. Padre Pio instead encouraged him to return to Sardinia and live out his vocation there.
At the age of 39 he entered the Capuchin order as a lay brother, taking the name Fra Nazareno. He carried out humble tasks including begging for alms, cooking and gardening, always in a spirit of prayer and simplicity.
In 1986 he settled in the countryside near Pula, where a sanctuary dedicated to Our Lady of Consolation would later be built at his request. He died of cancer in 1992 and is buried there today.
