FROM CONNECTICUT TO CHICLAYO

 

Edinson Farfán Córdova, Bishop Chiclayo, Peru has announced that in the coming months his diocese will begin the cause for the beatification and canonization of MONSIGNOR JUAN TOMIS STACK an American missionary priest who was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  He dedicated more than two decades of his life to the most needy of northern Peru and has been cited by Pope Leo XIV on various occasions as a major inspiration for his own missionary vocation.

“How beautiful that he was born in those lands. He came from the United States to serve these communities in Santa Cruz, in the highlands, and later in our beloved Chiclayo, which holds him so dear. I pray, through the intercession of St. John Vianney, that we may begin this process with joy, gratitude, and hope,” Bishop Farfán added.

It all began In 1963, when Bridgeport Bishop Walter Curtis, inspired by the Second Vatican Council, decided to send missionary priests to Latin America.  Among those first volunteers was “a young, enthusiastic priest of Slovak descent", Father Juan Tomis Stack.

In the mountianous region, he faced difficult conditions including lack of roads, electricity, and basic services, as well as high rates of childhood malnutrition, and strong resistance to any pastoral or social change. In 1967, the mission relocated to Chiclayo where he founded St. John Vianney Parish. 

Through perseverance and charity, he helped build roads, a clinic for the poor, promoted priestly vocations, and created lasting pastoral and social programs, including youth activities, medical outreach, libraries, and popular televised Masses.  He also worked to recover Church property that had been illegally occupied.

 In 1979, St. John Paul II named him a monsignor.

When he died in 1986, his funeral drew an estimated 20,000 people, one of the largest gatherings of affection in Chiclayo's history. 

Bridgeport to Peru, was written in 1989 by Monsignor Stephen M. DiGiovanni, but I have not bee able to locate any copies in English.

MYSTIC IN THE NEW WORLD

 

Pope St. John Paul II, hailed her as one of the “founders” of the Catholic Church in Canada. BL. CATHERINE of ST. AUGUSTINE made a promise “to live and die in Canada if God would open its door.”

Catherine was born in Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Normandy, France in 1632.

At the young age of five, Catherine began experiencing mystical experiences from God and at eight she knew she was being asked to be a saint. She is recorded as saying, “Remove from my heart every impurity, let me die now rather than allow my heart and soul to be soiled by the slightest blemish.”

 At age 14, Catherine became a novice at the Hôtel-Dieu of Bayeux, a hospital run by Augustinian nuns. She took the name Catherine of St. Augustine and offered herself for their mission overseas in New France. A day after her 16th birthday in 1648, she took her religious vows. Later that same month, she boarded the boat for the New World.

While on board “Le Cardinal,” Catherine became sick with the plague, but was miraculously cured by the Blessed Virgin. Arriving in Québec, Sr. Catherine began learning the languages of the natives and aiding the sick. It was hostile territory, and their workplace, she wrote, was “more like a hut than a hospital.”

In 1650 when the nearby Ursuline Monastery burnt down, their nuns moved in with the Augustinian sisters for a time. This is where St. Marie of the Incarnation (foundress of the Ursuline sisters in Quebec) met Sr. Catherine. Saint Marie was profoundly moved by the virtues she saw exemplified in Sr. Catherine.

For the next 20 years, Mother Catherine became the mission’s treasurer, director, and then novice director. She also continued in her mystical prayer life. 

The sufferings Mother Catherine endured she offered up in prayer for Canada and for forgiveness for the sins of its inhabitants. She cited Jesus in the Eucharist as being her main source of strength.

Mother Catherine also claimed God had assigned Fr. (St.) Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary to New France, an other native of Bayeux, who had died in 1649. This missionary had never during his lifetime met Mother Catherine. The nun says that from 1662 on, she frequently received visits from this blessed Jesuit, who was entrusted with guiding, comforting, and at times restraining her in her mortifications. But on certain days even he seemed to elude her. To win him to her, Mother Catherine spoke to him with childlike simplicity: “How happy I am, Father, that you are deriving some small joy and satisfaction now from seeing me thus crucified: be vexed with me as much as you like; I shall always look upon you and love you as my kind and charitable Father.”

On many occasions Mother Catherine stated that it was for Canada, which was in danger of undergoing grave punishments for the crimes being committed there, that she was enduring suffering. This role of assumed victim for the colony has placed Mother Catherine among the founders of the Canadian Church. While others overcame the forest, the rivers, and the winter, Mother Catherine bore the sins of her adopted country and grappled in close quarters with the powers of darkness.

Sister Catherine died on May 8, 1668 at only 36 years of age. St. François de Laval, the first Bishop of Québec (considered the founder of the Catholic faith in New France) wrote, “I don’t need to see any extraordinary signs from her to be convinced of her holiness, because her virtues made me perfectly aware of it.” 

The natives gave her the name lakonikonriiostha, the one who makes the interior more beautiful”.

She was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II in 1989, and her bones are preserved within a tomb in a shrine at Le Centre Catherine-de-Saint-Augustin in Quebec City.  Her feast day is May 8.

A MODERN MYSTIC

 

Somehow the month of August got away from me, but I thought perhaps we could study some of the Church’s newer mystics. This category of saints is probably one of the hardest to understand, as well as the most difficult for the Church to sort out due to the unusual aspect of the saint's life.

BL. EDVIGE (HEDWIG) CARBONI spent her life between her humble daily life and mystic phenomena, even receiving the stigmata which she tried to hide in every way possible. She had to deal with gossip and slander and she was even subjected to a Canonical Enquiry from which she was absolved. She was able to dedicate her life to service of the poor and sick.

Born in Pozzomaggiore, Sardinia in 1880, she was the second of six children.  Her father, Giovanni Battista Carboni, was a working man of modest means. She had to leave school in the fourth grade to care for her chronically ill mother and care for her younger siblings.

Her mother taught her embroidery as a child, and she would work with her father in the embroidery business. She also spent time in the convent of the Sisters of Saint Vincent in Alghero, where the nuns led a course in embroidery. Her desire to become a religious was thus thwarted and she would spend a sober and collected domestic life, alternating household chores with moments of prayer.

She became a professed member of the Third Order of Saint Francis in 1906 and belonged to an association known as the Friends of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus; she began recording her thoughts in a spiritual journal. Her mother died in 1910, and her responsibilities tripled.

On July 14, 1911, the signs of the Passion of Jesus appeared on her body. Edvige experienced a number of visions from Our Lady and many saints. She began to experience bilocation in 1925, and this grew greater during World War II. These and other mystical phenomena that were attributed to her were investigated in the canonical process of 1925, to which she underwent with complete obedience. She then moved to Rome with the rest of her family, just as the Second World War was about to begin.

Edvige belonged to the parish of the Salesians "Saint Mary Help of Christians" on Via Tuscolana. There she went almost every morning for Mass and Communion, where she usually prayed in the chapel of Saint Anne. Most of the ecstasies and extraordinary events took place there. She died suddenly in 1952 of angina pectoris.

Blessed Edvige Carboni's life was characterized by an unceasing charity, especially toward the weakest, Cardinal Becciu pointed out. A friend of the poor, she had words of comfort for all.

Cardinal Becciu said in the homily of the beatification rite: “Blessed Edvige embodies the most beautiful virtues of the Sardinian woman of the time. And yet from her experience, data emerge that make her testimony more relevant than ever ... Her simple and profound spiritual experience, marked by limitless charity, boundless humility and incessant prayer, is still a current model, because it shows that even in a simple life and ordinary it is possible to experience a solid communion with God and an apostolate characterized by a passion for wounded and disadvantaged humanity.”

" The new Blessed had “a heart that was humble and full of charity because the long hours of prayer banished any trace of barrenness and spiritual idleness. Through prayer, Edvige performed acts of reparation for those who were in the shadows of sin, and implored divine mercy for those who insisted upon not allowing themselves to be reached by grace”.

 She was a Sardinian laywoman who kept house, did embroidery, taught catechism to children, visited the sick, yet carried in her body the wounds of Jesus Christ for more than four decades without seeking any attention for it. Her feast day is February 17.

ANGEL OF AUSCHWITZ

 

SERVANT OF GOD STEFANIA LACKA (pronounced “Wonska”) was born on Jan. 6, 1914, in Wola Żelichowska, a village in southern Poland to a devout, peasant family.  From a very young age she experienced a deep faith. Every day she found a moment during the long days of work in the fields to take refuge in the church and pray.

At the parish, she took the opportunity to read, because the parish priest opened his doors to anyone who wanted to read in his extensive library.   She attended a teacher-training institution, graduating in 1933.

 

From 1934 to 1939, she worked for Nasza Sprawa (“Our Case”), the Catholic weekly publication of the Diocese of Tarnów, writing 700 articles and editing the children’s supplement Króluj nam Chryste (“Christ, reign over us”). 

After the Nazi German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the editorial team offered its skills to the Polish underground movement. The Gestapo arrested Stefania and other members of the team on April 16, 1941. 

 She was held at the Gestapo headquarters in Tarnów and later at the local prison. She was interrogated and tortured, but did not reveal the names of any of her associates.

 She was transported on April 27, 1942, with 60 other female prisoners to Auschwitz, where she was assigned the number 6886.

 In June 1942, a female prisoner escaped the camp. The authorities forced the prisoners to stand in the roll-call square for two days waiting to discover who would be killed in retribution for the escape.

 Bishop Jeż’s edict, dated July 26 but reported on the diocesan website on Aug. 8, said that Stefania was standing beside her friend, Helena Panek, as they awaited their fate. Stefania promised that if Helen was selected then she would go to her death with her. But the authorities were ordered not to proceed with their planned punishment. In spite of torture and dire living conditions, she refused to lose her humanity and encouraged other women

While caring for the sick Stefania fell ill with typhus and was admitted to the camp hospital in block 23. She recovered by the spring of 1943 and began working in the camp hospital as a nurse. Using her proficiency in German enabled her to gain access to some documents.

 Even though she knew it would cost her life if she was discovered, she altered data to get some people off the lists of those condemned to the gas chambers or to receive a lethal injection. She also wrote letters to the families of prisoners, and shared the power of prayer with everyone she could.

When she was unable to save babies condemned to the gas chamber along with their mothers, Stefania didn’t hesitate to baptize them in secret. 

“Risking her own life, she baptized newborns and ministered to people who were seriously ill,” Bishop Jeż noted in the edict. “She also watched over the dying, sweetening their last hours of life.” She encouraged other female prisoners to pray together with the dying.  Her fellow prisoners called her the ‘earthly guardian angel.'”

 She wrote a camp prayer book that survived the Second World War intact.

Stefania left Auschwitz with five companions on Jan. 23, 1945, days after the camp was bombed. She returned to her family home in Wola Żelichowska, where she attended daily Mass and helped her family.

 She began studying Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, but her health deteriorated and she was admitted to a hospital in the city in October 1946. She died on Nov. 7, 1946, at the age of 33 of tuberculosis

 In his edict, Bishop Jeż said that Stefania ’s spirituality offered an example for Christians today.“Stefania Lacka was distinguished for her high degree of the virtues of faith, hope, love, and moral virtues. From the day of her funeral to the present, her private cult has been growing.

At the Basilica of Our Lady of Consolation in Pasierbiec, a village near Krakow, in 2010 the people dedicated the outdoor Stations of the Cross with figures from recent Polish Catholic history. At the the Eighth Station, where Jesus speaks to the women,  He greets Stanislawa Leszczynska, who delivered over 3,000 babies at Auschwitz and Servant of God Stefania Lacka.

LAY MARTYR- APOSTLE OF MERCY

 

BLESSED STANISLAUS KOSTKA STAROWIEYSKI was born in Poland in 1895, into a wealthy political family, who were very active Catholics. Graduating from high school in 1914, Stanislaw went on to study law at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. However, his academic pursuits were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I.

Undeterred by the obstacles presented by the war, Stanislaw joined the Austro-Hungarian army and became a soldier and officer, serving on the eastern front and in Italy.

After the war, he played a vital role in the establishment of the Polish army in 1918. Stanislaw's dedication to his country led him to actively participate in the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918 & 1919, where he notably defended the citadel of Lviv.

 He continued his military service in the Polish‚ Russian war of 1920, rising through the ranks to become a captain and earning numerous decorations for his bravery. However, his military career was cut short by a near-fatal bout of dysentery in 1920.

Returning to civilian life, Stanislaw exhibited exceptional organizational and people skills. Recognizing the importance of agriculture in the country, he studied the subject and, in 1921, assumed the management of the 1,000-acre Zamosc farms in Labunie, Poland.

His reputation as a fair employer who ensured just wages and medical coverage for his workers quickly spread.  Bl. Stanisław was a model for living a vibrant Catholic life. He went to daily Mass, organized retreats and pilgrimages, visited orphans, and later in the concentration camps he cared for the spiritual needs of other prisoners.

In 1921 he married Maria Szeptycka, niece of Bl. Klymentiy Sheptysky and of Venerable Andrey Sheptysky of the Ukranian Greek Catholic Church. The couple moved into a war-damaged estate given to them by Stanisław’s father-in-law, but rather than use their money to rebuild the estate, they lived in a small building on the property, giving generously to the poor, and raising six children.

 After housing refugees during World War II, he was arrested together with his brother Marian in November 1939, by the Nazis for being a Catholic leader. While they initially managed to escape, Marian was recaptured and sent to the Russian interior, never to be heard from again.

 Stanislaw's freedom was short-lived, as he was apprehended by German troops and taken to the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany.

He became known as an apostle of mercy, living as a concentration camp prisoner, sharing his food with fellow prisoners, and urging them to hope. For those reasons, and because he came from a family of Polish nobility, he was regularly beaten by guards, often brutally. Taking those beatings, his health declined fast, and Stanislaw died on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941.

His unwavering faith, his commitment to his fellow human beings, and his martyrdom for the Catholic cause have made him a symbol of inspiration and holiness.

Pope St. John Paul II, recognizing his heroic virtues and sacrificial death,  beatified him on June 13, 1999.

 In his homily at the beatification, St. John Paul II talked about the hope of Polish people amid the horrors they experienced in the Second World War:

 “Faith in divine mercy made it possible for hope to endure in us. This hope did not concern social rebirth alone, or merely the restoration of dignity to man in the different world contexts.

Our hope penetrates far deeper: it is directed in fact to the divine promises which go far beyond temporal realities. Its definitive object is the sharing in the fruits of the saving work of Christ.”

His feast day is commemorated on June 4, and he is also honored as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II on June 12.

Blessed Stanislaw Kostka Starowieyski remains an enduring example of selflessness, devotion, and courage in the face of adversity.

 

CHURCH'S GIFT TO 21st CENTURY

 Our last writer for the month was an influential Catholic writer and thinker known for her penetrating studies on sanctity, the Church, and the spiritual life. Though widely read in the mid‑20th century, she is less known today—despite praise from major figures like Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), who called her “a brave and insightful voice given to the Church Today".  She has been almost entirely forgotten in German-speaking Europe but is more well known in the USA.  Bishop Erik Varden  (Trappist monk who has served as Bishop of Trondheim, Norway since 2020) described her as "one of the seminal Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century".

IDA FRIEDERIKE GORRES was born in 1901 in western Bohemia. She was the daughter, one of the seven children, of Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Japanese wife, Mitsuko Aoyama.  Her father was a diplomat for the Habsburg empire in Japan in the late 1800s. There, he met her mother, the daughter of a Japanese antiques dealer. Her father died when Ida was young. Her mother was cold toward her and her two sisters, even telling them they were “ugly” because of their mixed Asian-European features, while the mother embraced her four sons. 

Ida attended Austrian convent schools, first at the College of the Sacred Heart in Pressbaum near Vienna and then with the Mary Ward Sisters in St. Pölten. In 1923, she entered a novitiate at the Mary Ward Institute but left the convent in 1925. After that, she studied political science in Vienna from 1925 to 1927, and then other topics such as the social sciences, history, church history, theology and philosophy from 1927 to 1929 in Freiburg.

She became involved in the German Catholic Youth Movement around 1925, acting as the federal leader of the girls and writing articles for the magazine Die Schildgenossen. Then in 1931, she went to Dresden as a youth secretary for girls' pastoral care working there at the Catholic Educational Institute. In the spring of 1934 she became diocesan secretary at the ordinariate of the Diocese of Meissen. The Catholic Youth Movement during this period saw a tremendous Catholic revival. She was particularly active in the German branch of it known as Quickborn, led by Father Romano Guardini  (great theologan and writer everyone of my generation read in theology class, especially his book The Lord.  See BLOGS 10/24/2017 & 8/2/2016).

Around this time, Ida met engineer Carl-Josef Görres (1903-1973), who was the older brother of Catholic psychologist Albert Görres and his wife, Silvia Görres (née Volkart) a noted. psychotherapist and author. On Easter day (21 April) 1935, Ida and Carl-Josef married at the Oratory in Leipzig. Some time after the ceremony, the couple moved to Stuttgart-Degerloch. Through his work as an engineer and business consultant, Carl-Josef Görres made it possible for Ida to have the opportunity to work as a writer and theologian. Sadly, the couple were never able to have children.

Ida wrote on various topics on hagiography, stressing the importance of the "humanness of saints." During the last three or four years of World War II, her books were not allowed to be sold in Germany.  After the war was over, she continued to write, travel, and lecture, until in 1950 a breakdown in health drove her into seclusion. Her frank 1946 "Letter on the Church" unleashed significant controversy, though it is now viewed in hindsight as prescient.

She was loyal to the tradition of Catholic Church: "I have known no other father but these fathers, the priests of the Church, no brothers but my own dear brothers, the theology students," she said. "No mother but the Church...I loved them all and clung to them, not only as a daughter and sister, but as a Japanese daughter and sister, in the intensity of unconditional submission which belongs to Japanese filial piety." 

On February 21, 1969, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper wrote to  Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is considered one of the most important Catholic theologians of the 20th century. With Joseph Ratzinger and Henri de Lubac (a French Jesuit priest and cardinal also considered one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century and whose writings and doctrinal research played a key role in shaping the Second Vatican Council), he founded the theological journal Communio, “Do you know the heartfelt essay by Ida Fr. Görres on The Spirituality of Studying Theology [...; I wish it were in the hands of every student of theology, especially ‘lay’ theologians.”

 Ida Görres participated in the Würzburg synod and died a day after (May 16,1971) collapsing following an impassioned speech at  the synod meeting in Frankfurt. At the Requiem held in Freiburg Cathedral, the eulogy was delivered by Father Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI.

"Even at this hour: can we give thanks? Can we give thanks at the death of Ida Friederike Görres, with which a voice has been taken away from us, a voice which seems irreplaceable to the Church in this situation, when we are in a desert of conformism or embarrassed silence? She spoke with an insightful certainty and a fearlessness about the pressing questions and tasks of the Church today, something which is given only to the one who truly believes. And where else are there such voices?" (Homily of Father Joseph Ratziner at Ida Gorres' funeral Mass.

Ida is best known in the English speaking world for her 1944 study of Thérèse of Lisieux, Das Verborgene Antlitz - translated as The Hidden Face.

Since 2020, there has been renewed interest among English-speaking Catholics her work. There have been new translations of her works into English by Jennifer S. Bryson. Magnificat Magazine often uses passages from her writing as meditations

HOLY JOURNALIST

 

Our next writer was  BL. MANUEL “LOLO” LOZANO GARRIDO,  a Spanish  journalist  and  Missionary.

 Manuel, known as “Lolo”,  was born in 1920 in Linares, Jaén, Kingdom of Spain.  He had seven brothers and one sister.  His father died in 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War.  At that time, Manuel served as a Eucharistic Minister in his community, taking Communion to people in their homes.  He did this until he was arrested for this activity.

When Lolo was 15, he lost his mother as well. Lolo found strength in his faith, in the Eucharist. From a young age, he was part of the Catholic Action Movement. 

When he was 22, Manuel became a soldier but always had time to attend daily Mass.  Unfortunately, he suffered from spondylitis a degenerative disease.and had to leave the military because of increasingly poor health.  The next year, Lolo was paralyzed and spent the rest of his life in near-constant pain and wheelchair-bound.

Despite his pain, Lolo devoted his life to serving God as a journalist.  Not only did he have hundreds of his articles published, he also wrote nine books that he dedicated to his only sister, Lucia. The constant pain he experienced didn't extinguish his curiosity and love for the written word. Those who knew him said he never complained. 

The doors of his house were always open to everyone. When he could no longer write with one hand, he used the other. If he kept dropping his pen, he would attach it to his wrist. Then he moved to the typewriter, which he could use because he still had some mobility in his fingers. 

During Mass, he would set it on the altar. That's how he wrote the “Journalist's Decalogue,” which Pope Francis remembered during an encounter with the media.

 In his 'Journalist's Decalogue,' he recommends “paying with the coin of frankness,” “kneading the bread of clean information with the salt of style and the yeast of eternity,” and to serve “neither pastries nor spicy dishes, but rather a tasty bite of the clean and hope-filled life.” 

Because of his intense love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Lolo sought, and received, permission to have the Blessed Sacrament on his home altar.  He put his typewriter in front of the Blessed Sacrament for guidance from the Lord as he wrote.

One of the ways Lolo did missionary work from his home was by founding a magazine for those who were sick.  He called the magazine Sinai. In 1958 he travelled with his sister to Lourdes. In 1962 he lost his sight but continued his writing.

Lolo died on November 3, 1971 in his hometown of Linares, Jaén, Francoist Spain, at the age of 51.

On 19 December 2009, Pope Benedict XVI  authorized the recognition of a miracle attributed to Manuel's intercession in the cure of Rogelio de Haro Sagra (aged two) in 1972; the child had suffered from multiple organ failure due to Gram-negative sepsis.

Lolo was beatified on June 12, 2010. His feast is November 3. 

  Blessed Manuel is a patron of journalists.