As the new year 2025 begins, we are a happy lot. The year 2024 will remain in history as the year in which our Founder Joseph Allamano was canonized. It is a great milestone in our history and we should be proud to have experienced this.
By Jonah Makau *
The canonization of Allamano, brought to an end a long and arduous process, which began in 1944, after the General Chapter of 1939, which unanimously decided to start the cause of beatification. From then until the moment of canonization, the entire process passed through the hands of five postulators.
Allamano’s cause for beatification was initiated in 1944 by Fr. Giacomo Fissore. Over the decades it passed into the capable hands of Fr. Pasqualetti Gottardo, Fr. Francesco Pavese, Fr. Pietro Trabucco and Fr. Giacomo Mazzotti. The process ended last year during the “reign” of Fr. Giacomo Mazzotti as postulator. So, it has taken Joseph Allamano 80 years to become a saint, thanks to the cooperation of our missionaries, the prayers of God’s people and the invaluable work of the postulators.
To begin with, it is important to know who a postulator is. This is the person who leads a cause for beatification or canonization through the judicial processes required by the Roman Catholic Church. According to Santorum Mater, which is the instruction for conducting diocesan inquiries into the causes of saints, the postulator must be an expert in theology, canon law and history, as well as the practice of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (Article 12 §4).
In reality, however, the work of postulation is above all a collaborative activity: an important part of its activities is to coordinate and guide what comes from the people of God who are the real protagonist at the time of initiating the cause of beatification and canonization. The diocesan bishop takes the initiative, but his first duty is to ascertain that the candidate enjoys a firm and widespread reputation for holiness among the Christian people (Sanctorum Mater 7 § 1). If this foundation is lacking, no process of beatification should be initiated.
The servant of God’s reputation for holiness is thus the spark that starts the whole process, and is the element that sustains it. But what does “fame of holiness” mean? The reputation of holiness is the widely-held opinion among God’s people about the servant of God’s purity and integrity of life, and his heroic practice of the Christian virtues (Art. 5, §1).
Such a reputation for holiness must be stable, spontaneous and widespread (Art. 7, §2). That is the trick and that is where the effort of each one is needed. They, the people of God, are the ones who recognize the life of the servant of God as exemplary and worthy of imitation. It is the people of God who know the servant of God, the ones who must recognize that the person is fit for the invocation.
And in all this we, the missionaries of the Consolata, also have a role to play. In part, it is also up to us that our confreres, for whom it is worth initiating a cause for beatification, be known by the people of God whom we serve. Their lives, their ministry and their service must be alive in the minds of the Christian communities in whose service we work. So, only then will the people be able to identify the worth or holiness of a person, and consider him worthy of interceding for others.
The role of every Consolata missionary, with respect to this theme, is therefore first of all to help the General Directorate to identify, in the different parts of the world in which we operate, those individuals who have lived their missionary commitment in a heroic way, but then also to spread among the Christian faithful the positive memory of our deceased confreres. If we missionaries first speak ill of a certain deceased brother, how can we then ask Christians to invoke him?
God’s people are greatly influenced by the living testimony of ministers, and what we say about others matters a lot. If we are always in conflict and full of negativity, how can we inspire someone to trust that our deceased brother was better than us?
There is also a third aspect that is important: living exemplary lives ourselves. We cannot forget that God’s people see in our supposed saints what they see in us. If our life is not attractive, how can we convince Christians that a deceased missionary from our congregation lived an exemplary life? Christians are likely to associate the image of our life with the confrere we wish to present for beatification, and so if there is any bad example among us, this is likely to ruin the chances of many missionaries who truly lived admirable lives.
Each of us has a duty to demonstrate unity and harmony in our assigned community; the way we live our community life is fundamental. Jesus himself taught his disciples that people would recognize them as such if they had love for one another (Jn. 13:35). Loving one another was thus both a criterion and a means of evangelization. It is possible to live a “good life” as a missionary, but fail to be an effective member of a particular community. We have all known missionaries who did a lot, but lived alone.
The people of God are very attentive to such issues, and therefore any issue that seems to go contradict the teachings of Christ, become reasons to question the alleged sanctity of the particular person. This explains why our lives should be as authentic as possible.
At the beginning of the new year, the postulation office invites each of us to be more proactive in participating in postulation activities, each in his or her assigned mission.
* Fr. Jonah M. Makau, IMC, Director of History Office and Postulator
