Philippine Daily Inquirer Editorial
1:03 am | Friday, October 28th, 2011
Almost a dozen years after he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2000, Blessed Pedro Calungsod is set to become the second Filipino saint after San Lorenzo Ruiz de Manila. Through a unanimous vote, the cardinal-members of the Holy See’s Sacred Congregation for the Cause of Saints determined that the 2002 recovery of a woman, who had been clinically dead for two hours, was a miracle attributed to the intercession of Calungsod, to whom her doctor had reportedly prayed. Now, Beato (Blessed) Pedro Calungsod will soon be “San Pedro Calungsod.â€
What’s the difference between a Blessed and a Saint? The Spanish Dominican historian Fr. Fidel Villarroel, the most prolific saint-maker in the Philippines who did the “positio†or historical legwork to have Lorenzo Ruiz canonized, explains that beatification is “a declaration of the Church that a dead person, judging from his or her heroic life, is proposed to Christians for local veneration or limited cult as a model of virtuous living and as an intercessor and advocate for them before God.†While a miracle is needed to be attributed to a person who died naturally and is proposed for beatification, no such miracle is needed for a martyr. Martyrdom automatically elects the martyr to the beatitude of heaven. Beatification is expected to lead to canonization, in which the cult of the blessed is widened so as to include the universal Church. Therefore canonization means a wider veneration for Calungsod.
Notwithstanding the prospects for a wider—and more universal—veneration for Calungsod, we should not miss out on the fact that he hailed from the local, from the Visayas, in fact, where three provinces and ethnic groups claim him as their own—Cebu, Bohol and Iloilo.
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