c. 2007 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) What makes a saint? Whose history moves through the Vatican bureaucracy and comes out the story of a saint?
Brazil gets a new one on Friday (May 11), Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao (1739-1822), the first native-born Brazilian canonized and a gift from Pope Benedict XVI on his first visit there.
Galvao’s family was well-to-do. He became a Franciscan priest at 23. At 30 he was confessor to some women in Sao Paolo; at 35 he built a monastery for them. I mean, he literally built it. He was architect and mason and the task took nearly 30 years. They ended up a new religious order in the church: Recolhimento de Nossa Senhora da Luz _ the Recollects of Our Lady of Light.
As years turned into centuries, Galvao’s fame increased. The nuns make little “pills” _ special prayers on small pieces of paper _ that people swallow in hope of miracles. The Vatican agreed the cures were miraculous in three cases: a 4-year-old girl in 1990, a mother and a child in 1999.
It is the perfect Catholic story, with a priest, nuns, a cloister, miracles.
But I wonder if Benedict heard any other stories of saints and miracles in Brazil? I wonder if he’s heard about Sister Dorothy Stang, from Dayton, Ohio?
“Dot,” as friends and family call her, is in the martyr category _ no miracles required for canonization. She lived in the interior, where big-time ranchers clear-cut forests for mahogany and oak, upsetting the delicate balance of flora, fauna, water and earth for the poor who live so simply there.
For decades, Stang taught the poor sustainable farming and fought against the huge conglomerates that valued teak and rosewood more than people’s lives. She spoke softly and carried a small Bible. Always.
Stang was reading from her Bible the day they shot her. Two hired thugs were promised $20,000 _ nearly 70 times monthly wages in the cities of Brazil _ to shut the small nun up. They ended up in prison, one for 17 years and the other for 27.
The go-between who hired the two gunmen also went to jail. But their alleged employers _ two wealthy ranchers _ have beat the rap so far. One, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, once paid a $500,000 fine for burning out about 2,500 acres so he could graze his cattle. What a guy.
In a rather creepy coincidence, the other rancher’s name is Regivaldo Pereira Galvao. Who knows if Rancher Galvao _ lawyers say he’s hiding, probably in Rio de Janeiro _ is related to the brand new St. Galvao? One hopes not.
Then again, saint-making is a funny business. The Galvao who built a convent for women is indeed a saint; the Galvao alleged to have sent a bullet into the chest of a 73-year-old nun may have made another.
Thousands of Catholic sisters live outside the cloister, in slums huddled near urban garbage dumps, in simple apartments near the poor and lonely, in old convents now serving as women’s shelters and nurseries. Some, like Stang, are in the poorest rural areas this world has to offer. They all need a bigger following.
Just what is the church looking for?
Fifteen years ago, I drove from the Vatican to the Country Club of Rome with a man newswriters tend to call “a high Vatican official.” It was fun, sneaking out in a black Volkswagen Beetle, getting saluted by the Swiss Guard all the same.
“I told the pope,” my black-suited driver said, as we whizzed along some Roman road toward a spectacular al fresco lunch with friends, “I told him, the only way to boost religious life and get more nuns is canonize their founders. That is the way to do it. It gives them a heritage, an identity.”
That probably works. Now Galvao is a saint, and the nuns who follow him are happy.
But there are needs outside the cloister walls as well. There must be people who will try to stop the raging stampede of the rich against the poor. There must be people who will fend off the media-borne indecencies that infect the human soul and make it crave more. There must be people who will stand up to corruption, even if they have to die to do so.
There have been quite a few. The next time the pope is in Brazil looking for a saint, I vote for Dorothy Stang.
(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)
KRE/LF END ZAGANOPhotos of Phyllis Zagano and Dorothy Stang are available via https://religionnews.com
Editors: Note time element in second graf _ Friday, May 11