In the Jungle of Myanmar. The Story of a Missionary Proclaimed Blessed

ROME, May 23, 2011 – The beatification of John Paul II has rocked the whole world like a hurricane. "But there are also other exemplary witnesses of Christ, much less known, whom the Church joyfully points out for the veneration of the faithful": this is what Benedict XVI said at the "Regina Cæli" two Sundays ago.

Humble, ordinary saints – including those who will never get a halo – are a key theme in the preaching of pope Joseph Ratzinger. For him, the saints are "the greatest apologia for our faith." Together with art and music, he has often added; and much more than the arguments of reason.

taken from orientem.blogspot.com

Made by a pope who is a great theologian and thinker, this statement might come as a surprise. But it is perfectly in line with another of his characteristic traits: that of putting theology at the service of the "faith of the simple."

The saints – Benedict XVI has said on various occasions – are the "great luminous trail on which God passed through history, we see that there truly is a force of good which resists the millennia; there truly is the light of light."

One of these lights will be lit to wider attention on June 26, the day of the feast of Corpus Domini, when in Milan a priest will be beatified, Clemente Vismara, who died in 1988 at the age of 91, years spent to the last in missionary territory, in a remote corner of Burma.

His biography is the account of that ordinary sanctity which so pleases this pope who has called himself a "humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord."

The profile of the new blessed reproduced below was written by one of his confreres who know him very closely: Fr. Piero Gheddo, also a member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, who has also spent decades as missionary in the "ancient" style that dates back to the apostles themselves. It was not for nothing that John Paul II asked Fr. Gheddo to write him an outline for the 1990 encyclical "Redemptoris Missio," aimed at reinvigorating the genuine missionary spirit in an age in which it seems to have gone out of style.

In Buddhist Burma, today called Myanmar, Catholics are little more than one out of one hundred inhabitants. But if the Christian faith is rooted there, it is due precisely to a missionary like Vismara, soon to be beatified.

It is due to the "luminous trail" radiated by his holiness.

This profile of the new blessed written by Fr. Gheddo was published on "Asia News," the online agency of the missionary institute to which Fr. Vismara belonged.
 
source:http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1347995?eng=y