St Thérèse and Saints for Africa!

Dear Reader,

Allow me to give you a tiny glimpse behind the scenes of your monthly magazine by way of this brief anecdote. It will also show you who is really in charge here.

Some of our content is prepared quite a while before publication, sometimes several months ahead, to allow us time to work on other material that is filed closer to our deadlines. So it was on September 30 that I started to prepare our features about St Thérèse of Lisieux which appeared in last month’s issue and in the one you are holding right now, all to mark the 150th anniversary of her birth on January 2. Only as I looked at the calendar did I realise that the very day I began working on these features marked the 125th anniversary of the Little Flower’s death (her feast day is on the following day, October 1)

Coincidence or guidance from the Holy Spirit, perhaps prompted by St Thérèse herself? I take the view that in such things, there are no coincidences. On that day I decided that St Thérèse should have to grace the cover of our January issue. As you will have noticed, she does indeed — and I know that many readers will be delighted with that.

St Thérèse is a very popular saint, but I tend to agree with her biographer, the late Bishop Guy Gaucher, that it is too easy to reduce her to the sweetness that no doubt was also part of her personality. But that was not all she was. Thérèse was complex, creative and far more intelligent than many people seem to assume. Her messages may at a glance seem simplistic, but I find them substantial and challenging. The genius of St Thérèse of Lisieux — the reason, I suppose, why she is a Doctor of the Church — resides in her ability to present in simple terms concepts for which theology uses long words which even the spellcheckers can’t spell.

Every issue of The Southern Cross carries the story of a “Saint of the Month”, always accompanied by a poster. Some readers collect them in flip-files to create a book of saints, which is a great idea indeed. This issue marks a first in the series: our present saint, a priest and monk from Nigeria, has yet to be canonised (which is the Church’s way of certifying that somebody is with God and therefore a saint). There is no doubt that the day will come when Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi will be formally acclaimed a saint by canonisation.

We have only a few canonised saints from Africa. One reason for this is that Catholicism is still relatively young in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Another reason is that sainthood causes require a significant investment of financial and human resources — and these are not easy to spare in less affluent countries.

We must pray that there will be a greater number of canonised African saints. This requires that we include them in our devotional and prayer life. Blesseds Benedict Daswa, Isidore Bakanja, Ghebre Michael, Daudi Okelo & Jildo Irwa, Marie-Clémentine Anuarite Nengapeta, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, Raphaël Rafiringa, Lucien Botovasoa, and Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, pray for us

And we may also include in that group missionaries who made a great difference in Africa, such as Bl Joseph Gérard, or Abbot Franz Pfanner, the founder of Mariannhill, whose sainthood cause has been ongoing for some years.

For many Catholics, the great dream is to make a pilgrimage, maybe to the Holy Land or Rome or one of the many Marian shrines around the world. But we also have opportunities for local pilgrimages. Ngome and the shrine of Bl Benedict Daswa in Tzaneen diocese are two increasingly popular destinations in South Africa. In this issue, we read about a Mariannhill pilgrimage which took in sites and shrines connected to Abbot Pfanner and the congregation he founded. The twist here is that this pilgrimage was done on motorcycles!

Thank you for reading The Southern Cross, and please tell your friends about your monthly Catholic magazine.

God bless,

Günther Simmermacher

(Editor)