Beatification of Wisconsin Native Br. James Miller set for December 7th

The Vatican announced on Thursday, November 8, that Pope Francis approved a decree recognizing that Brother James Miller died as a martyr Feb. 13, 1982, in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. The process for declaring him a martyr began in 2009 and received this important ‘green light’ from the theological commission, which means we will soon be able to celebrate his beatification. Br. James will be the first De La Salle Christian Brothers from the United States to be beatified. The cause of beatification was undertaken by the Diocese of Huehuetenango, Guatemala and received the Decree of Validity in Rome in 2010 when Brother James was designated a Servant of God and a martyr for the faith. As a martyr, Br. James must have one miracle posthumously attributed to him to reach the next level toward official sainthood, which is canonization.

In the afternoon of February 13, 1982, at the age of 37, in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, Brother James (Santiago) Miller was shot several times by three men and he died instantly. Attempts to identify the assassins were unsuccessful. After funeral rites in Guatemala and in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he was buried in the parish cemetery in Polonia, Wisconsin.

continue at Christian Brothers

Mass commemorates death of Venerable Samuel Mazzuchelli, OP

Fr. Mazzuchelli at Guadalupe Shrine

BENTON -- The annual Mass to commemorate the death of Venerable Samuel Mazzuchelli, OP, will be held at St. Patrick Church, Benton, at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 24.

The Mazzuchelli Assembly 4th Degree Knights of Columbus invite everyone to attend and join them for a social in the parish hall afterward.

Father Mazzuchelli died in the house near the church on February 23, 1864, and is buried in the parish cemetery. The house is open for tours during warm-weather months.

Father Mazzuchelli began his ministry in the 1830s with Native Peoples of the upper Midwest, providing education and attempting to right the injustices they faced.

continue at MadCatHerald

Also:
This zealous Wisconsin missionary heard confessions for 14 hours a day
The Apostle of the Upper Midwest: Samuel Mazzuchelli

Wisconsin martyr’s sister tells what it’s like to have a saint in the family

Brother Miller holding a lamb.  He always had a great love of farming and creation. 

Miller's hometown remembers him as a farm boy who had a simple, but strong faith in God.

It’s not every day that you have a saint buried in your local cemetery. The unincorporated, rural town of Ellis, Wisconsin (originally known as “Poland Corners”), will soon become a pilgrimage site as a farm-boy from the community will be beatified later this year.

His name was James Miller and he was born into a humble Polish farming community on September 21, 1944. Growing up, he attended the small wooden church of St. Martin, which is next to his family’s dairy farm.

Miller loved the outdoors and enjoyed the manual labor he had to do on the farm. He also loved to fix things, a skill that stayed with him, earning him the nickname of “Brother Fix-It” after he joined the Christian Brothers religious community.

continue at Aleteia

Man, that Polonia church is gorgeous.  Gotta get there next time I'm in the area. 

Also, follow Phil.

Father Joseph Walijewski’s Cause for Canonization advances

From the Diocese of La Crosse:

May 22, 2018

Father Joseph Walijewski’s Cause for Canonization advances,

Positio to be presented to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints

With joyful thanksgiving to God, Bishop William Patrick Callahan will celebrate Mass on May 27, 2018, at 10:30 am, at St. Joseph the Workman Cathedral, La Crosse, WI, to mark the completion of the investigation of the Servant of God, Father Joseph Walijewski’s life. At the Mass, the official documents will be signed and secured with the official Diocesan seal in order to be presented to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in Rome, who will then begin their investigation regarding the position for the Servant of God, Father Joseph Wailijewski.

On March 19, 2013, Bishop William Patrick Callahan announced the opening of the Cause for Beatification and Canonization of Father Joseph Walijewski. This process called for an investigation and testimony to ascertain the holy life, the heroic virtues, the reputation of sanctity and any miracles attributed to the Servant of God, Father Joseph Walijewski.  Experts in theological, canonical and historical matters have spent the past five years completing the necessary research, study, and testimony. The collected information was carefully documented and assembled into the Positio, a summation of the life and virtues of the Servant of God. These documents, the Positio, will now be presented to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints marking the next step in the process toward canonization.

Father Joe served the Diocese of La Crosse from his ordination in 1950 until the time of his death in 2006. His early ministry was to the people of Thorp and Stevens Point. In 1956, Bishop John Treacy granted a mission request made by Father Joe. He then ministered to the people of South America, most notably in Bolivia and Peru. After a visit to Peru by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1985, Father Joe received the funds to begin building an orphanage, Casa Hogar de Juan Pablo II. Sixty-four abandoned or orphaned children reside there today. The home is modeled after Father Flanagan’s Boys Town.

The official website for Father Joe’s Cause, frjoesguild.org, includes a biography, timeline of his life and information about the Guild for the promotion of the Cause for Canonization of Father Joseph Walijewski. Additionally, visitors will find his prayer for canonization, information on how to request prayer cards and how to report favors granted. For those unable to attend the Mass on May 27 at the Cathedral, a livestream of the event will be available at www.diolc.org/live.

Media representatives wishing to attend the Mass on May 27 are asked to contact the Office for Communications and Public Relations at 608-791-2657, or email ebrannon@diolc.org by May 25.

Wisconsin native and patron of baseball, Fr. Solanus Casey takes another step toward canonization!

Just a refresher, it's been a while since I talked about Solanus Casey

Fr. Solanus Casey was born Bernard Francis Casey on Nov. 25, 1870 on a farm near Oak Grove, Wisconsin [later moved near Big River] along the Mississippi River. He was the sixth child in a family of ten boys and six girls born to Irish immigrant parents who left Ireland after the famine years, the scourge of the Emerald Isle.

...

His childhood was rich in love, steeped in Catholic tradition. The children shared a love for sports, hunting, fishing, swimming, skiing, and skating. The ten boys formed their own baseball team: The Casey Nine. Barney played catcher, usually without a glove. 

-Ryan Blute, who credits his cure from cancer to the intercession of Ven Solanus “Barney” Casey. The high school junior keeps a relic of Solanus in his wallet when he goes for scans at the hospital and when he took the SAT. “When I need help, he’s always with me,” Ryan said.

Do not pray for easy lives; 

pray to be stronger people. 

 Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; 

pray for powers equal to your tasks.

 - Blessed Solanus Casey

He was a huge Detroit Tigers fan.

Eighty-five-year-old Brother Leo recalled that Fr. Solanus had “a great sense of humor. He would tell little jokes—often on himself. The friars would kid him a lot, too. He loved hot dogs smothered with onions and he loved baseball. Even when away from Michigan he would keep tabs on the Detroit Tigers. It was his simple and down-to-earth manner that made it easy for people to relate to him. No one seemed intimidated by him.”

There's much to say but lots of info online.  Graced by God to be a miracle worker, steeped in humility, and buried in Detroit it's said his body is incorrupt.

And the news from today:

Father Solanus Casey, a Capuchin friar who died 60 years ago in Detroit, has taken a step toward being declared a saint Thursday, according to a release from the Archdiocese of Detroit.

The Archdiocese announced Pope Francis's beatification of Casey in an e-mail this morning. His current title of "Venerable" will soon become "Blesssed."

Casey was a member of the Capuchin Franciscan Order of St. Joseph in Detroit and one of the co-founders of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen in Detroit, said the Archdiocese.

"The beatification of Father Solanus Casey is an incomparable grace for the Church in the Archdiocese of Detroit and for the whole community of Southeast Michigan,” Archbishop Allen Vigneron, the head of the Archdiocese of Detroit, said in a statement today. “He is an inspiration to all us Catholics – and to all – of the power of grace to transform one’s life.”

According to the Michigan Catholic, the miracle that Casey performed to become blessed ”involved a woman with an incurable genetic skin disease." Citing a news release, the report said that "her cure was verified by doctors in her home country, in Detroit and in Rome, all of whom confirmed there was no scientific explanation."

continue at Detroit Free Press (some nice photos there too - and good to see the friars in habits)

Wisconsin couple offers home to terminally ill children without families

Cori Salchert and Charlie

SHEBOYGAN -- Two parents from Sheboygan say compassion brings children into their foster home, but it's their faith that allows them to care for these children who may not have much time left here on Earth.

Since Cori and Mark Salchert brought Charlie home in October 2015, they've gotten the post-travel routine down. But it's difficult to say that anything is routine when you offer your home to children who are terminally ill.

Charlie cannot breathe or swallow in his own. He suffered brain damage before and during birth, and he requires 24-hour care.

Mark Salchert with baby Charlie.

"This is a suction machine. It helps keep his saliva down," Mark Salchert said.

"With Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy, generally children don't live past the age of two," Cori Salchert said.

Cori Salchert, a registered nurse, and her husband began fostering terminally ill babies more than three years ago.

continue at Fox6

I missed this story a few months ago when it made the rounds.  The Salcherts have already had eight of their own children. This is one of the most beautiful things I've ever witnessed.

Also Sheyboygan Press: Sheboygan family opens home to hospice kids
Live Action: Family opens home and hearts to terminally ill children
HT AS

Father Marquette’s Heroic Virtue

In the December, 1984, issue of American Heritage magazine, historical novelist Walter D. Edmonds wrote that he wished he had been present on 18 May, 1675, when Father Jacques Marquette, S. J., breathed his last. Edmonds (1903-1998) had an eye for the dramatic moment: In 1936 he secured his literary reputation with Drums along the Mohawk, a novel that sold almost as many copies as that year’s runaway best-seller, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Like her novel of the American Civil War, Edmonds’, about the American Revolution, became in 1939 a major motion picture, in this case one that was directed by John Ford and that starred Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert.

As Edmonds noted, at the time of his death Marquette had been working as a missionary among the Indians of what is now Michigan, and on Easter Sunday of 1675, he had celebrated Mass with some five thousand of them present. Not all those assembled were Christian, but all held the priest in high regard, even reverence. All knew that the austere, balding young man (he was thirty-seven), so selfless and brave, was gravely ill.

When Marquette died, another Frenchman followed Marquette’s final instructions and rang a hand bell. “I wish I might have been there,” Edmonds wrote, “to hear those small and lonely notes.” To his way of thinking, the ringing of that bell “marked the end of the most spiritual and also down-to-earth of all the Jesuit missionaries,” and all can agree that those words aptly describe Marquette, although one hopes they applied to others as well.

continue at St. Austin Review 

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