Catholic World News News Feature
Three beatified in Sunday ceremonies November 10, 1997
VATICAN (CWN) -- On Sunday, November 9, Pope John Paul II presided at the beatification of three people: Vilmos Apor, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, and Maria Vicenta de Sainte-Dorothee Chavez Orozco.
During his public audience following the Angelus prayer, the Holy Father invoked the example of the three newly beatified Catholics, and called upon Catholics everywhere to "proclaim the social Gospel" of the Church, giving full voice to the call for service to God and to neighbor.
Vilmos Apor (1892- 1945) was a Hungarian bishop who earned a special reputation for his service to the poor, especially during the months of hardship that came with World War II. He also spoke out against persecution, and as Pope John Paul II noted, "He was not fearful about raising his voice, in accord with evangelical principles, to denounce injustice and abuse against minorities, especially against the Jewish community."
Named bishop of Gyor by Pope Pius XII in 1941, Bishop Apor chose as his motto: "The Cross strengthens the weak and makes the strong gentle." During air raids, he was known for opening his own house to those whose homes had been destroyed. On Holy Saturday, 1945, when Russian troops entering the city came to his episcopal residence and demanded that 100 women be taken from there to their own barracks, he flatly refused. A Russian officer shot and wounded him, and he died three days later.
The president of Hungary, Arpad Goncz, was in Rome for the beatification ceremonies, and met privately with the Pope on Saturday. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini (1839- 1905) was known as the "apostle of the Catechism" because of his prodigious efforts to organize the religious education of young people and adults alike. But Pope John Paul pointed out that he was also noteworthy for his commitment to helping the poor. Born in a village near the foot of the Italian Alps, he was ordained in 1863, and became the Bishop of Plaisance in 1870. There he reorganized the seminaries and enlivened the process of religious education in all of the diocesan parishes.
At the same time, the Pope observed, Bishop Scalabrini also made a habit of visiting the sick and those in prison frequently. He sold many of his own possessions-- even a pectoral cross that had been a gift from Pope Pius IX-- in order to obtain money to help the poor. He founded an order of missionary nuns to work especially with emigrants, and John Paul II referred to him as the "father of migrants" in recognition for his contribution.
Maria Vicenta de Sainte-Dorothee Chavez Orozco (1867-1949) was born in Mexico, and in 1892-- when she was hospitalized with a serious illness-- she made a firm commitment to dedicate her life to the poor. Recovering, she founded the Congregation of Servants of the Holy Trinity and the Poor in 1902, and was formally named superior of that order in 1913.
In 1914, when an anti-clerical persecution began in Mexico, she refused to discontinue her charitable work among the poor, the aged, and the sick. When the order's hospital was taken over by revolutionary troops, she again refused to leave her station. Eventually she was responsible for establishing 7 hospitals, clinics, and dispensaries.
