An energetic convert to Catholicism who guided the church in Madagascar through extreme difficulties was beatified in the country's capital.Brother Raffaele Rafiringa, born in the African country in 1856, was declared "blessed" in a ceremony June 7 in Antananarivo by Archbishop Antonio Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints' Causes.
In an interview with Vatican Radio on June 6, Archbishop Amato traced the remarkable history of Blessed Raffaele who, as a lay Christian Brother, found himself at the helm of the fledgling church organization when the country's ruling family expelled ordained missionaries.
During the exile of the priests from 1883-86, Blessed Raffaele's leadership "not only did not damage Catholics, but actually increased their number," Archbishop Amato explained.
When the missionaries were allowed to return, he said, they found a flourishing Catholic network: schools to prepare catechists to teach in the countryside, retreats organized for missionary sisters and excellent schools for children. On Sundays Blessed Raffaele directed a very well attended Liturgy of the Word, Archbishop Amato said.
As a boy, the archbishop explained, Raffaele Firinga was fascinated by the teachings of three French La Sallian missionaries who came to Antananarivo in 1866. He was allowed by his family to attend the school they had established and was baptized at the age of 14.
After working at the schools and studying himself, he became a brother.
He added the prefix "Ra", which means "Sir" to his last name, which became Rafiringa.
Seven years later, Archbishop Amato said, Blessed Raffaele was chosen to take on the responsibility of safeguarding the church and its activities in the absence of the missionaries.
Another convert, Blessed Victoire Rasoamanarivo, who was married to the son of the prime minister, helped him.
One of the requirements for beatification is the attribution of a miracle that occurred after praying to the candidate. Brother Rodolfo Cosimo Meoli, the postulator of Blessed Raffaele's sainthood cause, told Vatican Radio that a man who had been paralyzed from the waist down began to walk after praying at the brother's coffin when it was being displayed 14 years after his death in 1919.
Blessed Raffaele's beatification sends two messages, the postulator said. The first is that "lay people must understand that they are missionaries who are fully involved in evangelization."
The second was that Blessed Raffaele fostered the roots of the Gospel in the local culture, he said, because he knew that forcing the people of Madagascar to abandon their own traditions "would have been difficult and would have made them reject, rather than embrace, Christianity."
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