The beatification — the penultimate stage for sainthood — of the founder of the religious order that runs Dadar’s Convent Girls High School and Bandra’s Mount Mary Convent was celebrated with a mass at Mount Mary basilica on Wednesday.
The beatification — the penultimate stage for sainthood — of the founder of the religious order that runs Dadar’s Convent Girls High School and Bandra’s Mount Mary Convent was celebrated with a mass at Mount Mary basilica on Wednesday.
Sister Maria Clara, a Portuguese nun who founded the Congregation of the Franciscan Hospitaller Sisters of the Immaculate Conception (CONFHIC) in 1871 was beatified after the miraculous healing of a Spanish woman’s chronic skin disease was attributed to her. According to the procedure followed by the Catholic Church in the sainthood process, sister Maria Clara will be canonised or declared a saint after a second miracle.
“The woman who was cured had been ailing for years. She prayed and wore a relic of mother Maria Clara when she found no relief in medicine. She was cured overnight,” said sister Eunice Menezes, provincial or head of the order in Mumbai.
After the Vatican confirmed the incident as a miracle, the nun was declared beatified. The beatification ceremony was held on May 21 in Lisbon, Portugal which sister Menezes attended. “Mother Maria Clara set up the order when she saw poor children in Portugal. She said they were her children. Her beatification revitalises our life of commitment,” added sister Menezes.
The order runs schools, hospitals, orphanages and social welfare centres across the world and has 1,540 nuns, including 386 in India. The order came to Mumbai in 1910 and have their headquarters near Mount Mary basilica. The nuns had reached Goa in AD 1886 and came to Mumbai when they were expelled following a regime change in Portugal. Besides the schools in Dadar and Bandra, the nuns also run a home for the aged in Goregaon, a school in Vasai and two schools for tribal children in Dahanu.
The ceremony which was held on the 168th birth anniversary of sister Maria Clara was presided over by the archbishop of Bombay, Cardinal Oswald Gracias. Over 350 people, including CONFHIC nuns from all over the country participated in the ceremony.
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