By Arnold Neliba
NAIROBI, AUGUST 11, 2023 (CISA)-The medical team of Dicastery for the Causes of Saints is expected to make an announcement in September on the course of canonization of Blessed Joseph Allamano, founder of the Consolata Missionaries.
According to Fr James Lengarin, Superior General of Consolata Missionaries, the team has been investigating the validity of a miracle, which took place in the Catholic Diocese of Roraima, Brazil, on February 7, 1995.
“This is the announcement we are waiting for when this medical commission will sit in September. They have not given us the exact date but it will be early September,” Fr Lengarin told CISA on Tuesday August 8 during his visit to Kenya on the sidelines of a thanksgiving Mass with Consolata Missionaries working in the Kenya/Uganda Region.
From March 6 to 16, 2021, the diocesan inquiry into the alleged miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Joseph Allamano took place in Brazil, in the Diocese of Roraima. It was about the healing of Sorino Yanomami from a very serious head injury due to the attack of a jaguar near the mission of Catrimani.
“This man was attacked by a jaguar which pulled out his brain. People were trying to heal him by local traditional herbs. The hospital was far off. Our sisters, who are nurses insisted to take the person to the hospital but people refused, and still insisted on healing him in a traditional way. At some point the elders of the villages said, Sisters and brothers, you will take this man but make sure this man returns healed. If you don’t we shall have you chased an even killed. That was threatening,” Fr Lengarin said.
In his summary Fr Lengarin said “The sisters took Sorino to hospital while he was not speaking and with all the threats they had received, they resorted to pray through Blessed Joseph Allamano. He was not speaking. He was operated hey started operating and they put him there. After one day, they found him there in bed and he was speaking and these people could not understand what happened.”
The acts of the diocesan inquiry were delivered by the Postulation team to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, in Rome, on April 7, 2021, so that the Congregation could examine its contents and pronounce about the validity of the inquiry.
On June 23, 2021 during an appointment with Cardinal Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, to have an insight into the process, the Consolata Missionaries were informed that the special Commission of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints had examined and considered the validity of the acts of the inquiry, according to communication by the institute shared on website for Consolata Missionaries Africa.
The completion and approval of the diocesan inquiry paved way for the scientific examination which according to Fr Lengarin “What science does is always explainable but if something is beyond science then there enters the miracle. If they say that the healing of this man is something we cannot explain then we have it. If they say this is medically approved, then we don’t have it.”
Blessed joseph Allamano who founded Consolata Missionaries, a congregation of priests, brothers and sisters in 1901 was beatified on October 7, 1990, by Pope John Paul II, now St John Paul II.
