Edit: Vere Surrexit Dominus, Alleluia! New Beatifics!
(Vatican / Reggio Emilia) On Maundy Thursday Pope Francis approved the beatification of 63 Catholics, among them are also martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. Along with those who will soon be beatified are included Rolando Rivi, a young Italian seminarian of Castellarano in the Emilia region, on whom Giovannino Guareschi has also based his Don Camillo. Rivi was shot on 13 April 1945 because of the anti-religious hatred of Communist partisan in the province of Modena.
The young Catholic who had come from grade school to the small diocesan seminary, died at the age of only 14. His killers had kidnapped him during the end of the civil war raging in northern Italy in the mountains of Emilia during the Second World War. What now in the history books is usually glorified uncritically as the "Resistance," is presented as a resistance against the "Nazi-fascism", that the fight against the German occupation forces and against Italian fascism was in fact in some areas of northern Italy, a civil war in which it came to who would hold the power in the postwar period. The Communist partisans took up arms, not only against German troops and Italian Blackshirts, but for the establishment of a Soviet Republic with the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus against all non-communists, including especially the Catholics.
Left historical misrepresentations are addressed and overcome
The "Resistance,” was understood by many Communist brigades as the spark for a communist revolution, also in Emilia. Therefore Rolando Rivi only a 14 year old boy, had to die, and with him, dozens of priests and religious, who were brutally murdered in the "death triangle" of Emilia. Not because they were suspected to have been fascists or had fascist friends, as Leftist historiography and "partisan tradition” would like to tell it, but because they defended the Catholic faith, which the Communist revolutionaries wanted to eliminate.
Rolando Rivi was a young lad of Catholic parents, whose greatest desire was to become a priest. He would rather die than take off his cassock as his killers had asked of him. [How many Communists in modern seminaries today want their young men to remove their cassocks and wear street clothes!]
The beatification process had entered eight years ago into the decisive phase after two dioceses, those of Modena, where the martyrdom took place, and that of Reggio Emilia, the home diocese of Rivi, completed the preliminary investigations. In 2005 the two dioceses promoted the cause from a joint committee, in order to promote the causa.
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The admiration for the young seminarian was in the religious people has grown over the years after the war during the peace. Publicly it was by grace, miracles and healings, whose testimonies were collected from the two dioceses. From different countries today, the faithful flock to the hills of the Apennines to the Romanesque church, in which Rolando Rivi lies buried.
Pope Francis recognized with his signature on Holy Thursday, that the young seminarian was not murdered by the Communist partisans for political reasons, but in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith.
A decision that is to challenge in those events and help to ensure greater attention in the post-war period "canonized” by Leftist historical misrepresentation. It is therefore an important signal that the first choices of the new Pope's beatification of Servants of God were killed by two different totalitarian ideologies which were yet opposed to God, which rocked the 20th and persecuted the Church.
Martyrs of totalitarians, Godless ideologues, raised to the altars
Among the 63 Catholics whose beatification Pope Francis signed, there is also the Dominican, Father Giuseppe Girotti, who was killed in 1945 in the concentration camp at Dachau.
Archbishop Luigi Negri of Ferrara said after learning of the beatification: "The meeting with Rolando Rivi meant in my life, the encounter with the experience of a radical adherence to Christ and to the Church, which dominates the boy's age and state wide. A faith in granite, a simple but robust faith that allowed him to stand faithfully and firmly even before the outbreak of the wildest anti-Christian hatred, with humility and realism. Evidence which is also aimed at the youth of today and certainly not unheard of today” says Monsignor Negri for the Nuova Bussola Quotidian.
Archbishop Luigi Negri: "Rolando Rivi is the St. Aloysius Gonzaga of the third millennium"
Archbishop of Ferrara compared the soon to be blessed Rolando Rivi with another great young saint. "I believe that Rolando can be the Saint Aloysius Gonzaga of the third millennium, because in him the same faith freshness and the same size of the witness of faith which shines forth"
Rolando Rivi is in fact already beatified with the papal signature. In the coming months, however, a solemn Rite of Beatification will take place in Modena, where the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints will read the decree of the Pope.
Rolando Rivi is the first Italian Blessed, who was in a junior seminary and the first among the 130 priests and seminarians who were killed during the Civil War with Italian Communists.
Text: Giuseppe Nardi
Image: Modena diocese
The South African lay catechist and Samuel Benedict Daswa was killed by a crowd, because his Christian convictions opposed local spirit healers and witchcraft.
