Pope Leo recognises heroic virtues of six new Venerables
Pope Leo XIV authorised decrees recognising the heroic virtues of six Servants of God, declaring them Venerable. The six include missionary bishops Friedrich Kaiser Depel and Oreste Marengo, laywoman Margarita Bavosi, priests Domenico Pogliani and Alessandro Vitetti, and Capuchin friar Daniele of San Giovanni Rotondo. Kaiser Depel served in Peru, where he became the first Prelate of Caravelí and founded the Missionary Sisters of Jesus, Word and Victim. Marengo served as a Salesian missionary and bishop in India, establishing mission centres and supporting communities amid regional conflict.
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Pope Leo XIV has recognized the heroic virtues of six Catholics, declaring them Venerable: two missionary bishops, a Focolare laywoman, two diocesan priests and a Capuchin friar. Their lives included missionary work, care for people in need, and perseverance through illness and other hardships. 1
At an audience on 24 October with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Leo authorized decrees recognizing the heroic virtues of Friedrich Kaiser Depel, Oreste Marengo, Margarita Bavosi, Domenico Pogliani, Alessandro Vitetti and Daniele of San Giovanni Rotondo. 1
Born in Germany in 1903, Kaiser Depel was sent to Peru in 1939 as a member of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. Named the first prelate of Caravelí in 1957, he helped provide water and rebuild the cathedral after an earthquake in 1960, then founded the Missionary Sisters of Jesus, Word and Victim to help address the shortage of priests and serve communities in the Andes. 1
He attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council and was ordained a bishop in 1963. After resigning in 1971 because of ill health, he continued the sisters’ theological and spiritual formation; he died in Lima in 1993. 1
Born in Italy in 1906, Marengo went to northeastern India in 1923 as a Salesian novice and worked in villages supporting early Catholic communities. He became the first bishop of Dibrugarh in 1951, later leading the Diocese of Tezpur and serving as apostolic administrator of Tura. 1
Marengo established mission centres, helped people fleeing Pakistan during its war with India, and sought to address the shortage of priests. He died in 1998, having continued to support local clergy after stepping down from his administrative role. 1
Bavosi was born in Buenos Aires in 1941 and joined the Focolare Movement, whose founder, Chiara Lubich, introduced her to its “charism of unity.” Known as “Luminosa,” she held responsibilities for the movement in Argentina, Spain and Uruguay; she died in 1985, aged 43, after developing atypical pulmonary fibrosis. 1
Born in Milan in 1838 and ordained a priest in 1861, Pogliani served in several parishes before becoming parish priest in Cesano Boscone. There he helped open a nursery school and an oratory for girls, and founded a care home that housed 400 people by the outbreak of the First World War, including boys with intellectual disabilities; he died in 1921. 1
Vitetti was born in Calabria in 1915 and ordained in 1940. He served in a range of diocesan roles, cared for people in need during the Second World War, and became known as a confessor and spiritual guide; in 1964, he joined the Secular Institute of Missionary Priests of the Kingship of Christ. 1
In his final years, diabetes left him blind and unable to move. He faced his condition with the words, “I cannot see, I cannot hear, but I believe,” and died in 1995. 1
Born Michele Natale in 1919, Daniele became a Capuchin lay brother after feeling called to religious life as a teenager. An encounter with Padre Pio in 1933 strengthened his vocation; during the 1943 bombings of Foggia, he helped the wounded and buried the dead. 1
After years of illness and hospital stays, he supported and established prayer groups in Italy and abroad following Padre Pio’s death. Daniele died in 1994. 1
Catholic sanctity emerges through missionary service and communal resilience
Catholic sanctity can indeed become visible through missionary service and the resilience of communities, but the wording needs an important qualification: service and resilience are fruits of grace and love of Christ, not achievements that make a person holy by themselves. In the Church’s account, missionary action carries the Gospel outward, while communal fidelity helps people persevere in that mission through hardship, rejection, and loss.
Missionary service is more than travel or institutional activity. It is a response to Christ’s call to share the Gospel and its mercy with people who are poor, distant, or overlooked. Pope Francis describes missionaries as people who receive grace from Christ and do not keep it for themselves; they go out to invite others into the Gospel, serving the Church’s mission through both proclamation and care for those in need. He summarizes the heart of that mission this way:
The Church’s mission of evangelization is essentially a proclamation of God’s love, mercy and forgiveness, revealed to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
That emphasis matters because Catholic holiness is not simply being energetic, charitable, or successful. Missionary work is Christian when it takes its shape from Christ—his self-giving love—and communicates the Gospel through word and deed. Pope Benedict XV likewise connects missionary credibility with prayer and virtue: the missionary’s humility, patience, compassion, and closeness to God help make the faith accessible to others.
The lives recalled in the supplied texts give this principle concrete form. Pope Francis presents Saint Laura Montoya’s evangelization among Indigenous people as both spiritual and attentive to their culture: she welcomed them with love and brought them to Christ through an approach that did not set the Gospel against their culture. Her example, he says, challenges Christians not to keep faith private but to communicate it through words and the witness of life. Pope Benedict XVI’s account of Mother Marianne Cope similarly emphasizes practical service: she and her sisters cared for people with leprosy in Hawai‘i, managed hospitals, and opened homes for girls and women who were especially vulnerable.
These examples suggest that missionary holiness is not confined to preaching. Teaching, medical care, accompaniment, and the creation of institutions can all become forms of evangelization when they serve human dignity and express Christ’s love.
The phrase “communal resilience” also points to something important, provided resilience is understood in a Christian sense. It is not merely a group’s ability to survive or maintain its identity. It is the perseverance by which people continue in faith, charity, and mutual responsibility despite pressures that could divide or discourage them.
Pope Francis stresses that holiness is not lived in isolation. In reflecting on family and shared sanctity, he says that holiness grows “side by side with others,” and describes it as something lived with the community. His examples range from spouses who help sanctify one another to the Ulma family, whose members together bore witness to the Gospel. The point is not that every community is automatically holy, but that relationships can become places of mutual self-giving and fidelity.
The example of Saint Bonifacia Rodríguez de Castro illustrates the strain such fidelity may involve. Her work encountered rejection even among her own disciples; the account presents her as accepting that suffering in hope and offering her life for the unity of the work she had begun. Her story links resilience not to unbroken success but to remaining faithful to a good work when it is resisted.
Communal endurance is also present in the witness of martyrs. Pope Francis recalled the Christians of Otranto who refused to renounce their faith, and connected their fidelity with the support needed by Christians who suffer violence in the present. In a broader reflection, he notes that sometimes entire communities live the Gospel heroically or offer the lives of their members. Such witness is not a celebration of suffering for its own sake. Its Christian meaning lies in fidelity to Christ and in refusing to answer evil with evil.
Mission and communal resilience are mutually reinforcing. Communities sustain missionaries through prayer, shared work, formation, and practical support; missionaries, in turn, help a community look beyond itself toward those who have not been reached or cared for. Pope Francis warns that when the Church becomes closed in on itself, it becomes spiritually unhealthy. He presents missionary movement as a way the Church shares the grace it has received rather than hoarding it.
The community’s role does not diminish the individual’s responsibility. Rather, personal holiness and common life support one another. A missionary’s courage may inspire a community; the community’s prayer and perseverance may sustain the missionary. The Church’s recent teaching also recognizes less conspicuous forms of communal witness: people who care for, educate, accompany, or comfort others in ordinary life. Their persistence, especially after setbacks, can bear witness to the Gospel without public recognition.
This prevents “missionary service” from being reduced to the work of a few celebrated figures. Holiness can take shape in a religious community serving in a dangerous place, but also in the repeated, often unnoticed care offered by families, health workers, volunteers, and those who stay beside a vulnerable person. The common thread is charity expressed through faithful service.
The claim should not imply that activism alone is sanctity, or that hardship automatically makes a person or community holy. The supplied texts connect missionary effectiveness to prayer, union with God, humility, and charity. They also present mission as an expression of Christ’s Gospel, not merely a project of social improvement.
Nor should “communal resilience” mean protecting a group at any cost. The Christian measure is fidelity to Christ and love of neighbor. The community’s perseverance becomes holy when it serves the good, remains open to God, and strengthens people in faith and charity—not simply when it preserves its own structures.
Thus the statement is strongest when read this way: Catholic sanctity is formed by grace and becomes publicly recognizable in love—love that goes outward in mission and endures through shared fidelity. Mission makes holiness generous; communal resilience helps that generosity endure.