An Italian missionary who was gunned down in a Karen village 66 years ago has been declared “blessed” by the pope, meaning a miracle attributed to him would lead to his canonization, which would make him a saint.
Alfredo Cremonesi had been living in the Karen mountains for nearly three decades when government troops, who claimed Cremonesi had led them into a rebel ambush, killed him in Donoku village.
Pope Francis officially recognized his martyrdom in March, clearing him for beatification. During a mass in his native Crema in northern Italy on Saturday (October 19) he was declared “blessed.”
Cremonesi arrived in Myanmar, then Burma, at the age of 23, and was first assigned administration duties of the Catholic Church in Bago’s historical town of Taungoo.
He went on to roam the countryside, and, though he struggled with the monsoon rains and scorching sun, his mission pulled him through, because “to see souls who convert is the greatest of all miracles,” he wrote.
He saw Japanese troops tear through Burma in 1941 and then retreat four years later—by which time Italy had surrended to the Allies and become an enemy of Japan.
Like other civilians, he was regularly harassed by troops and at one point was kidnapped. The following years brought civil war, as the government cracked down on a people’s movement for an independent Karen state. He was killed at the age of 50, on 7 February 1953.
Read excerpts from his letters from Burma here.
