At least 500 people took part in a mass and procession in honor of the Argentine this Sunday in Buenos Aires Mom Antulawho was consecrated this Sunday in Rome by the Pope Francisco in the presence of his compatriot, the President Javier Milei.
The service began after 10:30 a.m. local time (1:00 p.m. GMT), lasted an hour and a half and was attended mostly by elderly people who used their fans to try to relieve the heat that was thickening the air.
A few hours after the consecration by Pope Francis Mom Antula in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome one of the clergymen responsible for conducting the mass Buenos Aires He repeatedly emphasized that the saint’s example serves to combat “the most difficult virus to defeat, radical individualism.”
Roxana Madrid, a 50-year-old administrative worker, agrees with this vision. For them, society has become very individualistic, and the canonization of Mama Antula has the opposite effect: “It makes us look at ourselves again, be more generous, something that people have forgotten.”
Madrid lives in Lima, a city more than 100 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires. He got up at 5 a.m. and drove more than three hours by bus to get to mass with his 80-year-old mother.
Between prayers and songs, one noticed the formation of a long line kneeling in front of the statue erected over the saint’s tomb on the right side of the basilica.
The ceremony even attracted worshipers from the original province Mom AntulaSantiago del Estero, is more than 1,000 kilometers north of the Argentine capital.
Clemente Di Lulloa 74-year-old historian and essayist from Santiago, said with his voice breaking with emotion: “For us it is an immense pride, we still do not realize how important it is to have born a saint in this salt land.” Soil , which some call dirt. Infertile,” referring to the territory of the province of Santiago del Estero, one of the most poverty-stricken areas in Argentina.
Mama Antula was beatified by Francis in 2016 and is now the first Argentine saint after she was credited with a second miracle, the inexplicable healing of an Argentine who had suffered a stroke.
María Antonia de Paz y Figueroa (1730-1799) was an ordained laywoman who fought to spread the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola when the Society of Jesus, from which the Pope came, was expelled from the jurisdiction of the Crown. Hispanic for them King Charles III.
Over time, she was also considered a pioneer of human rights in Argentina as she stood up for the excluded.
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