Blessed Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Santiago

Blessed Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Santiago was a layman from Puerto Rico, an office clerk who, despite a chronic illness, devoted his life to liturgical renewal and to the Christian formation of students. His friends called him Charlie or Chali. He is the first Puerto Rican raised to the altars. The Church commemorates him on July 13.

He was born on November 22, 1918, in Caguas, the second of the five children of Manuel Baudilio Rodríguez and Herminia Santiago. When he was six, a fire destroyed his father’s store and the family home, and the family moved in with his grandparents. He owed much to his deeply devout grandmother, Alejandrina Esterás. At the Catholic school in Caguas he was formed by the Sisters of Notre Dame and the Redemptorists, and he also served as an altar boy.

As a teenager he fell ill with ulcerative colitis, which caused him suffering for the rest of his life. He worked as an office clerk, among other places at the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Puerto Rico. In 1946 he began studies at that university, but illness forced him to give them up. He went on educating himself: he read widely and, after a year of piano lessons, taught himself to play the organ as well.

His greatest passion was the liturgy, which he regarded as the life of the Church. He spent almost all of his modest salary on it: he translated articles on the liturgy and published them in the mimeographed booklets “Liturgia” and “Cultura Cristiana.” In Caguas he founded a liturgy circle and a parish choir. At the Catholic University Center in Río Piedras he organized another circle as well as Christian Life Days, which helped students live the seasons of the liturgical year.

Long before the Second Vatican Council, he worked for the active participation of the faithful in the liturgy, for the use of the vernacular, and above all for a worthy celebration of the Easter Vigil, which Pius XII restored to the night hours. He often repeated: “Vivimos para esa noche” (“We live for that night”), meaning the night of Easter. John Paul II stressed that he recalled the universal call to holiness, to which every baptized person is to respond consciously and responsibly. Despite his shyness and poor health, he radiated a joy that flowed from faith in the Resurrection.

In 1963 he underwent major surgery, after which it turned out that he had advanced rectal cancer. At the end of his life he went through a dark night of faith and felt abandoned by God, but before his death he found again the Word that had given meaning to his whole life. He died on July 13, 1963, at the age of 44. A few days earlier he had said that the thirteenth is a good day.

His cause for beatification, supported by lay people gathered in the circles that bear his name, opened in 1992. The healing from non-Hodgkin lymphoma that took place in 1981 was recognized as a miracle. John Paul II beatified him in Rome on April 29, 2001.