Blessed Ceferino Namuncurá

Blessed Ceferino Namuncurá was a young Mapuche from Argentine Patagonia, the son of a great chief and a pupil of the Salesians. He wished to become a priest in order to serve his people, but he died of tuberculosis in Rome before he had turned nineteen. The apostolic letter of beatification set his memorial on August 26, his birthday.

He was born on August 26, 1886, in Chimpay. His father, Manuel Namuncurá, was a Mapuche chief known as the Great Cacique of the Pampas, and his mother was Rosario Burgos. Two years later he was baptized by the Salesian missionary Domenico Milanesio. The same priest had earlier mediated a peace agreement between the Mapuche and the Argentine army, thanks to which Ceferino’s father kept his title of chief and his people kept their land at Chimpay.

When the boy was eleven, his father sent him to a government school in Buenos Aires, because he saw in him the future defender of his people. Ceferino was unhappy there, so his father moved him to the Salesian Pius IX College. There, on September 8, 1898, he made his First Communion, and a year later he was confirmed. Dominic Savio, a pupil of Saint John Bosco, became his model. He never forgot that he was Mapuche and wanted to be useful to his own people. He came to long to become a Salesian and a priest in order to show his Mapuche brothers the way to heaven.

As a Salesian aspirant he moved to Viedma. Asked there one day what he liked most, he answered: “To be a priest.” During this time he fell ill with tuberculosis. A return to his native region brought no improvement, so the Salesian Bishop Cagliero took him to Italy in 1904 in the hope of better treatment. In Turin he prayed for long hours in the Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, and on September 27, 1904, Pope Pius X received him in a private audience. He then studied at the Salesian college of Villa Sora in Frascati near Rome, and although he still spoke little Italian, within a few months he was second in his class.

But his illness advanced. On March 28, 1905, he was admitted to the Fatebenefratelli Hospital on Tiber Island in Rome, where he died on May 11, 1905. A priest who visited him three days before his death recalled that Ceferino, knowing he would soon depart, asked him to look after the poor young man in the next bed. In 1924 his remains were brought back to Argentina, to the Salesian school at Fortín Mercedes.

The diocesan process was conducted in the Vicariate of Rome, and in 1972, under Paul VI, the decree on his heroic virtues was promulgated. In 2007 Benedict XVI approved a miracle attributed to his intercession and enrolled Ceferino among the blessed. The ceremony took place on November 11, 2007, in Chimpay, and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone presided at the Mass. The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints calls him the first Indigenous blessed from South America.