ShareThisBy Richelle H. Verdeprado
The author is a fourth-year Social Work major at the University of Negros
Occidental-Recoletos (UNO-R) in Bacolod City and a frequent contributor to
Misyon.
This was my first time to hear of the name Chiara Luce Badano. This was also
my first time to write an article about a teenager who will soon be beatified.
I didn’t know Chiara – ‘Chiara’ is the Italian form of ‘Claire’ and means
‘clear’ - Luce personally and there’s no way for me to meet her now. Luce died a
year before I was born. But a well-lived life is a life that is never meant to
die. It is a life worthy of being shared with people of all ages from all walks
of life. Just as I longed for and tried hard to know about the lives of heroes
and heroines who were generations ahead of me, I felt stirred in learning about
Luce, a fine-looking, creative and sports-loving Italian who died even before
she reached 19. With all interest, I thoroughly searched for facts about her. I
wanted to know the events in her life that have led to her beatification on 25
September this year.
Fr Patrick McCaffrey was born in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland in 1944 and ordained in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Derry, on 20 December 1967. He went to Fiji in 1968 and moved to Pakistan when the Columbans opened a mission there in 1979. In 2000 he was transferred to Britain where he worked mainly with Muslims, some of them refugees from the Middle East, in Bradford. He also celebrated Mass regularly there with Pakistani Catholics. He moved back to Fiji and later was again assigned to Pakistan, where he died suddenly on 18 May this year.