The clock marked 4:42 p.m. in the Canary Islands on July 30, 2002 when Pope John Paul II pronounced the formula to canonize the first Canarian saint at the Guatemala City racecourse before a crowd of 750,000 people: “After having reflected at length, invoked Many times the divine help and hearing the opinion of numerous brothers of the episcopate, we declare and define Blessed Brother Pedro de San José de Bethencourt as a saint and we inscribe him in the catalog of saints ”.
At that moment the bells of the church of Vilaflor de Chasna began to ring, the town where the priest was born in 1626 and, immediately, the celebration spread to all the parishes of the island of Tenerife. In his homily, John Paul II highlighted the “profound prayer of Hermano Pedro both in his native land, Tenerife, and in all later stages of his life.”
The two-and-a-half-hour ceremony, concelebrated by more than 700 priests from the Archipelago and all Central American countries, featured a prominent Canarian delegation made up of 400 people led by the then Prime Minister, Román Rodríguez; the head of the Cabildo, Ricardo Melchior, and the Bishop of Tenerife, Felipe Fernández.
In the act, the young 22-year-old Adalberto González took communion, whose cure, in July 1985, served as a document of the “miracle” necessary for canonization. ‘Bertito’ overcame intestinal cancer when he was 5 years old due to the effect attributed to prayers made with a relic of the religious chasnero.
The canonization of Hermano Pedro paralyzed Guatemala, the country in which she carried out much of her work after arriving in Antigua in 1651. There she gave herself body and soul to promote social assistance to those most in need and completed the humanitarian work of the Brothers of Saint John of God. In addition, he founded the Bethlemite Order, dedicated to the care of the poor who were ill.
Miguel Torres, a full member of the Academy of Geography and History of Guatemala and one of the great experts on the life and work of the Tenerife saint, explained to this newspaper the admiration his country feels for the religious from Tenerife. “He is one of the fathers of the homeland of my country, because when he arrived there were no educational or public health institutions, and he took care to create them so that the indigenous population could be cared for,” said Torres, who highlighted the “key role “Which played to promote an egalitarian education:” Not only did it allow access to education for poor children, but also introduced the concept of education for both sexes. “
His tomb is in the San Francisco el Grande sanctuary, in Antigua Guatemala, along with a specimen of esquisúchil, a highly prized tree used by the Mayans and Olmecs for special offerings. Catholics from all over Central America come to his pantheon – he is the first saint in the region – to pray to him and bring him flowers.
The mayor of Vilaflor de Chasna, Agustina Beltrán, highlighted her ability to anticipate the times in which she had to live. “He emigrated to America and there he worked for all the values he believed in, creating a mixed school to teach indigenous boys and girls, and a hospital for convalescents. His human quality, his charity, his solidarity are admirable and his work is comparable to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but 300 years ago ”, he said. The councilor believes that the religious represents “all the human values of which we are so in need today.”
The mayor of Granadilla de Abona, a municipality in which the Hermano Pedro Cave is preserved, where the religious led his flock in winter and used as a place of prayer, recalls that up to this point on the coast of the municipality “hundreds of people approach each day to speak with him and ask for his intercession ”. José Domingo Regalado refers to his figure as “one more member of our family” and emphasizes that “you only have to look at the hundreds of objects that the faithful deposit in the cave to understand their effectiveness and the love and veneration that they profess in everything the Archipelago ”.
Both the Granadilla de Abona City Council, which last Christmas congratulated its neighbors with an image of the saint from the Canary Islands, as well as that of Vilaflor, will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the canonization with different events.
