WILL POPE GREENLIGHTS CLEMENTE CANONIZATION? - SOME CLAIM MIRACLE REQUIREMENT MET

July 22, 2017
ROME, Standard Newswire

A baseball player may on the way to becoming the next saint.  The idea may sound like it is out of left field, but the pitch thrown to Pope Francis by filmmaker Richard Rossi may turn out to be an unlikely strike.

What about the requirement for a miracle to greenlight the canonization of baseball icon Roberto Clemente beyond beatification?  It may have been met today, as reported by Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press.  

Olympian Jaime Nieto was paralyzed from the neck down in a backflip accident three years after Rossi's controversial film "Baseball's Last Hero" was released.  Nieto starred in the lead role of Roberto Clemente.  His stellar acting in portraying Clemente's Christlike decision to give his life to save others caught the pontiff's attention, inspiring the Clemente canonization campaign.  Today in El Cajon, Ca., Nieto walked 130 steps at his own wedding to fellow Olympian Shevon Stoddart.  

Sources say the miracle was predicted in a letter Rossi sent Pope Francis. (Rossi wrote and directed the film).  He said Nieto's walking will be a "demonstration of the power of God."

"In meditation, it was revealed to me that Roberto Clemente was a saint," Rossi said in the letter to Pope Francis, sent a year ago.  "I saw a miracle healing of Jamie Nieto.  He will walk at his own wedding to show the grace of the sacrament of marriage.  Jesus performed his first miracle at the wedding of Cana."

Pope Francis agreed if the miracle happened as Rossi predicted, the canonization of Roberto Clemente he would consider going forward, some church sources said.

Rossi visited Nieto after the accident and prayed for his healing. "You will come back and walk like the bionic man." Rossi said.

"I've never thought of him in terms of being a saint," said Mets second baseman Neil Walker, a devout Catholic whose father knew Clemente. "But he's somebody who lived his life serving others, really. So if it would happen, I wouldn't be terribly surprised by it." 

    (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong). Two-time Olympic jumper Jamie Nieto, center right, and his bride Shevon Stoddart, a   Jamaican hurdler, walks out of a church after their wedding ceremony Saturday, July 22, 2017, in El Cajon, Calif. 

Roberto Clemente a saint? He's in the ballpark.

LA TIMES, Michael McGough

At my Catholic boys high school in Pittsburgh, every class began with a prayer. Although prayers were usually led by teachers, our freshman history teacher Mr. Wynn subcontracted the job to students. Eager to delay the actual lesson, we prolonged the prayers with some facetious embellishments. I remember a witty kid named Robert McNulty intoning: “St. Roberto of Clemente, pray for us.”
Roberto Clemente, of course, was the legendary Pittsburgh Pirates rightfielder who was to die on New Year’s Eve of 1972 when his plane delivering supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua crashed into the sea.
Little did McNulty know! This week I received an email from Richard Rossi, a Pittsburgh native now living in Los Angeles who is leading a campaign to have Clemente canonized as a Roman Catholic saint. Rossi is the director of the film “Baseball’s Last Hero: 21 Clemente Stories.” (21 was the number of Clemente’s jersey.)

According to a letter Rossi sent to Pope Francis and the archbishop of Clemente’s native Puerto Rico: “Roberto Clemente was not only the best rightfielder of all time in his 18 seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but was also an imitator of Christ, dying to save others, on a mission of mercy to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. My film shows Clemente exemplified the Scripture, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’ ”

Apparently the rescue mission that ended in his death wasn’t the only example of Clemente’s charity and compassion. All in all, he seems the model of the kind of humble Christian Francis likes to extol.

For someone other than a martyr to qualify as a saint, his advocates must be able to point to two miracles traceable to the candidate's intercessionBut here’s the catch: For someone other than a martyr to qualify as a saint, his advocates must be able to point to two miracles traceable to the candidate’s intercession. (Francis angered some conservative Catholics when he let the liberalizing Pope John XXIII squeak through with only one). Rossi told me that he has been gathering accounts of miracles that could be attributed to Clemente both during and after his lifetime.

The medieval-seeming miracle requirement long has been criticized, and occasionally has been the inspiration for comedy. On the old “Saturday Night Live,” Don Novello’s character Father Guido Sarducci (the supposed gossip columnist for the Vatican newspaper) memorably criticized the canonization of Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born American saint, because she had been responsible for so few miracles — and “two of them was card tricks.”
One Catholic commentator, the American Jesuit Thomas Reese, thinks it’s time to abandon the miracle requirement. According to Reese: “It is sufficient to look at a person’s life and ask, Did this person live the life of a Christian in a special or extraordinary way that can be held up for admiration and imitation by other Christians?”

 If that were the standard, Clemente’s humanitarian activities would be ample evidence of sainthood — and the Vatican wouldn’t even have to take account of his miraculous batting average.
Follow Michael McGough on Twitter @MichaelMcGough3

Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2017, Los Angeles Times

•