SÃO PAULO – A major folk saint in the northeastern part of Brazil, 19th-century Padre (Father) Ibiapina was officially declared Venerable by the Vatican, according to a decree released on Mar. 31.

Ibiapina has been considered by many as an avant-la-lettre representative of Pope Francis’s outward-looking Church, due to his continuous dedication to social works and his passion for the poorest in society.

Ordained a priest only at 47, Ibiapina previously had a very successful career as a lawyer and a judge in the first part of his life. As a Congressman, he notably tried to pass a bill in 1836 in order to impede enslaved Africans from being disembarked in Brazilian ports. Later, as a tireless missionary, he would create the so-called houses of charity, where the poor would be sheltered and fed, especially abandoned girls, many of them daughters of enslaved women who were raped by their masters.

José Antônio Pereira was born in Sobral, Ceará State, in 1806. His family lived in a number of cities of the so-called sertão, the arid interior region of the northeast of Brazil.

For a few years, he lived in the town of Ibiapina with his father, who later incorporated it to his name as a nom de guerre, when he took part in the Confederation of the Equator. A separatist revolt of republican nature staged in Pernambuco State against the Empire of Brazil, the Confederation was defeated by the monarchy forces. His father and an uncle were executed in 1825.

Ibiapina had to take care of his four siblings, given that his mother had died a year before, in 1824, during labor. That impeded him from pursuing his studies in the seminary. In 1828, he tried to reconcile Law School with the studies to become a priest, but ended up deciding to firstly become a lawyer.

Shortly after completing his studies, he was appointed as a professor of Natural Law. He had a number of high-profile Brazilian politicians as his students and was considered a brilliant professor.

In 1834, he was indirectly elected to be a Congressman in Rio de Janeiro. As soon as he arrived in the capital city, he learned that the Empire had appointed him to be a judge in Ceará State, a function that he worked on for three months, focusing on combating the disputes between rich local families, something that used to cause numerous deaths. After he concluded the most urgent cases, he went back to Rio in order to continue his mandate as a Congressman till 1837.

In the National Legislative Assembly, Ibiapina had a notorious concern about the most disadvantaged. He presented a bill aiming at preventing enslaved Africans from being disembarked in Brazil. The project included the possibility of any citizen arresting and denouncing the human traffickers in charge of the operation.

Between 1838-1850, he worked as a criminal lawyer. On many occasions, he also helped the poor.

At 44, he bought a house in a faraway location in Recife and remained there for three years, reading the Bible, a theological textbook, a book about the lives of the saints, and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.

“After three years in such a self-imposed reclusion, he decided to become a priest,” Father Demétrio Morais, the vice-postulator of Ibiapina’s cause, told Crux.

The local bishop ordained him within a month, skipping several canonical requirements of that time due to Ibiapina’s noticeable virtues.

“Again, he was quickly invited to assume important offices, and he became a professor at the seminary and the diocese’s general vicar,” Morais described.

But then a cholera pandemic broke out in the sertão. He decided to give up on everything and began his mission trips throughout Paraíba, Pernambuco, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte and Piauí States.

“He arrived in Soledade, in Paraíba State, and saw numerous bodies buried in shallow graves or unburied. He decided to gather the community and build a cemetery and a chapel. That was the beginning of everything,” Morais described.

In another city, he found out that an old acquaintance was ill with cholera. The woman was a wealthy landowner.

“She promised to God that she would donate part of her farm if she was healed. And that’s what she did. She gave the lands to Father Ibiapina. The property’s main house became the first of his houses of charity,” Morais said.

Over the years, he kept traveling all over that arid region on the back of a donkey  and founding houses of charity – 22 of them – churches, cemeteries, and dams. His works saved the lives of countless victims of poverty and of the continuous droughts in the sertão.

He was also a pacifist. In order to deal with the common disputes between families – known as rixas, in Portuguese – he would call the people involved in violence in the city he was visiting, tell them to open a pit in front of the church, throw their guns there, and cover them with soil.

“He not only preached. He was a man of action. He used to say that ‘the most important prayer is the one we say with our hands’ – the charitable work,” Morais said.

In his last seven years of life, Ibiapina had his legs paralyzed and couldn’t visit the houses of charity anymore, but he kept orienting the sisters in charge of each one of them by sending them letters. Those documents were recovered and integrated into the files of his sainthood cause, which was opened in 1992, almost 110 years after his death, which occurred in 1883.

Ibiapina’s sainthood reputation began when he was still alive. There are records of a few alleged miracles he practiced as a priest. Over 140 years after his death, such fame only grew. Side by side with Father Cicero Romão Batista, known as Padre Cícero – declared a Servant of God in 2022 – Ibiapina became one of the most important folk saints in Brazil.

“All over the northeastern part of Brazil – and even in other regions – you still see boys named ‘João’ or ‘José Ibiapina’ and girls named ‘Maria Ibiapina’, for instance,” Morais said.

Some devotees here and there still tell stories about a great-grandfather or great-grandmother who met Ibiapina in person or was even helped by him. But the years make such reports more and more rare, the priest lamented.

Morais thinks that Ibiapina was a priest ahead of his time.

“He was truly ‘a shepherd with a sheep’s smell,’ as Pope Francis invites all the clergy to be. He lived for an outward-looking Church,” the priest said.

In a notorious article in Brazil, Jesuit Father Luis Araújo Pinto Jr. argued that Padre Ibiapina was a precursor of the Church of the ‘preferential option for the poor in Brazil’, the formulation that became famous with the Latin American Episcopal Conferences of Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979).

That may have delayed the process of his canonization cause throughout the 20th century, when the Brazilian Church was deeply Romanized and there was an explicit movement to erase the history, the practices and the characters of the previous’ centuries’ popular Catholicism, with which Ibiapina ended up being identified.

Bishop Aldemiro Sena of Guarabira, in Paraíba State – the region where the city of Solânea, where Ibiapina died, is located – told Crux that the cause was resumed in 2018, when Italian-born postulator Paolo Vilotta got involved with it.

Vilotta has been working for the causes of at least 45 candidates to sainthood that either were born or worked in Brazil.

“He made great efforts in order to make the positio [the collection of documents and reports that confirm the candidate’s heroic virtues] being published. The pope’s decree was received with enormous joy in our diocese and in all regions where Ibiapina worked,” Sena said.

He said that the diocese is now compiling the reports of people who claim that they have received a grace with his intercession, including medical documents. All those materials will be sent to Vilotta.

“We hope that anytime soon Father Ibiapina can be introduced to he altars of our churches – although we know that he’s already in the hearts of so many brothers and sisters,” Sena said.