The Pope will proclaim the doctor José Gregorio Hernández a saint, the first Venezuelan to be canonized

From the Genelli hospital, Pope Francis, convalescing from bilateral pneumonia, has authorized the canonization of José Gregorio Hernández, a layman who will be the first Venezuelan saint. A long crusade by the Venezuelan Catholic Church to obtain the decree of canonization of the man known as “the doctor of the poor,” who had already achieved the rank of blessed in 2021, has finally achieved its goal. The decree was published in the Bulletin of the Vatican Press Office and from Rome, the Archbishop of Caracas, Raúl Biord, confirmed it in a message on Instagram.

“Today, our Pope has approved the positive opinion of the cardinals and bishops of the Licastery of the causes of beatification and canonization, which has approved the virtues of our dear blessed, who will soon be a saint,” said the priest. The Pope will have to call a consistory to decide the date on which the ceremony will take place to officially make him a saint. “May God give much health and life to our dear Pope and may we soon celebrate the canonization here in Rome.”

Francis has expedited the process of José Gregorio Hernández and has been key in this cause with great fervor among Venezuelans. “ He was a doctor full of science and faith who knew how to recognize the face of Christ in the sick and, as a good Samaritan, he helped them with evangelical charity,” said the pontiff after his beatification. To get there, the Vatican recognized a relatively recent miracle of the next saint. In 2017, Yaxury Solórzano Ortega was 10 years old when she was shot in the head during a robbery while she was with her father. The doctors who treated her had given up on her, but her mother prayed to José Gregorio for her healing, which is why, according to the version of her relatives, endorsed by the Pope, she was saved.

But the work of José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros is more than 100 years old. He was born on October 26, 1864 in Isnotú, a small town in the Andean state of Trujillo, and raised by a modest family with strong religious values. Together with other prominent Venezuelan doctors, he faced the Spanish flu epidemic and his beatification was a small ceremony because it occurred in the middle of the Covid pandemic.

The image of José Gregorio Hernández, that mysterious man with a hat, a moustache, a dark suit and a white coat, is on family altars, in hospitals and private clinics, it also rolls around on buses in Venezuela, which usually make his fervour visible on the signs they put on the vehicles and, above all, it is very present in the La Pastora neighbourhood in Caracas, where he lived. He is one of the figures who arouses the most religious fervour in Venezuela, to whom many more miracles are attributed, inside and outside Venezuela, but until now only that of the girl Yaxury has been validated. The doctor died in Caracas on June 29, 1919 when a vehicle ran him over and in the fall he fractured his skull when he hit a pavement. After his death they began to venerate him and call him a saint, but before that some people highlighted his generosity. Thousands of people attended his funeral and the coffin was carried in the arms of the people. Thirty years after his death, in 1949, after his death the Venezuelan Church made the request, the first step in the race for sainthood, which was followed by investigations into his Christian virtues, the declaration of “venerable” given by the then Pope John Paul II —now a saint—, the beginning of the cause to “prove” a first miracle that would make him blessed and another that would turn him into a saint so he could be venerated in all the temples of the world.