Santa Fe, N.M., Jan 25, 2018 / 05:26 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Billy the Kid, a notorious bank and stage-coach robber of the Wild West, met his match in the most unlikely of people when he met Sister Blandina Segale.
According to legend, and to Sr. Blandina’s journal and letters, one of Billy the Kid’s gang members had been shot and was on the brink of death when the doctors of Trinidad, Colo. refused to treat him. Sister decided to take him in and cared for him for three months, nursing him back to health.
But Billy the Kid (William Leroy) was still unhappy. Word got out that the outlaw was coming to town to scalp the four doctors of Trinidad in revenge. When he arrived, Sr. Blandina intervened, and convinced him to call off his mission on behalf of his man she had saved.
After that incident, Sr. Blandina and Billy the Kid became friends. She once visited him in jail, and he once called off a stage-coach robbery as soon as he realized Sister was one of the passengers.
When she wasn’t calling off outlaws, Sr. Blandina was founding schools, building hospitals, teaching and caring for orphans and the poor, and advocating for the rights of Native Americans and other minorities. All in a day’s work.
Her heroic virtue and enduring works are why her cause for sainthood was opened in New Mexico in 2015, earning her the title “Servant of God” and allowing people to ask for her intercession. Since then, several documents have come to light corroborating her stories, and the necessary miracle for the next big step – beatification – seems to be well on its way.
“Sainthood isn’t about an award, it isn’t about honoring, it’s about helping the faithful know that there is a source of God’s grace being worked on Earth,” said Allen Sanchez, president and CEO for CHI St. Joseph’s Children in Albuquerque, which Sr. Blandina founded. Sanchez also serves as the petitioner for the cause of Sister’s sainthood and has studied her life extensively.
Her early years
Sr. Blandina, born Maria Rosa Segale, was just four years old when she emigrated with her parents from the small town of Cicagna, Italy to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1854 (she had her 5th birthday on the boat ride over).
At the age of 16, Maria Rosa joined the Sisters of Charity and took the name Sr. Blandina. When she was just 22 years old, she was sent – alone – to Trinidad in Colo. territory to teach in the public school there. A few years later, she was sent further south, first to Santa Fe and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It was probably quite an adjustment, Sanchez said, going from Europe and the more settled parts of America to the still very rough-and-tumble west.
While in New Mexico, Sr. Blandina helped found the public health care system and the public school system by building the first hospitals and schools in Albuquerque, often asking for the temporary release of prisoners to help her with the labor.
Much of what is known about Sr. Blandina’s life comes from a series of letters she wrote her sister, Sr. Justina Segale, who was back in Ohio. The compiled correspondences, which span the years of 1872-1894, were published ten years before Sr. Blandina’s death in 1941.
“You’re able to see the history of New Mexico happening within her interactions,” Sanchez said.
Sister stops a lynch mob
To open a cause for sainthood, examples of heroic virtue of the person must be shown. The specific example of heroic virtue that her petitioners are using involves another story that could only take place in the Wild West; the story that earned her the title “The Fastest Nun in the West” from a 1966 CBS feature on the incident.
Sr. Blandina was teaching school in New Mexico when one of her pupils told her, “Pa’s shot a man, and they’re going to hang him.”
That’s when Sr. Blandina went to work. She met with the shooter, and was able to convince him to write a confession. She then met with the dying man, and convinced him to forgive his shooter – in person – before he passed away.
After the two men were reconciled, Sr. Blandina then had to face down the lynch mob that was coming to kill the shooter, who, because of Sister, was instead taken to the circuit court and was given life in prison. After nine months, he was released to go back home to care for his four children.
“She disarms them from their guns, their hanging rope and their hate,” Sanchez said of sister and the lynch mob.
“She must have been charming to them!” he added. “I think they would fall in love with her and do what she would ask them to do, because she cared for them and she honestly was able to see the dignity of every human being from the innocent orphans to the guilty outlaws.”
Sr. Blandina also made several trips to Washington, D.C. to meet with legislators and to advocate on behalf of the Native Americans, whose reservation boundaries were being drawn at the time.
And although her own life is being evaluated for sainthood, Sr. Blandina herself knew all about the canonization process – she helped to petition to Rome for the cause of two different saints in her lifetime; St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Kateri Tekakwitha. She also helped bring now-St. Katherine Drexel and her sisters to the West to help serve the Native American populations.
The next step
In order to be beatified – one step away from canonization – there needs to be proof of an otherwise – inexplicable miracle brought about through that person’s intercession. There are several possible examples of this being explored, which makes those petitioning for Sr. Blandina hopeful that her cause will advance quickly.
“We know of a baby that was born prematurely with a malfunctioning valve in the heart and collapsed lungs,” Sanchez said. “This family immediately contacted us, said they were praying the Sr. Blandina novena for the baby. The doctors had very little hope for the baby living, but four days later they couldn’t find the problem in the heart, it was as if it didn’t exist to begin with. Doctors are saying it’s inexplicable, so we’re pursuing that, there’s many stories like that that are being pursued to see if Sr. Blandina was involved.”
The example of her life on earth is also important for the faithful today, Sanchez said, because Sr. Blandina knew how to address both immediate problems as well as more systemic problems of social justice.
“She would follow through from the charity to the social justice,” he said. “For example, she would help feed and house the railway workers, but then she would also ask why the railway workers weren’t being cared for. And that’s the call for us today. Charity is important, that’s where you start, and then you move to the social justice from there.”
Sister’s cause for canonization may take several years, depending on the approval of her heroic virtue and miracles attributed to her intercession, but Sanchez said the board that is petitioning her cause is hopeful that things will progress quickly.
“I’d say we’re more than halfway through the diocesan phase. For her to be called ‘venerable’, we just have to prove her heroic virtue,” he said.
If he had to describe her personality, Sanchez said, he would say she was tough but spunky, holy but unafraid of conflict.
“She wasn’t afraid of conflict and to roll up her sleeves and get the work done,” he said. “And she was always giving credit to the Gospel, to Jesus’ work.”
The best part of the process, Sanchez said, has been getting to know Sr. Blandina.
“I didn’t know this was going to be so fun and so inspiring,” he said. “And I really know her; she’s become my best friend.”
This article was originally published on CNA Aug. 1, 2015.
[…]
““As a founding principle of our country, we have always welcomed immigrant and refugee populations, and through the social services and good works of the Church, we have accompanied our brothers and sisters in integrating to daily American life,” Bishop Mario Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of Washington and chair of the US bishops’ Comittee on Migration, said Jan. 2.”
Someone needs to take a remedial US history class.
SOL,
Which part of US history did you think they need a remedial class on?
Who are most Americans originally if not immigrants?
I’d agree it’s not correct to say that we have always, at all times welcomed immigrants and refugees but we certainly have done that selectively. And Catholics have for the greater part been among the groups of immigrants not warmly welcomed.
We need immigration to counteract the current birth dearth but we don’t have to have open borders or risk our national security. There should be a reasonable and humane approach to immigration.
Has it occurred to you that mass immigration is a cause of the drop in birthrates? By driving up the cost of living (housing, heath care, taxes, etc.), while depressing wages, it makes family formation so much more difficult.
Tony,
Birthrates are plummeting globally with or without immigration. Even government incentives to have a replacement level birthrate have failed.
Hungary is offering tax incentives for families and hopefully they’ll have some success.
Mrscracker,
The founding American people were not immigrants but colonists/settlers. They didn’t enter into a pre-existing polity and receive citizenship or some other form of membership from another people. The whole “America is a land of immigrants” myth was created by leftist subversives even if used by 20th ce nationalists for their own purposes after the fact, more than 3 centuries after the first British colonists started settling this country. Many of the founding fathers after the revolution even explicitly wrote on the question of whether anyone non-British should be allowed to immigrate to the US.
This original Anglo-American (and Protestant Christian) heritage and identity is what the left is trying to erase and unfortunately too many Catholic bishops are assisting in this, even if the bishops seek to replace it with some vague “Catholic” identity.
This system is currently in a stage of collapse, and continued immigration will further destabilization and increase the likelihood of wide-scale violence, regardless of how necessary believers in infinite economic growth say immigrants are for that.
SOL,
Good morning!
My daddy’s side of the family has been here for 400 years. I went to the UK a few years ago and visited the parish church of a 17th century colonial ancestor. In his memorial he’s referred to as “Henry the Immigrant” because he migrated to the American Colonies.
🙂
You know, the longer your ancestors have lived in North America the more likely you are to find non Anglo Saxon ancestry or ancestors who came as convicts. The American colonies were a dumping ground for thousands of British convicts until the Revolutionary War. After that, the British had to turn to Australia and Tasmania to dump their unwanted.
Beyond chattel slavery, folks of African ancestry have been here for 400 plus years. Many were free people of color and many intermarried with white colonists.
And of course, our American Indians have their own perspectives on immigration.
History is complicated and the more you look at it, the more humble you feel. Most of us have very modest beginnings and sometimes, we find very surprising narratives along the way.
Your argument seems to be that, since we are all the descendants of immigrants (in the broadest sense of the word), there is no justification for this nation (or really, any nation) to have a restrictive immigration policy. Apparently, this Ellis Island sentimentalism must override all other political, social, cultural and economic considerations. Does a country have a right to try to maintain its ethnic and cultural balance by limiting who is allowed in?
More mindless, liberal rubbish from bishops who seem utterly incapable of, not to mention unwilling to, speak in anything other than left wing cliches. Will they ever declare solidarity with the American people?
Looked up the bishop in question.
Wikipedia: Mario Eduardo Dorsonville-Rodríguez (born October 31, 1960) is a Colombian-born bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Like Jose Gomez, another immigrant who is presumptuous enough to lecture Americans about American history and identity.
Thanks for the information. I suppose the good bishop has admonished the elites in Colombia on the need to clean up the corruption and to improve the nation’s economy that has apparently created such intolerable conditions.
Wish the bishops (and the nuns!!) would show a little solidarity with the dyslexic/dyscalculaic/etc community.
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Just because dyslexics frequently have high intelligence does not mean they all go to MIT and walk out with $75,000 starting income.
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Many suffer socially as well as educationally and the job situation upon adulthood can look bleak. As many prisoners are dyslexic, I think it is a good bet if it was caught early in school, we’d have fewer children in trouble and fewer adults in prison.
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I mean no ill will toward those looking for a better life, but we have plenty of hurting children/adults who were born here. Don’t they deserve the same concern?
Tony,
North Americans, with the exception of those descended from our Indian tribes, are all the product of quite diverse immigrant populations from the past 400-500 years. I dislike the term “diverse ” because it’s become a cliche, but it really does describe our immigrant history.
I don’t think race or ethnicity should even enter into a Catholic conversation regarding what to conserve in America. Color and ethnicity simply don’t signify but culture does.
A Judeo Christian culture is what conservative Christians and others should be concerned about preserving. Not Anglo Saxonism. Culture, not color is what’s critical.
And yes, I strongly believe that sovereign nations have a right to secure their borders and enforce immigration laws. And preserve their unique cultures. But you have to have enough population to ensure a functioning society to pass that culture down to. Societies that are ageing and not reproducing themselves won’t be capable of that and will eventually be replaced.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Immigrants – they are ambassadors of the Good News.
All of them? How so? In what way?