Could a woman who once lived in Kenosha be the next saint?
The Vatican has given its approval to begin the lengthy process to determine if Gwen Coniker should be canonized. With her husband Jerome, Coniker founded the Apostolate for Family Consecration in Bloomingdale, Ohio, giving up an affluent lifestyle. She refused to abort her 11th child even though a doctor told her that giving birth would be fatal. There are reports that Coniker worked miracles but officials can’t and won’t elaborate. Gwen and her husband raised 12 children and have 65 grandchildren.
Here are more
details.The last person to be canonized was Mother Theodore Guerin in October of last year.
She was born Anne-Therese Guerin on Oct. 2, 1798, in the village of Etables-sur-Mer in Brittany, France. The Chicago Tribune reports, “Her father, a French navy officer, was demobilized after the Napoleonic wars but was murdered by bandits while traveling home to his family. Guerin was left to care for her distraught mother and her younger sister.
She entered a convent at 25, and she reluctantly agreed to leave France in 1840, unsure that she could handle the hardship. Her health was poor.
Guerin sailed with five other sisters to New York. Then they traveled for another 40 days to the site where they established their motherhouse, or head convent for the new religious community. The French sisters and four American women who joined them were bunked in the freezing attic of a farmer.
As her schools and ministries grew, Guerin became active in the broader community. She founded Sisters of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods convent in Indiana and established a women's college, schools, orphanages and pharmacies for the poor. Guerin died in 1856.
If Gwen Coniker is canonized, she would become one of only nine individuals who whose primary work was in the United States to be declared saints.
In addition to Guerin, here are the other seven saints whose work was mostly in the United States:
- St. Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774-1821): foundress of the American Sisters of Charity, convert to Catholicism, first native-born citizen of the United States to be canonized.
- St. John Neumann (1811-1860): missionary, priest, 4th bishop of Philadelphia, born in Bohemia, responsible for bringing seven religious communities to the Diocese of Philadelphia.
- St. Rose Philippine Duchesne (1769-1852): missionary; opened convent school in Missouri, served as missionary to Native Americans, often caring for their sick.
- St. Isaac Jogues (1607-1646): French missionary, first Catholic priest at Manhattan Island, first to preach the Gospel near Lake Superior, devoted to converting Native Americans, captured and tortured and held in slavery by Native Americans, martyred by Iroquois.
- St. Rene Goupil (1607-1642): Martyred in New York. Jesuit missionary, surgeon in Quebec hospitals, captured by Iroquois, tortured, taught children the sign of the cross, first of his order in the Canadian missions to suffer martyrdom.
- St. Katharine Drexel (1858-1955): dubbed by journalist as "millionaire nun," founded Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, now officially called the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, spent nearly $20 million from the income of her parents' estate to establish 60 missions to care for the education of Native and African Americans.
- St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917): missionary, first American citizen to be canonized, came to United States to help Italian immigrants, cared for the poor and sick and those incarcerated in jails, established orphanages, offered education to children and adults, established parish schools in several major cities across United States, died in Chicago.
Here’s
how someone becomes a saint.
