On the slopes of Mount Kenya, among the forest of Chocoria, the glades of Tigania, after a hundred years she is still called "The Saint," as if it were natural that one day the Pope would beatify her.
Sister Maria Carola Cecchin, the Cottolengo missionary who arrived in Kenya in 1905 and spent the last two decades of her life helping the poor people of the highlands, in the missions of Limuru, Muigori up to the Aberdare of Tuthu, will be proclaimed blessed next Nov. 5 in a solemn ceremony in Meru.
It will be the Cardinal of Kigali, Antoine Kambanda, who will represent the Holy Father and celebrate the beatification of the Italian nun, which once again reminds us of the work of our missionaries in Kenya, which has been going on for 120 years. Sister Maria Carola, born Fiorina Cecchin, originally from Cittadella, in the province of Padua, had been announced as "venerable" by Pope Bergoglio two years ago but in the meantime the process for Cottolengo's request for beatification had already begun.
"It all started from the Kenyan land," postulator Sister Antoinette Bosetti, interviewed at the Cottolengo's Nairobi headquarters, explains to Malindikenya.net, "It was the people who kept alive the memory of Sister Maria Carola's tireless industriousness, which did not stop at evangelization, but started from doing and social exchange, anticipating by years the ability to bring the faith using local culture and traditions, which later would be the basis of the modern dictates of the church, sanctioned also by the Second Vatican Council.
At the age of twenty-eight, the Venetian missionary of what in those days were called the "Vincentian Sisters" left for Mombasa with other sisters, sent at the request of the Consolata, whose presence north of Nairobi was predominantly male and for this reason not too integrated into communities where women and children required more assistance and relationships related to daily needs.
Sister Maria Carola was naturally predisposed to interact with local communities: her fair complexion and unusual features for a girl from northeastern Italy put the Kikuyu women and elders at ease. Soon her talents as a nurse as well as a maintainer, cook, and organizer were recognized by all, even the local chiefs.
"To speak of her zeal would require volumes," Father Joseph Aymo said of her after her death, "toward the people entrusted to her, she felt that she was not superior, but mother. How hard she worked! There was no hut, even far away, that was not visited, even several times, by her."
The tales, accounts and anecdotes about her industriousness are many, including one about the region's great Kikuyu chief, who was taken "by the throat" by the nun's version of a cook, by sweet delicacies of which he had a particular sweet tooth.
"My grandfather, who lived about a hundred years and had the good fortune to know Blessed Maria Carola Cecchin," Sister Mary Japhet of Cottolengo, who is from Meru, tells Malindikenya.net, "when I was a little girl, he used to tell me about this extraordinary 'mzungu' woman, who would set a good example to everyone first when there was anything to be done: from chopping wood to build a hut to putting herself in the kitchen. And at the end of the day, she would sit with our people as village elders do and tell about Jesus without standing up as a teacher and without constraint, but as an example of brotherhood, of beauty. Many elders in the villages below Mount Kenya learned and practiced active charity toward their less fortunate co-religionists because of her and waited for her return all their lives. Some died very late in life shortly after learning that in fact Sister Maria Carola had died shortly after leaving Kenya."
That's right, because the Italian missionary who was to be beatified, after serving as superior at the mission in Iciagaki and ministering in Mugoiri and Tigania, was recalled to Italy in 1925, partly because of her poor health. She will never arrive there. Illness will take her away on a steamer in the Red Sea into whose waters, according to the obligations for vessels and their crews, she will be thrown.
Her memory, in the Mount Kenya region, is eternal and Christians still pray to her today, as in the case of the miracle that led to the beatification process. In the testimony of a nun and the obstetrician who tried to resuscitate a baby born lifeless, at the invocation insisted upon by praying to the Italian nun, the infant resumed breathing. Today the little boy is 9 years old. His guardian angel is almost 100, and in less than two weeks he will be proclaimed blessed.