The Archbishop of Valencia, Spain, Agustín García-Gasco, will open this coming September 20, at 12 noon, at the Cathedral of Valencia, the cause of canonization of Archbishop Emilio Lissón Chaves, C.M., who died in the exile in Valencia in 1961.
Born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1872, Emilio Lissón joined the Congregation of the Mission and was ordained priest in 1895 in Paris. Pope St. Pius X named him bishop of the Amazon diocese of Chachapoyas in 1909, where he carried out great evangelical ministry. He was 37 years old then and he went about his diocese, with the help of the natives, in a canoe as well as on foot. At age 46, in 1918, he was named archbishop of Lima by Benedict XV. There he opened four smaller seminaries and founded a Christian newspaper, and visited parishes which no prelate had visited for over 400 years.
Archbishop Lissón was forced to resign his episcopal see in 1931 due to pressures from the Peruvian authorities who accused him of “interference in politics, of bad administration, and of having little theological formation.” Although years later his accusers asked forgiveness and recognized the injustice of their allegations, Lissón was sent into exile. During the nine years he spent at the International House of the Congregation of the Mission in Rome, the archbishop studied archaeology and church history and dedicated himself to giving spiritual retreats.
Lissón was allowed to go to Spain in 1940 upon the invitation of then bishop of Navarre, Marcelino Olaechea. He went with Olaechea to Valencia when Olaechea became the archbishop of this diocese. In Valencia, Lissón administered the sacraments to thousands of young people, ordained numerous priests and made pastoral visits throughout the diocese. “He is a saint “And he is not going to leave Valencia, dead or alive.” said Olaechea on one occasion when people from other parts of Spain were asking that they be favored with the Peruvian prelate’s presence. Archbishop Olaechea testified, during those years, that Lissón “practiced in a heroic degree the virtues of charity, humility, obedience and poverty.”
Read the report in Spanish from which this piece is taken
