Rome (AsiaNews) – The Church of Myanmar will soon have its first blessed: Clemente Vismara, PIME missionary, who worked for 65 years in the "pagodas country", from 1923 until 1988, with only one return trip to Italy in 1957 due to sickness. He died on 15 June 1988 in Mong Ping, in the diocese of Kengtung, on the border with China and Laos. He was immediately invoked as "protector of children" because he always lived among 200 to 500 orphans, who he used to collect from villages destroyed by war or who were lost through hunger or disease. Clemente died at age 91 but he used to write that he never felt old, because he was still useful to many abandoned children and people (disabled, lepers, lone widows, opium addicts, thieves chased out of their villages) who he gathered into his mission, supported and cared for with the help of the sisters of Maria Bambina.

In October 1996, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini launched the cause for his beatification in Agrate Brianza (his birth place) which today has nearly come to a close. Clemente is prayed to as "protector of children" and of youth, and he obtains many graces from God. In 2001, I presented six alleged "miracles" obtained through his intercession to the Congregation of the Causes of Saints. One of them seems to be at the point of being approved: a 10-year-old boy, Joseph Tayasoe, fell five metres from a tree and hit his head on a big stone: he bled from his nose and ears and smashed his skull with a crack visible to the naked eye. He spent four days in a coma and after prayers to Fr Vismara, he suddenly woke up and asked to eat, completely healed, without any consequences or care in ensuing years. Today, aged 16 years, he is a completely normal boy.

Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the prefect of the Congregation for Evangelisation, is also interested in Clemente's beatification, together with the bishops of Myanmar who, in an official document to mark his ninetieth year, described him as "the patriarch of Burma".

Still today, his tomb in Mong Ping is visited by many; not only Catholics but Protestants, Buddhists, Animists and Muslims go to ask him for graces. Even if Clemente was a missionary just like all the others, and did not do anything extraordinary, the bishop of Kengtung, Mgr Abramo Than (today emeritus) used to say: "We have had many good PIME missionaries who built the diocese, like the first bishop, Mgr Erminio Bonetta, who many remember as a model of gospel charity, but for none was there such devotion and initiative among the people to have them declared as saints, as there is for Fr Vismara. In this, I see a sign of God to start the diocesan process for his beatification."

Clemente was a man of constant prayer, always serene and full of joy, even in the midst of great difficulties and suffering of a life lived among people experiencing war, hunger, thieves and street brigands, and isolation in remote forest areas with the nearest doctor living two days away. When he reached his first mission which was a six-day journey by horse away from the place where the bishop was, he wrote that "to see another baptized man, I must look at myself in the mirror".  Then he set up six parishes, built many churches in stone and chapels in wood, schools and hospitals, orphanages and residences; he cleared out forests to make paddy fields and irrigation canals, streets and new villages, he taught the tribal people more modern agricultural methods to produce enough rice and vegetables. Clemente was the authentic missionary at the service of the poor and the outcast, committed to the educational and social fields, capable of giving life to his people but also, first and foremost, to be a witness and proclaimer of Jesus Christ through his life.