Saint Donizetti Tavares de Lima

Donizetti Tavares de Lima (3 January 1882 – 16 June 1961) was a Brazilian Catholic priest. Tavares de Lima was ordained to the priesthood in 1908 and served as a parish priest in various churches across Brazil but was noted for his extensive work at the San Antonio church in Tambaú where he lived most of his life. He was famed for his reported miracles and other wonders that began around the 1920s and continued until his death. But this produced some consternation in the local bishop who, in 1955, ordered him to give one final blessing to the public and then to retreat to normal parish duties with no more talk of miracles or healings. He did so in obedience and continued to exercise his functions as a parish priest until his death. The priest had been hailed as a saint his lifetime, and efforts to launch a beatification process started in 1991. The cause opened towards the decade's end and he became titled as a Servant of God. Pope Francis confirmed his heroic virtue on 9 October 2017 and named him as Venerable. Francis also signed a decree on 6 April 2019 that recognized a miracle attributed to his intercession, which made it possible for him to be beatified in Tambaú on 23 November 2019. Donizetti Tavares de Lima was born in 1882 in Minas Gerais to Tristão and Francisca Cândida Tavares de Lima. He had eight brothers. His father worked in law and his mother worked as a professor. In his childhood in 1886 the Tavares de Limas family relocated to Franca in São Paulo where Donizetti attended school and learned music. In 1894 he commenced his ecclesial studies where he soon became the organist at the institute where he studied and later started to teach music to the seminarians. He had asked his father for permission to become a priest. In 1897 he moved to a college to further his education but later returned to teach music to seminarians.