Saint Ezequiel Moreno

He was born at Alfaro, in La Rioja, on April 9, 1848, the third child of Félix Moreno, a tailor, and Josefa Díaz, both poor and both devout. ²⁴ Martínez Cuesta, his order's historian, writes that as a child of the people his boyhood has almost no history; he went to the public school, sang in the town's chapel choir and served as altar boy and sacristan for the Dominican nuns. ⁴ He wanted from childhood to preach in the Philippines, the Dicastery says, having heard the stories of the Recollect missionaries there. ²

Following his older brother Eustaquio, he took the habit at the Recollect friary of Monteagudo, in Navarre, on September 21, 1864, as Brother Ezequiel of the Virgin of the Rosary, and made his vows the next year, with the oath to go to the missions. ²⁴ He studied theology at Marcilla. ² In 1869 he sailed with seventeen other friars, reached Manila on February 10, 1870, and was ordained a priest there in June 1871: on the third, according to the Dicastery, or the second, according to Martínez Cuesta. ²⁴

His first posting was Mindoro, beside his brother. ² In 1872, at twenty-four, he went as missionary and military chaplain with a Spanish government expedition to Palawan, and fever sent him back to Manila. ² He was then parish priest of Calapan and vicar provincial of the Recollects on Mindoro, and from 1876 to 1885 served on Luzon, at Las Piñas, at Santo Tomás in Batangas, as preacher of the Manila friary, as parish priest of Santa Cruz, and as administrator of the order's estate at Imus. ²⁴

Martínez Cuesta describes the ordinary work of a parish priest of the time: daily Mass, catechism for children, the Sunday homily, the sick, parish associations, and long trips to Christians scattered across fields and rivers without any civil or religious services. ⁴ On Palawan and Mindoro he also came into contact with peoples who had not heard the Gospel. ²⁴

In 1885 he was named prior of Monteagudo, the novitiate where the order formed its missionaries. ²⁴ Martínez Cuesta says that during the famine of 1887 he fed some four hundred people a day at the friary door. ⁴

When his term ended he volunteered to restore the Recollects in Colombia, where the province had shrunk to a handful of friars scattered in parishes. ²⁴ He left Spain at the end of 1888 at the head of six volunteers and reached Bogotá on January 2, 1889. ² His first aim was to restore religious observance, and his second the old Recollect missions of Casanare, in decline since Colombian independence. ²⁴ He went through them himself by mule, across its plains and steep mountains. ²

In 1893 the Holy See made Casanare a vicariate apostolic, the first in Colombia, and named him its vicar and titular bishop of Pinara; he was ordained bishop in May 1894. ²⁴ He placed his sixteen missionaries at Arauca, Támara, Orocué and Chámeza, opened orphanages for the children of the Guahibo and Sáliva peoples, and wrote, the Dicastery says, that he would gladly have ended his days there among its hardships. ²⁴ He was there less than two years. ⁴

He was named bishop of Pasto in 1895, and could not reach his diocese until June 1896. ²⁴ When the news reached him, the Dicastery says, he asked himself, "Have I become unworthy of suffering for God, my Lord?" (translated from the Italian). ² His diocese covered some 160,000 square kilometers; he visited even its most remote parts, pressed parish priests never to skip the Sunday homily, liked to sit in on catechism "on any seat and sometimes on the floor," and visited the hospital and the orphanage each week (translated from the Spanish). ⁴

His diocese bordered Ecuador, and there, in Martínez Cuesta's phrase, he became the symbol of a cause: the Church's fight with liberalism. ²⁴ The Dicastery describes humiliations, mockery, slander and persecution from those who wanted to strike at the Church, and even abandonment by his immediate superiors. ² In 1898, during a controversy over him, he offered Leo XIII his resignation to spare the Holy See trouble and to protect the reputation of a fellow bishop; the pope refused it. ² The same year, Martínez Cuesta says, he offered his diocese to the religious communities expelled from Ecuador. ⁴

Martínez Cuesta, writing for his order, presents the conflict as part of his pastoral zeal: he saw liberalism as a body of ideas and methods opposed to Christianity, drawn from the encyclicals of Pius IX and Leo XIII. ⁴ He adds plainly that his upbringing, the anticlerical tradition of Colombian liberalism and the hostility of the Ecuadorian government inclined him to read Rome's directions restrictively. ⁴ John Paul II, at the canonization, spoke of a bishop who preached, heard confessions, taught the catechism and cared for the sick, and who, where he could not go in person, made himself present through publications, the press and personal letters. ³

In June 1905 he noticed malignant sores in his nose; by October it was confirmed as cancer, and he said, "I have put myself in God's hands. He will do his holy will" (translated from the Spanish). ²⁴ He did not want to leave his diocese, and went only when his clergy ordered him to, in December 1905. ²⁴ Too weak to go on to Barcelona, he was operated on in Madrid on February 14, 1906, for three hours. ⁴ Martínez Cuesta records that the surgeons removed the tumors from both nasal passages, with the vomer and the ethmoid bone, which required removing the whole nose, and then scraped the soft palate and the roof of the mouth. ⁴

The two sources explain the pain differently. The Dicastery says he refused anesthesia to be more like Christ. ² Martínez Cuesta says that some of the cutting was done with him fully conscious because "the special situation of his lesion" made it advisable to suspend the anesthesia (translated from the Spanish). ⁴ Both say he bore it without a complaint. ²⁴ A second operation followed on March 29. ⁴

Knowing he would not recover, he went back to Monteagudo, saying, "I am going to die beside my mother," meaning the image of the Virgin of the Way in its church (translated from the Spanish). ²⁴ He died there on August 19, 1906, his eyes on the crucifix. ²⁴ His remains lie in a chapel built for them in that church after his beatification; Martínez Cuesta says his body is incorrupt. ²⁴ The diocesan process opened at Pasto in 1910, and Paul VI beatified him on November 1, 1975. ²⁴

ACI Prensa calls him "patron of those ill with cancer," and says the two cures approved for his beatification and canonization were of patients with terminal cancer, one of them a woman with breast cancer (translated from the Spanish). ⁵ The Dicastery does not use the word patron, but says that very many cures are attributed to his intercession, especially of malignant tumors, and that it would seem he has a particular feeling for the victims of a disease he suffered himself. ² In 1976 the Recollect Sebastián López de Murga founded the San Ezequiel Moreno Foundation in Colombia to visit the poorest of the sick, especially those with cancer. ⁴⁶

His feast is August 19, the day he died. The Roman Martyrology enters on that day, at Monteagudo in Navarre, "the anniversary of the death" of the bishop of Pasto of the Augustinian Recollects, "who in the Philippine Islands and in South America spent his whole life proclaiming the Gospel" (translated from the Italian). ¹ He is not on the calendar of the dioceses of the United States. ¹

Most of his life was the ordinary work of a priest: catechism, confessions, the sick, the parish, and long journeys to people nobody else visited. ³⁴ Martínez Cuesta says he gave five to six hours a day to prayer, and that more than four hundred of his letters of spiritual direction survive. ⁴

He was also a combative bishop in a bitter political fight, and the sources do not hide it. ²⁴ His own order's historian says that his upbringing and his circumstances inclined him to read Rome's directions restrictively. ⁴ The page sets that beside the rest of the life rather than explaining it away.

His last year is the hardest part of the story. A man who had spent his life visiting the sick spent it being cut open, and the people who now pray to him are often those facing the same disease. ²⁴⁵ He did not explain his suffering. What he said, when he learned what he had, was that he had put himself in God's hands. ⁴