A

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez: 1918-1963: Religious educator

---

When he was beatified and thus placed on the road to sainthood by Pope John Paul II in 2001, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez became the first Caribbean-born—and only the second Latin American—lay individual (not a priest or a member of a religious order) to achieve that rank in the hierarchy of Catholic historical figures. Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican religious educator and writer active in the middle of the twentieth century, left a deep imprint on the island's dominant Catholic religion through his teachings and his exemplary life. Forty years after his death, as he approached beatification, Rodriguez became a focus of Puerto Rican protests against the United States Navy's use of the island of Vieques as a practice bombing range.

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez Santiago, known as Chali or Charlie, was born in the town of Caguas, Puerto Rico, on November 22, 1918. Now a suburb of San Juan, Caguas was then a small town whose residents were mostly poor. The Rodriguez family's house burned down when Rodriguez was six, and he and his four siblings had to move in with a grandmother. The religious impulse ran strong in the family. Rodriguez's brother became a priest in the Benedictine order and its first Puerto Rican-born abbot, and one of his three sisters grew up to be a Carmelite nun. When Rodriguez himself was four, his mother found him lying on his back in the courtyard of the family house, looking skyward and praying to God to come and get him.

Deeply Committed to Spirituality and Learning

Rodriguez entered the Catholic School of Caguas when he was six, by which time he could already read and write in Spanish and to some degree in English. He maintained a lifelong friendship with the Sisters of Notre Dame who operated the school, and he began to think of devoting his life to a religious calling. When he graduated from the school in 1932 he received the Medal of Religion award. His characteristic courage had also shown itself in the secular sphere, however: he stepped in when his one-year-old cousin was attacked by a police dog and stopped the attack.

Some of Rodriguez's family members blamed the shock of that incident for the beginnings of his lifelong stomach problems, which developed in his second semester at Gautier Benítez High School in Caguas. His schooling was interrupted several times before he finally graduated in 1939. His ailment was diagnosed as ulcerative colitis, a serious illness that left him prey to high fevers and other incapacitating symptoms. Rodriguez worked as an office clerk during World War II and in 1946 enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico. Unable to cope with the rigors of university study because of his illness, he had to drop out after a year. But it was at this time that Rodriguez's friends began to notice the depth of his commitment to a life of spirituality and learning.

Studying on his own, Rodriguez read about literature, science, and philosophy in addition to religion. He learned, on his own, to play the piano and organ, and he became an avid naturalist and lover of the outdoors. Taking a job as a clerk at the university's agricultural research station, Rodriguez became more and more involved in Catholic lay activities at the school. He began translating religious writings from Latin, French, and English into Spanish, which he favored as a language of worship that could reach ordinary Puerto Ricans (at this time, the Catholic reforms mandating the use of vernacular languages in place of Latin were still years in the future). These efforts coalesced into a magazine, Cultura Cristiana, copies of which Rodriguez ran off on a mimeograph machine at first. He lived simply: over his entire adult life he is said to have owned only one pair of shoes.

Inspired Many in Life and Death

Most of Rodriguez's small office-worker's salary went to finance his religious activities, especially after he began organizing student religious clubs like the Circulo del Liturgía and teaching catechism classes. Rodriguez believed that Puerto Rican Catholic faith was being weakened by the rapid urbanization and industrialization, and he worked tirelessly to start student groups at schools and colleges all over the island. As a result, it was a rare member of the next generation of Puerto Rico's Catholic leadership who had not had contact with Rodriguez personally and been inspired by him. "To me, Charlie was a lay person committed to his faith, who lived his life so convinced of what he believed, and who was a living testimony of what an authentic Christian should be," Mother Rosa María Estrema told the Orlando Sentinel in an interview quoted on the Puerto Rico Herald website.

In the late 1950s Rodriguez was hired to teach full time at the University of Puerto Rico's Catholic Center in San Juan. His message, which stressed that every Catholic had the capacity to do Christ's work and emphasized the importance of direct communication of the faith in terms that ordinary worshippers could comprehend, anticipated in some respects the reforms of church's Vatican II conclave of the 1960s. Before Rodriguez could attend or witness those events, however, his stomach problems worsened into colon cancer. After living and working calmly in the face of severe pain for a time, he died at age 44 on July 13, 1963. "The 13th will be a good day," he had said several days before (according to his biography on the Santaboricua website).

Soon some of Rodriguez's friends and students had formed a group with the aim of carrying forward his work. In 1981 the group's treasurer, chemistry professor Carmen Santana, revealed to other members that she had traveled to Boston to be treated for advanced lymphatic cancer—but that when she arrived, doctors found the cancer had mysteriously disappeared. Santana's husband, she recounted, had said a prayer to Rodriguez for her recovery, which was deemed a miracle Rodriguez had accomplished—one of the preconditions for Catholic sainthood. The group drew inspiration from the designation by Pope John Paul II of 1987 as the Year of the Laity, and in the early 1990s began campaigning in earnest for Rodriguez's beatification.

Beatified by Pope John Paul II

The process, usually measured in decades, occurred with unprecedented speed. After an ecclesiastical investigation involving 38 witnesses to Carmen Santana's recovery, the Vatican agreed that a miracle had occurred. Bits of Rodriguez's exhumed bones and articles of his clothing were designated as relics and flown to Rome, and on April 29, 2001, Rodriguez was beatified (and thus given the title of "Blessed") by the Pope. Upwards of 2,500 Puerto Rican devotees attended the ceremony in Rome, and thousands turned out for subsequent observations in Puerto Rico itself; at one of those, Rodriguez's remains were moved from Humacao back to his hometown of Caguas.

Since he was not a martyr, evidence of two other miracles was required before Rodriguez could be elevated to sainthood. That seemed likely after the Vatican began investigating three more miracles credited to Rodriguez, including the case of a paralyzed woman who visited his home, put on his shoes, and shortly afterward began walking unaided. Another measure of Rodriguez's lasting impact was the role he played in Puerto Rico's ultimately successful efforts to put an end to the Navy bombing practice on Vieques, which was blamed for health problems among the island's poverty-stricken residents.

Demonstrators carried Rodriguez's picture, and San Juan Archbishop Roberto O. González called on Puerto Rican worshippers to pray to Rodriguez for a resolution of the situation. "The sanctity of Blessed Carlos is more powerful than the entire military might of the United States," he was quoted as saying by the Catholic New York website. The Navy suspended the bombing for several days at the time of the beatification ceremonies, an act attributed by many Puerto Ricans to Rodriguez's direct intervention. Strengthening the Catholic Church in Puerto Rico during his lifetime, he had, it seemed, strengthened the society of the island from beyond the grave.

Sources

Periodicals

Associated Press Worldstream, April 12, 2001; April 28, 2002.

Daily News (New York), May 3, 2001, p. Suburban-4.

Orlando Sentinel, April 30, 2001; May 1, 2002, El Sentinel ed.

On-line

"Beato Carlos M. Rodriguez: Apostol Laico de Puerto Rico," Santoboricua, www.santoboricua.com (May 23, 2003).

"San Juan archbishop urges prayers to beatified Puerto Rican in Vieques Strife," Catholic New York, http://cny.org/archive/ld/ld060701.htm (May 28, 2003).

"Thousands of Puerto Ricans Receive Blessed Charlie in His Home Town," Catholic World News, www.cw news.com/Browse/2001/05/15618.htm (May 28, 2003).

—James M. Manheim