Bl. Cristobal of Saint Catherine

Cristóbal Fernández Valladolid was born in 1638 at Mérida, Spain, into a humble family, and worked in the fields as a boy. He worked in a hospital run by the Brothers of St John of God and was ordained a priest at twenty-four.

He served as chaplain to an infantry battalion, hearing soldiers' confessions and caring for the wounded. Shaken by the horrors of war, he spent two years as a hermit in the Bañuelo hills. He then begged day and night in the streets of Córdoba for the poor and the sick.

He founded a Franciscan-inspired congregation, the Hospitaller Brothers and Sisters of Jesus of Nazareth, with a hospital in Córdoba, where the sick were cared for free of charge. During an epidemic he kept nursing the sick, caught the disease himself and died in 1690, a day before his fifty-second birthday. He was beatified in Córdoba in 2013.

Cristobal of Saint Catherine was beatified in 2013.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.