Bl. Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi

Iwene Tansi was born in 1903 at Igboezunu in southern Nigeria, an Igbo. He went to a mission school and was baptised at nine with the name Michael. Against his parents' wishes he entered the seminary in 1925, and he was ordained a priest in Onitsha cathedral in 1937.

As parish priest at Dunukofia and then Aguleri he did wide-ranging missionary work. His bishop wanted a monastery in the diocese, so in 1950 Father Tansi went to England and entered the Trappist abbey of Mount St Bernard in Leicestershire. A Trappist is a monk of a strict Cistercian order. He took the name Cyprian and made his final vows in 1956.

In 1964, as he was about to go to Cameroon to lead a new monastic community, he suffered an aortic aneurysm and died in hospital in Leicester. John Paul II beatified him in Onitsha in 1998; he was Nigeria's first Blessed.

Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi was beatified in 1998.

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