Bl. Domingo Iturrate Zubero

Domingo Iturrate Zubero was born in 1901 in Dima, near Bilbao, in the Basque Country. He joined the Trinitarians, an order founded in the Middle Ages to ransom Christian captives, and took the name Domingo of the Blessed Sacrament.

He studied philosophy and theology in Rome and was ordained there. He hoped to go to the missions, but he caught tuberculosis and died in the Trinitarian house at Belmonte, Spain, in 1927, aged twenty-five. Three months before his death he wrote that what matters is that God's will be done, whether God takes a person young or gives them great works to do. John Paul II beatified him in 1983.

As a novice he went through what his biographers call a "dark night of the spirit", a period when prayer felt empty and God seemed absent. He stayed the course.

The Church has declared Domingo Iturrate Zubero Blessed.

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