Bl. Ivan Merz

Ivan Merz was born in Banja Luka, Bosnia, in 1896. He wanted to be a teacher. During the First World War he served for nearly two years on the Italian front, and the horror he saw there turned him back to God. In his diary he wrote that it would be terrible if the war had no meaning for him.

After the war he studied in Vienna and Paris and earned a doctorate in literature. He taught French and German at a school in Zagreb. He gave most of his free time to the Catholic youth movement in Croatia, organizing groups for young people and writing about the liturgy, the Church's public worship.

He died in 1928 at the age of thirty-one, after an illness. John Paul II beatified him in Banja Luka in 2003.

Ivan Merz was beatified in 2003.

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