A woman holds a figure and a photograph of the Venezuelan doctor José Gregorio Hernández.Miguel Gutiérrez / EFE
A pious Catholic doctor, laureate in France and a man of firm creationist convictions, he founded the chair of bacteriology at the Central University of Venezuela in 1899.
He died more than a century ago - hit by one of the few automobiles that circulated in Caracas back in 1919 - and since then the Creole anti-clerical scorn has been suggesting that Dr. José Gregorio Hernández has not been canonized once and for all by the Vatican because the application file was drawn up with carelessness and carelessness by priests who were extremely chambones and sloppy.
Devout but distracted cock suckers;
in short, Venezuelans.
In reality, what happened is that Dr. Hernández did not accredit miracles sufficiently attended by the so-called “Congregation for the Causes of Saints” of the Holy See.
Since the end of the 18th century, the norms have been changing: there are flats with this miracle thing because the devil can also do wonders to deceive us.
Today, to be considered holy your batting average must be not only very high, but convincingly infused by divine grace.
And the best proof of an effective connection with the Supreme — the only true one — is a cure that inexplicably defies all medical prognosis.
That moment came to an end for Dr. Hernández in March 2017, when a 10-year-old girl was seriously wounded in the head by a firearm during an assault in a remote Llanera town.
Already almost completely bled, after a four-hour river odyssey and presenting a loss of brain mass, the girl was able to enter the emergency room in a deprived provincial hospital whose neurosurgeon also took 48 hours to arrive.
He was in such a critical trance that surgeons told his parents that if he survived, he would safely and forever lose mobility, sight, and speech.
His mother, devoted to the doctor, then urged his intercession.
Immediately, Dr. Hernández went to work.
The girl not only survived the difficult intervention, but her complete recovery has left the medical, interdisciplinary team of the Congregation speechless.
It is the first miracle of the doctor recognized by the Vatican and has earned him beatification.
That is to say, he has not yet entered the
hall
of Fame of the great holiness leagues;
He is not yet a Vatican saint which his devotees do not care about.
José Gregorio, as we familiarly call him, has managed to sneak into the altars that anthropologists call syncretic and where he rubs shoulders with deities of the Santero pantheon such as Changó or Obatalá, with the Afro-descendant Simón Bolívar, with Maria Lionza - a nocturnal divinity, exalted by Rubén Blades , who wanders through the forests of Yaracuy, riding naked on a tapir—, with the “soul of Taguapire” —the banshee where they exist—, with the so-called powerful “Negro Felipe”, with Carlos Gardel himself, with the virgin de Coromoto —Venezuelan invocation of the mother of God, the country's official patron saint—, with Che Guevara and Don Juan del Dinero and, lately, with the holy hitmen of the so-called “malandra court” presided over by “San Ismaelito”, a violent Caracas robber killed by the police, along with his girlfriend, at the beginning of the century.This scandalous promiscuity more than explains the resistance of the Vatican.
After very well forty years, José Gregorio, a fervent Christian, opted in 1908 for what San Benito called the
straight road.
He resigned his chair, said goodbye to his clientele and his readers as a columnist on rugged cultural issues in the newspaper El Universal, and entered the Carthusian monastery in Lucca, Italy.
It did not go well.
The cold, the harsh rules of the Carthusian order and surprising health ailments added to the judgment that the superiors of the order made of his character: monastic life, they thought, was simply not for him.
Jose Gregorio was slow to convince himself of this and still tried unsuccessfully again.
Later he wanted to be ordained a priest in Rome, without success.
In the end, he returned to Venezuela to become a doctor for the poor.
And it was in the Caracas of the needy, under the brutal dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, where the doctor quietly carved out his Samaritan vocation and a solid reputation, not only for sanctity, which is to say, but also as a wise, efficient and saving doctor. .
The influenza pandemic of 1918 - the Spanish flu - which in a Venezuela of two and a half million inhabitants killed 23,000 people in three months, most of them in the capital, consecrated him as the doctor who excused himself from being part of the Relief Board, made up of the best doctors of his generation, because he was too busy going into unhealthy neighborhoods of bahareque and wild cane, assisting the plagued.
No one knows for sure how many Venezuelans have already died victims of the covid-19 pandemic.
Maduro's tyranny has systematically falsified the numbers of infections and deaths.
Trying to hide the effects of his deadly and criminal indolence, Maduro relentlessly pursues anyone who disseminates figures.
The Venezuelan Medical Federation reports, however, that only 0.3% of a population of 28 million inhabitants have been vaccinated.
The medical profession and health unions already report 500,000 deaths since the emergency began.
The most lethal rebound in the pandemic recorded so far decimates a country without electricity, running water or automotive fuel.
Without vaccines or credible vaccination plan in sight, Venezuelans, believers, agnostics or atheists, have only two words on their lips: José Gregorio.
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