NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Francis J. Parater was born on October 10, 1897. He died on February 7, 1920. In the intervening 22 years, the Virginia native graduated at the top of his class from Benedictine High School in Richmond, became an Eagle Scout, discerned a vocation to the priesthood, and began his formation at Belmont Abbey Seminary.
In 1919, the Diocese of Richmond sent Parater to Rome, to continue his seminary studies at the Pontifical North American College (NAC). He began his classes at the college on November 25, 1919. Less than eight weeks later, the pious, popular, -easygoing seminarian contracted rheumatism. That led to rheumatic fever and, by early February, his death.
Just days later, a seminarian friend sorting through Parater’s belongings discovered an Act of Oblation to the Sacred Heart that the seminarian wrote shortly after he arrived at the NAC. It read:
I have nothing to leave or give but my life and this I have consecrated to the Sacred Heart to be used as he wills. I have offered my all for the conversion of -non–Catholics in Virginia. This is what I live for and in case of death what I die for… Since my childhood, I have wanted to die for God and my neighbor. Shall I have this grace? I do not know, but if I go on living, I shall live for this same purpose; every action of my life here is offered to God…I shall be of more service to my diocese in Heaven than I can ever be on earth.
Somehow the Act of Oblation made its way to Pope Benedict XV, who asked the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to publish it. The future Pope Pius XI then saw it and copied it out so he, too, could pray Parater’s oblation.
As the years passed, the Diocese of Richmond held up Parater as a model for all seminarians, and in 2001, it officially opened his cause for sainthood.
