Ceferino Namuncurá

Ceferino "Morales" Namuncurá (the Venerable Namuncurá) (August 26, 1886 - May 11, 1905) was a religious student and the object of a Roman Catholic cultus and veneration in northern Patagonia.

He was born in Chimpay, in Valle Medio, Río Negro Province, Argentina, the sixth child of Rosario Burgos and a Mapuche cacique, Manuel Namuncurá. He was baptized by a missionary priest, Domingo Milanesio, at the age of eight.

Namuncurá's early years were spent by the Río Negro river, and it was here that he allegedly miraculously survived a fall into the river. He attended the San Fernando school, and then the Pio IX technical school, in Almagro, Buenos Aires, where he was given a Catholic education by the Salesians of Don Bosco.

Namuncurá started studies for priesthood, yet he became increasingly sick with a cough (later diagnosed as tuberculosis). In 1904, he departed for Italy together with Monseñor Antonio Cagliero, who was to become an Archbishop. Pope Pius X received them on September, after which Namuncurá moved to Turin to continue his religious education. He became ill during the Italian winter and was taken to Rome, were he died a few weeks later.

In 1924, his remains where returned to Argentina, where they now rest in Fortín Mercedes, in the south of Buenos Aires Province.

In Chimpay a very small chapel has been erected to Namuncurá, where believers from Río Negro Province and beyond pray for his intercession. In 1945, a request for his beatification was made to the Vatican. Since 1972, Ceferino was officially considered venerable, the first Argentine to be so. Pope Benedict XVI finally decreed his beatification on 6 July 2007.