Apparently Pope Benedict XVI will soon be beatifying someone by the name of Fr. Gabino Olaso Zabala. One problem -- Fr. Zabala seems to have participated in the torture of a fellow priest:
According to written testimony from the victim, Olaso participated in the 1896 torture of a Filipino priest named Fr. Mariano Dacanay, who was suspected of sympathy for anti-Spanish revolutionaries. Dacanay’s own account asserts that Olaso and a handful of other Augustinians encouraged guards who were administering the torture, and that at one point Olaso himself kicked Dacanay in the head, hard enough to leave the suffering priest semi-conscious.
Historians generally regard Dacanay’s testimony as credible. Augustinian Fr. Fernando Rojo, the Rome-based postulator for the cause of Olaso and the other Augustinian martyrs, told NCR Oct. 10 that he does not see “any reason to doubt the basic historical accuracy of the facts” contained in Dacanay’s account.
Needless to say, this raises some interesting issues.
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The controversial Spanish Fr. Gabino Olaso Zabala who tortured a Filipino priest is no difference to that of Spanish Mother Francisca de Fuenetes of the Dominican Sisters of Siena who discriminated and barred Filipino women from entering the Dominican convent in Manila because of their race. Her cause was opened in the early 2000.
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