Aleteia: "Camille Costa de Beauregard, a Frenchman soon to be beatified".

Pope Francis has authorized publication of the decree recognizing the miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable Servant of God Camille Costa de Beauregard (1841-1910), the Holy See Press Office reported on March 14, 2024.

Camille Costa de Beauregard, born in Chambéry on February 17, 1841, was the son of a Turin politician and a French aristocrat. After a period of detachment from the faith, he entered the French seminary in Rome in 1863, and was ordained to the priesthood on May 26, 1866 in the Basilica of St. John Lateran. However, he refused to enter the Académie des Nobles Ecclésiastiques, as he was destined to do, preferring to return to his home diocese, where he became vicar of the cathedral in 1867.

The population of the Savoyard town was decimated by a cholera epidemic that left many orphans. The young vicar of the cathedral took charge of them, creating the Bocage orphanage, which welcomed up to 175 boarders. Working with Don Bosco's Salesians, this friend of the Piedmontese saint dedicated himself entirely to caring for orphans, to the point of twice refusing the episcopate.

Shortly after his death in 1910, his reputation for sanctity spread, with the healing of a child who had suffered severe trauma to his eye after a play accident. After a doctor had declared that his eye would be irretrievably lost, a nurse took the initiative of wiping it with a handkerchief that had belonged to Abbé Costa de Beauregard. He was cured, but it was only in 2015 that documentation relating to this episode was found. This discovery has re-launched the cause for the priest's beatification, opened in 1961 at diocesan level.

Camille Costa de Beauregard's heroic virtues were recognized by Pope John Paul II in 1991, and he has since held the title of "Venerable Servant of God". Entrusted to the Salesians of Don Bosco, the Fondation du Bocage perpetuates his work, with a children's home and an agricultural high school bearing his name. The beatification of the Savoyard priest is due to take place in the coming months.

Read the article on www.aleteia.org

By I.Media

published March 14, 2024