CCW and Catholic Daughters Christmas party

Holy Redeemer Council of Catholic Women and Catholic Daughters will have their Christmas party on Monday. Potluck starts after the 5:30 p.m. Mass. Bring a dish to pass. The night includes fun, games, and food. The party will be located in Carlin Hall.

Bishops support 3 for sainthood; 2 are from Louisiana

LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) — A Louisiana girl often called “The Little Cajun Saint” has been moved a second step toward actual sainthood, along with a teacher who evangelized door to door in Cajun country and a man who worked for decades at a Hansen’s disease colony in Hawaii.

During its November meeting in Baltimore, the U.S. Conference of Bishops held voice votes to advance the cause of beatification and canonization of Charlene Richard of Richard, August “Nonco” Pelafigue of Arnaudville, and Ira Barnes Dutton, who took the name Joseph Dutton when he converted to Catholicism.

“It was a joyful moment to hear a unanimous voice vote supporting our pursuit of both causes for beatifying and canonizing both local parishioners of our Diocese,” Bishop Douglas Deshotel of the Diocese of Lafayette said in a news release.

Now that both their local parishes and the bishops have found them worthy, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints will document the candidates’ lives and investigate any miracles attributed to them, the diocese said.

Richard was 12 when she died of leukemia in 1959. Pelafigue died in 1977 at age 89. Dutton, 87, died in 1931.

Another candidate from the Diocese of Lafayette — a priest who volunteered as a military chaplain during World War II and died while a prisoner of war in 1944 — was advanced during the bishops’ spring meeting, the diocese’s news release noted.