(Prot. No. 1120)
San Rafael Arnáiz Barón was born in Burgos on 9 April 2011. An architecture student in Madrid, he discovered the monastery of San Isidro de Dueñas in 1930, and in 1934 he abandoned his university studies and a promising future to embrace the monastic life. After a few months, struck by a diabetic crisis, he had to return to his family and in Oviedo lived through the terrible days of the Asturian Revolution of October 1934. He returned to the monastery in 1936 as a simple oblate, that is, a monk without public vows, and from a legal standpoint the lowest-ranking member of the community. For him, monastic life alternated with stays with his family due to health problems. At the end of 1937, he decided to return definitively to the Trappist monastery, aware of the risk this would entail for his life. He died of a diabetic coma on 26 April 1938, at the age of 27. In a short time, he walked an exceptional path of faith, love, humility and prayer, which, along the Way of the Cross, led him to an exemplary contemplative and mystical experience. His letters and diaries have been widely circulated. On 19 August 1989 in Santiago de Compostela, the Saint Pope John Paul II held him up as a model for young people throughout the world and beatified him on 27 September 1992. He was canonised by Pope Benedict XVI on 11 October 2009.
