Holy Heroes · Stage of the cause
Witnesses of faith
Holy men and women remembered for their faith whose cause for beatification has not been opened. They are not candidates for canonization.
Not everyone whose life inspires faith has a cause for canonization. This page gathers the people on MyHolyHero for whom the Church has not formally opened any cause: among them witnesses of the apparitions at Knock and Beauraing, priests and laypeople remembered in their communities, a pope, a statesman and Catholic writers.
Because no cause is open, these men and women are not Servants of God, Venerables or Blesseds, and they are not candidates for sainthood. The Church has made no judgement on their holiness and no public cult is permitted. We do not present them as anything more than they are: Christians whose example still helps many people to believe and to pray.
You may remember them in your own prayer, thank God for their example and pray for the repose of their souls. Where a prayer appears on their page, it is offered for private devotion only. Opening a cause belongs to the competent bishop, at the request of the faithful; if a cause is opened in future, the person will move to the Servants of God page.
Witnesses of faith on MyHolyHero
No cause for beatification has been opened for the people below. They are not candidates for canonization; they are remembered here for the witness of their lives.
Archdeacon Bartholomew Cavanagh
Parish Priest of Knock during the 1879 apparition, who chronicled hundreds of cures and helped establish Knock as Ireland's foremost Marian shrine.
Canon James O'Neill
Belfast canon and parish priest who founded the Knights of Saint Columbanus in 1915 to defend and promote Catholic faith, education and culture in Ireland.
Cardinal John Francis D'Alton
Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland (1946-1963), classics scholar and Maynooth president who led the Irish Church through the post-war era and the opening of Vatican II.
Monsignor James Horan
Visionary Parish Priest of Knock who built the Basilica, hosted Pope John Paul II in 1979 and dreamed Knock Airport into existence on a 'foggy boggy site' in west Mayo.
Father Slavko Barbarić, O.F.M.
Bosnian-Herzegovinian Franciscan priest, psychotherapist and author who served as a spiritual director at Medjugorje from 1984 until his sudden death in 2000.
Pope Leo XIII
Italian-born Vincenzo Pecci reigned as the 'Social Pope' from 1878-1903, transforming Catholic social teaching with Rerum Novarum and earning the title 'Rosary Pope' for his Marian devotion.
Ellen Organ, 'Little Nellie of Holy God'
Irish child mystic of Cork who, dying of tuberculosis at age four, received Holy Communion before age seven; her story moved Pius X to lower the age for First Communion in 1910.
Father Michael Ross SDB
Cork-born Salesian priest who pioneered Catholic media in Ireland, founding Radio Maria Ireland and serving as director of the Divine Mercy Conference and the Legion of Mary.
Sister Ruth Maria O'Callaghan
Dublin-born Servant Sister of the Home of the Mother who led the order's first Irish community in Roscommon and offered her cancer suffering for the Church before her death at 43.
Father Henry Kowalczyk, SHM
American priest of Polish descent of the Servants of the Home of the Mother who died ministering to a Carmelite community in Amposta, Spain, during the 2020 pandemic.
Elisabeth 'Mamie' Van Keerbergen
Belgian laywoman and Servant of Suffering, spiritual mother to Fr Rafael Alonso and the priests of the Home of the Mother, who offered her long illness for the sanctification of clergy.
Daniel O'Connell
Kerry-born lawyer and statesman known as 'The Liberator', whose peaceful campaign won Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and reshaped the place of Catholics in the British Isles.
Father Patrick Murray CSsR
Irish Redemptorist who served as Superior General of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer for thirty-eight years (1909-1947), the longest tenure in the order's history.
Mary Beirne (later Mary O'Connell)
The principal eyewitness of the 1879 Knock apparition; her detailed deposition described the three figures, the altar, the Lamb and cross. She lived until 1936 and reaffirmed her testimony on her deathbed.
Patrick Hill
Schoolboy and one of the principal witnesses of the 1879 Knock apparition; his deposition is among the most detailed and is regularly quoted in accounts of what the villagers saw.
Maria Valtorta
Italian Catholic writer and visionary, bedridden for decades in Viareggio, author of 'The Poem of the Man-God'; her writings have not been recognised by the Church as supernatural.
Gilberte Degeimbre
Youngest of the five Beauraing visionaries and the last surviving witness; she died in 2015 at age 91 after a lifetime of quiet testimony at the sanctuary.
Liam Coyne
Irish solicitor and district justice who, with his wife Judy, founded the Knock Shrine Society in 1935 to promote and organise pilgrimage at the Marian shrine in County Mayo.
Judy Coyne (Dame Judy Coyne)
Irish lay Catholic and co-founder of the Knock Shrine Society; the first Irish woman ever made a Dame of the Order of St Sylvester for her work at Knock.
Jim Browne
Irish lay evangelist from Killadoon, County Mayo, who turned a personal conversion at Medjugorje into thirty years of leading others there. Founder of the Ark of Mir apostolate.
Reggie Donnelly
Belfast layman who founded Our Lady Queen of Peace Pilgrimages in 1986 and led thousands of pilgrims to Medjugorje while raising millions for Mother's Village orphanage.
Father Patrick Aloysius Murray
Irish Catholic priest and dogmatic theologian who taught at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, defending papal authority and ecclesiology before Vatican I.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Oxford philologist and author of The Lord of the Rings; a daily communicant whose mother’s death as a Catholic convert and lifelong devotion to the Blessed Sacrament shaped a profoundly Catholic literary vision.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
English journalist, novelist and lay theologian — best known as G. K. Chesterton — who entered the Catholic Church in 1922. A giant of a man whose joyful, paradoxical faith fills books like Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, and The Innocence of Father Brown, where argument becomes hospitality and reason an act of thanksgiving.
Father Hugh Mullan
Belfast curate shot dead in the Ballymurphy Massacre of August 1971 as he went, holding up a white cloth, to give the last rites to a wounded parishioner.
Father Noel Fitzpatrick
Belfast curate shot dead at Springhill in July 1972 while going to minister to the wounded, eleven months after his fellow curate Fr Hugh Mullan was killed the same way.
Frequently asked questions
Are the people on this page candidates for sainthood?
No. No cause for beatification and canonization has been opened for them, so they are not candidates. They are remembered here as witnesses of faith.
Can I pray to someone who has no open cause?
Privately, yes: you may ask God for graces remembering their example, and pray for them. Public veneration is not permitted, and a private prayer implies no judgement of the Church.
Why are they on MyHolyHero?
Because their lives still help many people to pray and to live their faith. Each page says clearly that no cause has been opened.
How could a cause be opened?
Any member of the faithful or group of the faithful can ask the bishop of the diocese where the person died to open a cause, normally at least five years after death. The bishop decides, after consulting the bishops of the region and obtaining the Holy See's nihil obstat.