Who is felix varela

In , Father Varela was elected to represent Cuba in the Spanish legislature. Varela recommended that Spanish colonies in Latin America be considered independent. He also asked for Cuban self-rule and an end to slavery. Two years later, marked as an enemy of the autocratic government of Ferdinand VII, the Spanish Crown condemned him to death.

Before he could be arrested, he escaped and made his way to New York, where he arrived in December On February 25 of , he died in Havana after battling asthma throughout his life.

Members of the Jovenes Ilustrados transferred him there in an attempt to improve his condition, but to no avail. His remains were then sent to Saint Augustin, Florida, and was finally relocated to Havana years later. By this time he was mostly blind and his hands shook too much to write, but his sharp mind continued to impress parishioners until his death in Sympathetic Cubans erected a Neoclassical mortuary chapel with furnishings imported from the homeland.

In , when Bishop Augustin Verot died, he was interred in the chapel as well. Admirers in the Catholic Church have started campaigning for Varela to be declared a saint; in the Vatican declared him Venerable, the first step in the canonization process.

There are several monuments to Varela, in St. Augustine and elsewhere. The mortuary chapel in Tolomato Cemetery where he was interred until is the main memorial to his legacy in the First Coast. A historical plaque is nearby, and Tolomato is open to visitors the third Saturday of every month. Ever the parish priest, Varela counted as one of his closest friends, Father Alessandro Muppiatti, a Carthusian monk who left Italy in search of political asylum in New York.

Exhausted from pastoral and administrative duties, and emotionally spent from his energetic and passionate defense of the Church in the wake of a growing and virulent anti-Catholicism in the United States, Father Varela returned to St. Augustine in There, Varela took as his residence a small wooden shed adjacent to St.

Augustine Cathedral school, living in sickness, obscurity and crushing poverty. Augustine and reinterred at the University of Havana. In , the Congregation for the Cause of Saints charged the Archdiocese of Havana with the investigations into the heroic sanctity of Father Varela. Thomas J.