This article from Agenzia Fides and written by by Antonella Prenna tells of the great role that Cardinal Gantin has played in the development of the Church in Africa. It also highlights his close links with the Society of African Missions.
Rome (Agenzia Fides) – The main airport in Benin, his homeland, is named after Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, who died in 2008. Seventeen years after his death, it was the Bishops of the Episcopal Conference of Lazio, on 14 January 2025, who approved the process for opening the beatification and canonization process. And it was the Vicariate of Rome that issued the Edict calling on its diocesan Tribunal to “collect all information from which one can in any way derive elements that speak for or against the reputation of holiness of the said Servant of God”.
The Process for the canonization of the Beninese cardinal, starting with the actors involved, thus highlights one of the traits that characterized the entire human and Christian adventure of this “African giant”, as John Paul II called him: his passionate identification with the Church of Rome, which nourished his missionary heart and also embraced his love for his homeland.
“Undoubtedly, the main ambition of a Christian is not to be beatified or canonized, but to be faithful, to be a person of faith in Christ, who renders Christ present and bears witnesses to him in every aspect and area of this earthly life. This is an obligation for the Christian “charged with mission”, for one who has received the command to proclaim the Gospel,” said the Cardinal in his commentary on the Pope’s missionary prayer intention for November 2004 (Fides, 28/10/2004).
“With great gratitude to the Successor of Peter, I look to the future, on the eve of new horizons, to always carry Rome in my heart, just as I have tried to bring the Church of my country to Rome, the city of Peter,” he said in the homily he gave at the tomb of Saint Peter under the high Altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on 3 December 2002, in which Gantin once again stressed that the missionary, even if he comes from a particular nation, must have a “Roman heart” that is not so much related to the earthly “civitas” but rather to the Eternal City, that is, to the Pope, the Successor of Peter.
A missionary in body and soul, Cardinal Gantin understood the mission as the key to understanding his personal existence and his priesthood.
In an interview with Joseph Ballong, the director of the Franco-African program of Vatican Radio, who died on February 1st of this year, he expresses well how his positive response to Paul VI’s request to serve at the head of the Roman Curia profoundly marked his life and determined his vocation as a world missionary. It was a matter of saying “yes” to the call of the Holy Father, following in the footsteps of the missionaries who gave the same response, to evangelize Africa. For Cardinal Gantin, being Christian means first and foremost being a missionary, that is, becoming a true witness to the Good News of salvation and making Jesus present in every culture and every situation.
Speaking in Ronco Scrivia (Italy), the birthplace of Father Francesco Borghero of the Society of African Missions, one of the missionaries who began to preach the Gospel in his native Benin, he said: “I am deeply moved to bring you, in my humble person, a sign of the gratitude that the Church of Africa feels for the missionaries who, renouncing every human satisfaction, no matter how legitimate, have placed their health, their physical and mental strength, every strength, talent and opportunity at the service of the evangelization of Africa, enduring enormous difficulties and sacrifices. I do not forget that my own belonging to the Catholic Church and the choice of my life in the Christian faith are certainly linked to this evangelization in Dahomey, today’s Benin”. The surname Gantin means “iron tree of the African land”, and his people and his land were and are always present in his life.
The deep bond of the future Blessed Gantin with the Society of African Missions is confirmed by testimonies of people who shared important moments and fundamental aspects of their lives with him.
“It was June 21, 1975, a Saturday. A year later, Lorenzo Mandirola and I, who studied at the same seminary, will be ordained priests for the Mission ‘ad Gentes’,” said Father Sandro Lafranconi (SMA), who had received the deacon’s ordination from Cardinal Gantin,” the missionary currently working in Polynesia told Fides.
“Bishop Bernardin Gantin, who had already been called to Rome to work in the Roman Curia, was invited to our SMA provincial house in Genoa to ordain us deacons. If his presence at our ordination to the diaconate was of particular importance, it was even more important for him to come to Genoa and, on this occasion, to travel as far as Ronco, a small village in the Scrivia Valley, behind the Ligurian capital. In fact, it was from this very village that Father Francesco Borghero, a member of the SMA, who was barely 30 years old at the time, set out at the end of 1800. Father Borghero was one of the first to arrive in Dahomey, now Benin, to bring the first mustard seed of the Gospel. A hundred years later, Bernardin Gantin was one of the fruits of the now vigorous plant of the Catholic Church, which had taken root and borne branches and leaves, and even fruit. A son of the soil of Benin, fruit of the tree of the Gospel planted there a century earlier.”
“I clearly remember the discretion, the silence and the recollection that could hardly contain his deep emotion when, at the end of Sunday Mass in the small church of Ronco Scrivia, he stopped to pray at the tomb of Father Borghero, now in a side chapel of the church itself,” said Father Sandro. “And he repeated that for him that day was the grateful and joyful return of a son to his father’s house. It was a loving and simple meeting with the ‘grand vieux’ who had brought the Gospel to his African homeland. If I am a Christian today and if my country knows the Risen Christ, I owe it to Father Borghero and my spiritual family of the Society of African Missions. And even if these are not his exact words, I take responsibility for having heard them spoken from his heart and from his lips.”
“A cheerful, simple, intelligent and cultured personality,” recalls Father Lafranconi. “His character and way of presenting himself, his discreet kindness and spontaneous directness prevented even the veil of racial differences and misunderstanding from creeping into his encounters. A natural bridge-builder between cultures and peoples, he became an outstanding representative of the Church because he managed to be discreet, modest and sincere.
How can we forget that Pope John Paul II gave him his papal cross to represent him in Lourdes when he was unable to travel there in that dramatic year in which he was the victim of the attack in St. Peter’s Square?”
“Ordained deacon by Bishop Gantin, I am always speechless when I realize that one of the most important moments of my life was marked by a person whose virtues are comparable to those of the saints,” concludes Father Lafranconi, with emotion.
Another memory of the “African giant” is that of Father Lorenzo Rapetti, currently Provincial Secretary of the Society of African Missions in Genoa. “I came into contact with Cardinal Gantin in the 1970s when, as a missionary in the Ivory Coast in the Lakota mission, I was asked by the Provincial of the Society of African Missions in Paris to commission an ivory carver to carve and deliver to the Cardinal an altar in solid iroko wood, similar to the one he admired in the house of the Society of African Missions in Paris. He liked this altar and used it throughout his stay in Rome, first in San Callisto and then in the Vatican, to celebrate daily Mass. He also took it with him when he returned to Benin in 2002, where the altar still stands in the small chapel of the house where he spent his last years in Cotonou,” the missionary told Fides.
“The Cardinal,” Father Rapetti recalls, “was ideally part of the SMA family, but this affiliation also became concrete on June 25, 1993, when he was named an honorary member of the Society of African Missions. When he was named Cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1977, the then Superior General of the Society of African Missions, Father Joseph Hardy, put the episcopal ring of the Order’s founder, De Marion-Brésillac, on his finger, which he returned when he returned to Benin,” the missionary said. “I knew of his connection with the Italian province of the Society of African Missions through the Ligurian missionary Father Francesco Borghero, who came from Ronco Scrivia and whom Gantin considered the real founder of the ecclesiastical mission in what was then Dahomey, later Benin,” Father Lorenzo continued. “I had the opportunity to get to know his talents and his personality better during the ten years I spent in Rome as general treasurer and in other areas of responsibility. He was often with us in the Generalate on important occasions, such as December 8th, the anniversary of the founding of the Society of the Society of African Missions (1856) and June 25, the anniversary of the death of our founder, Melchior-Marie De Marion Brésillac. I sometimes met him in Marino, near Rome, where he went to the Sisters of Notre Dame de la Apostle, who were also present in his life, and he fondly remembered the sisters who had accompanied and supported him during his early years of primary school and when he entered the seminary.”
Gantin’s link with the Society of African Missions extends from his education at the Sainte Jeanne d’Arc minor seminary and later at the Saint Gall major seminary, always under the watchful eye of the missionaries of the Society of African Missions, to his ordination as a priest by the laying on of hands by Archbishop Louis Parisot (SMA), whose successor he was to become at the head of the Archdiocese of Cotonou.
In April 1999, Gantin, who was Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops from 1984 to 1998, had spoken clearly in an interview with the monthly magazine 30Giorni to condemn the practice of transferring bishops from one diocese to another and to express his appreciation for the old discipline which tended to consider the successors of the Apostles as “stable” and permanent in the episcopal sees to which they were destined. “On his appointment,” the Cardinal said in the interview, “the bishop must be a father and a pastor for the people of God. One is always a father. Once a bishop is appointed to a particular see, he must generally and in principle stay there for ever. Let that be clear. The relationship between a bishop and a diocese is also depicted as a marriage and a marriage, according to the spirit of the Gospel, is indissoluble. The new bishop must not make other personal plans. There may well be serious reasons, very serious reasons for a decision by the authorities that the bishop go from one family, so to speak, to another. In making this decision, the authorities take numerous factors into consideration. They do not include an eventual desire by a bishop to change see”. In the same interview, Gantin questioned the then self-evident concept of “cardinalate dioceses”: “Today, in recently evangelized countries, in Asia and Africa for instance, there are no so-called cardinalates, in that the purple is conferred on the person. That should be the case everywhere, even in the West. There would be no deminutio capitis, nor would there be any lack of respect if, for example, the archbishop of the very great archbishopric of Milan, or of other very ancient and highly respected dioceses, were not made cardinal. It would not be a catastrophe”.
“I have now become a Roman too and I am returning to my Africa as a Roman missionary,” said Gantin, returning to his homeland after more than 30 years in the service of the Roman Curia. “I left Rome with my soul, but not with my heart. I remain a Roman missionary in my country, where I carry the care of the entire universal Church. I have been back here for two years. And I made this decision to pray, to help the bishops of my country with my presence and my prayers.”
He was the first African bishop in the Roman Curia and the first African cardinal to head a curial college: “Among the African bishops, he is one of the few who attended all the sessions of the Second Vatican Council; he contributed so much that he was the one chosen by Pope Paul VI when he wanted an African bishop in the Roman Curia. Because of his personal history, Cardinal Gantin was considered a leader among the bishops of Africa: he did not make much noise, he did not speak too loudly, but each of his words was worth a lot,” said Cardinal Francis Arinze. (Agenzia Fides, 8/2/2025)
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