Francesco Zirano

Life

Zirano was born in 1564 in Sassari to Margherita who was a peasant; he had two sisters and one brother. His father died of the plague sometime around 1582 and his mother followed in 1598. The friars at Santa Maria di Betlem oversaw his education later in his childhood for he had been illiterate as was a norm at the time. In 1579 he decided to become a priest and so decided to enter a religious order settling his sights on the Franciscans.

Zirano later became a professed member into the Order of Friars Minor Conventual. He made his final profession into that order in 1580 and later received his ordination to the priesthood in 1586 from the Archbishop of Sassari Alfonso de Lorca. His maternal aunt's son Francesco Serra – his cousin – attended the ordination. In 1590 his cousin was imprisoned after Ottoman pirates captured him and took him to Algeria. Zirano received a papal commission on 19 March 1599 from Pope Clement VIII to collect ransom funds in order to free enslaved Christians held that Muslims in North Africa held as their hostages.

He left in spring 1602 and stopped in Spain where King Philip II assigned Matto de Aguirre to act as his companion to the desert nation and the two left on 18 August disguised as merchants. Zirano arrived in Algiers on 21 August 1602 but it was at this point that the nation was at war with the Kingdom of Cuco. On 1 January 1603 he was sent to Spain to inform the king's court that the Cuco kingdom had prevailed in the struggle but local Algerian soldiers caught and imprisoned him in chains before he could depart on 6 January. He was stripped and beaten. In his imprisonment he learned from his captors that – due to anti-Christian sentiment in the region – he had been sentenced to death; his jailed cousin managed to visit him on two occasions. He was offered a pardon under the condition that he convert to Islam. He refused and was killed on the morning of 25 January 1603; he was flayed alive. Zirano was dressed in a plain white tunic with a chain around his neck and was paraded through the central town street where people shouted and insulted him though he recited a biblical song for interior peace. He was flayed alive and his skin stuffed with straw. Christian slaves collected his bones and bits of skin after his death as relics which were sent to Sassari sometime prior to 1605. His cousin soon found freedom and managed to give Zirano's mangled remains a proper Christian burial sometime prior to 1605.

Beatification

In 1731 a request to the Congregation for Rites to begin the sainthood process was denied after a dispute between the Conventual Franciscans and the Order of Friars Minor who each claimed Zirano as their own member thus throwing into question who the formal petitioner should be.

The beatification process commenced under Pope John Paul II on 3 May 1990 after the Congregation for the Causes of Saints issued the official "nihil obstat" and titled the late priest as a Servant of God; Archbishop Salvatore Isgrò oversaw the diocesan process in Sassari from 15 August 1990 until its closure later on 7 September 1991 while the C.C.S. validated this process in Rome on 5 June 1992. The postulation submitted the Positio to the C.C.S. for assessment in 2001.

Historians assented to the cause on 4 March 2003 while theologians on 16 May 2013 endorsed the cause as did the members of the C.C.S. on 4 February 2014. Pope Francis approved on 7 February 2014 that the late priest had been killed "in odium fidei" ("in hatred of the faith") and thus approved for him to be beatified. Cardinal Angelo Amato presided over the beatification on the pope's behalf in Sassari on 12 October 2014. In attendance was the Sassari Archbishop Paolo Maria Virgilio Atzei and the then-Archbishop of Algiers Ghaleb Moussa Abdalla Bader.

The current postulator for this cause is the Conventual Franciscan priest Angelo Paleri.