Cardinal Roche: Pedro Ballester’s selflessness a witness for youth

The enduring memory of Pedro Ballester, an English student whose life is being studied for a possible sainthood cause, is defined by joy and selflessness in the face of suffering, British Cardinal Arthur Roche said.

Speaking with OSV News on March 17 in his Vatican office, Cardinal Roche, prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, said Ballester serves as a role model for young people dissatisfied with what the world offers.

“I think even now, what’s happening worldwide — the number of young people, not least young men, becoming interested in the practice of the faith and in the knowledge of who Christ is,” the cardinal said, is significant.

“And what’s the reason for that? For me, it’s very simple. I think it’s the work of the Holy Spirit,” he continued. “I think the Lord is saying, ‘All of your programs, all of your initiatives have not really worked.’ The program is preaching the Gospel, it is living the Gospel and making that the reality of the image of Christ within the world in which we’re living. That was true of Pedro.”

Ballester, a Manchester-born student who died of cancer in 2018 at age 21, is remembered by those who knew him as an ordinary young man whose deep faith was revealed through his response to suffering.

A diocesan inquiry is gathering testimony about his life as part of preparatory work that could eventually lead to the opening of a formal sainthood cause.

Cardinal Roche told OSV News he first met Ballester and his family while serving as bishop of Leeds, encountering him at a confirmation ceremony where the teenager immediately stood out.

“I was greeting the people at the door as they were going away and taking all sorts of photographs. He kept coming to me, and it was very forward. He was very confident as a young man, and I think he would have been around 14 or 15 at the time,” he recalled.

“It’s a sort of story that grows simply by contact,” he said, recalling how that first meeting led to a friendship with Ballester’s family. “They were just really very nice people, and we got on very well.”

Ballester, the son of a surgeon, impressed the cardinal not only through his personality but also his intellect.

“He was a very bright boy, clearly very like his father, a scientist, scientifically minded,” the cardinal said.

However, for Cardinal Roche, what defined Ballester most was not who he was before his illness, but how he lived after receiving his cancer diagnosis.

“Nothing changed with him; he didn’t become depressed. The impishness that was part of his character remained there,” the cardinal told OSV News. He had a “constant smile. You could be talking to him, and he suddenly smiled about something or other. You were left wondering what he was smiling about.”

The cardinal also noted that despite his worsening condition, Ballester maintained “a remarkable outward look” that focused on others more than himself.

Ballester’s father, also named Pedro, told OSV News on Feb. 11 that his son would sometimes delay taking morphine so he could remain alert while speaking with visitors — a detail the cardinal said did not surprise him.

“Well, that says a lot about him, doesn’t it?” the cardinal said. “There was nothing selfish about him.”

“When you asked him how he was, he would say, ‘I’m fine. Never better. Never happier,'” the cardinal said. “He was more concerned about the other person and not going into detail about the horrors that he was having to contend with.”

Although the sainthood process for Ballester has not officially opened, a diocesan inquiry into his life is underway. Cardinal Roche said he believes the young man’s selflessness amid his battle with cancer will be “one of the most important testimonies that will be received when the documentation is finally complete.”

“I think it is complete, so it now needs a diocesan tribunal to examine it and then to bring it to Rome for further examination,” he said of the inquiry.

Cardinal Roche said Ballester’s example of facing suffering with faith and joy is an authentic message “that is reaching young people who are being disillusioned by the world in which we’re living.”

More young people who see “the inconsistency of leadership — political leadership, national leadership — the corruption that they see in public life and not engaging with it” are instead choosing “to go to Church and to discover God again.”

“I think, to my mind, that it’s the work of the Holy Spirit within those young people,” Cardinal Roche said.

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