Apostolic Vicariate of Puerto Princesa in Palawan Bishop Socrates Mesiona wants to rename a street in the city of Puerto Princesa after St. Ezekiel Moreno, the patron saint of cancer victims, and the first missionary priest in the area.
Bishop Mesiona has asked the city government to consider renaming Taft Street after the popular Spanish saint, said a Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines News post.
The stretch runs past the Immaculate Conception Cathedral and a park dedicated to Princess Eulalia of Spain, whom the city was named after.
“This will be in perfect accord with the history of the city,” Mesiona said in his letter to the city government.
St. Ezekiel Moreno was an Augustinian Recollect missionary first assigned to the Philippines. In 1871, after being ordained a priest in Manila, he was initially assigned to Calapan, Mindoro, and was later sent to Puerto Princesa as chief missionary and chaplain of the penal colony.
He celebrated the first holy mass in the area on March 10, 1872. In 1873, he was forced to leave the province after he was stricken with malaria.
Moreno was later sent to Colombia, where he became the apostolic vicar of Casanare and later the bishop of Pinara and Pasto. He reluctantly returned to Spain after he was diagnosed with cancer of the palate and the nose and died there on Aug. 19, 1906, at the age of 58.
He was beatified in 1975 by St. Paul VI and canonized in the Dominican Republic by St. John Paul II on Oct. 11, 1992 at the close of the 5th Century Celebration of the Evangelization of Latin America.