Exemplary courage: Sybil was tortured by the Japanese secret police for supporting the resistance movement.
GEORGE TOWN: The process of beatification and canonisation of civilian hero Sybil Kathigasu will take a few years to be completed, says the Penang diocese.
Its civil officer Christopher Kushi said the task has been handed to Father Eugene Benedict from the Kuala Lumpur archdiocese.
“There is no particular timeline to complete the project as it is a laborious process, which begins with the gathering of all documents.
“These will then be sent to the Vatican to be studied as the final approval will be from the Vatican,” he said.
He said the Catholic Church will usually start the beatification and canonisation process before declaring someone a saint.
“The church investigates their life and needs two miracles,” he said.
In the Penang diocese’s latest notification published on July 1, Catholic Bishop of Penang Cardinal Sebastian Francis said he had started a cause for Sybil’s beatification and canonisation.
He said it should be undertaken as an example and inspiration of Gospel living.
Sybil was an Indonesian-born nurse who ran a free clinic in Papan, Perak, with her husband Dr Abdon Clement Kathigasu during the Japanese occupation in World War II.
She had supported the resistance movement, secretly supplying medicines and medical services to Allied forces.
She was however captured, interrogated and tortured by the Japanese secret police.
Sybil died on June 12, 1948 at the age of 48 in Britain and her body was buried in Lanark, Scotland.
Her body was later returned in 1949 to then Malaya and reburied at the Roman Catholic cemetery beside St Michael’s Church on Brewster Road (now Jalan Sultan Idris Shah) in Ipoh.
A road, Jalan Sybil Kathigasu in Fair Park, Ipoh, was named in her honour after independence to commemorate her bravery.
Today, the shophouse at No.74, Main Road in Papan, which used to be Sybil’s clinic, serves as a memorial museum.
Sybil’s grandniece, actress and television producer Datin Elaine Daly, had urged Malaysians to donate generously towards her memorial museum to keep it going.
