ROME (CNS): Norbertine Father Werenfried van Straaten, founder of the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, died of natural causes on January 31 at the age of 90.
The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, called him an “untiring witness of charity”.
The priest was hospitalised in Bad Soden, Germany, on January 30 and died early the next morning, exactly two weeks after participating in a special January 17 Mass marking his 90th birthday, according to the charity’s Rome office.
Fr van Straaten’s 1947 efforts to collect food for homeless refugees in Germany after World War II earned him the nickname the “Bacon Priest”, but his focus soon shifted to raising money and collecting religious literature for the Catholic communities suffering or outlawed under the communist regimes of Eastern Europe.
Over the decades, Fr van Straaten and Aid to the Church in Need raised more than A$6 billion in donations, the charity said, prompting some to call him the “greatest beggar of the century”.
