A diocese in the northern Philippines is going through a laborious procedure to anoint a teenage girl as one of history's youngest saints.
Niña Ruiz-Abad died at the age of 13 from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an incurable heart ailment she was diagnosed with at the age of 10.
While her life was brief, she made a lasting impression on those whose lives were affected by her great faith in God and charitable gestures.
She was a devout Catholic who spent her life giving rosaries, Bibles, prayer books, holy images, and other religious objects.
Mayugba presented a plea to the bishops at the recent plenary assembly of the episcopal conference in the Diocese of Kalibo to initiate the sainthood cause of Abad.
Typically, the procedure leading to sainthood does not begin until five years after a person's death.
With the bishops' assent, it paved the way for an official examination into her life and witness, which could take years before Rome makes a decision on her prospective beatification and canonization.
Gathering information about the candidate and interviewing witnesses who knew the person are among the first steps.
Abad was the daughter of a lawyer couple from Sarrat, a town in the province of Ilocos Norte.
However, due to their parents' jobs, she was born and raised in Quezon City with her only sibling, Mary Anne.
When she was three years old, her father died. Her family relocated to Sarrat in April 1988, where her mother became the chief hearing officer of the Department of Justice's Commission on the Settlement of Land Problems.
She graduated from elementary school at the top of her class and then attended Mariano Marcos State University Laboratory School for her first year of high school.
However, due to a change in her mother's work assignment, she was transferred to the College of the Holy Spirit in Quezon City during her second year of high school in June 1993.
The awful day arrived on August 16, the same year, when she died at school from a heart attack. She was taken to the hospital but died. Abad's body was returned to her birthplace in Ilocos Norte.
She was laid to rest in Sarrat's public cemetery. Normally, the sainthood process begins on a local level in the diocese where a candidate died. It is the Diocese of Novaliches in the instance of Abad.
Mayugba, on the other hand, secured Bishop Roberto Gaa's approval for the transfer of the "forum of competence" to the Laoag diocese, which was also confirmed by the Vatican Dicastery for Saints' Causes.
The bishop described the young girl as "a good model of piety and fortitude" for today's youth. Abad is still remembered by people who were with her and knew her more than three decades after her death.
