Vatican City: Father Sebastian Gaya, one of the primary architects of the Cursillo (short course) in Christianity, an ecclesial movement that had its origins in Spain in the 1940s and has since spread around the globe, has started the diocesan phase of the canonization process with the Archdiocese of Madrid.

Sebastian Gaya was born on the island of Mallorca in 1913. After a few years in Argentina, where his parents had emigrated, he returned to Spain in 1926 to pursue his priestly vocation and entered the seminary in Palma de Mallorca.

Gaya, who is credited with being the primary architect of the Cursillo, was ordained on May 22, 1937, right in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. In the 1940s, he introduced a novel approach of sharing the gospel within the framework of Catholic Action.

In the preparatory phase for the Great National Youth Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela that took place in 1948, other styles of Christian spiritual revival were developed that, adapted and modified, led to the Cursillo in Christianity.

The Vatican officially recognized the first Cursillo, which took place during the weekend of January 7–10, 1949, at the Monastery of San Honorato in Mallorca. Only five years after it was the first of the first 20, 100 Cursillos had been distributed.

Transferred to Madrid in 1957, Gaya recommended that many priests should give the Cursillo, preparing them for the pastoral care of the Spanish emigrant population in those years, a circumstance that led to the international expansion of the Cursillo.

In Latin America, the first country to receive this new method of evangelization was Colombia. A decade later it was already present on practically the entire continent.

The Cursillo expanded to Europe first in Portugal, Austria, and Italy in 1960 and was brought to Eastern Europe beginning in 1974. The Cursillo came from the United States to the Philippines in 1962. In Africa, the movement has reached countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Togo.

In 2004, the Pontifical Council for the Laity recognized the World Organization of the Cursillo Movement as “a structure for the coordination, promotion, and dissemination of the experience of the Cursillos in Christianity, having the character of a private legal entity” and “the approval of the statute of the aforementioned organization.”

“Raise the banner of hope every morning,” Gaya encouraged wherever he went. He chose as his priestly motto “I have become all things to all men, that I might, by all means, save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

Appointed honorary prelate by the pope in 2005, Gaya died at the age of 94 in Mallorca. His remains rest in the Monastery of San Honorato, where the first Cursillo was given.