CARDINAL Kelvin Felix, former Archbishop of Castries, will head a list of leading Catholic officials coming to Saint Lucia next week for the Funeral of Lady Abbess, Mother Marianna Pinto OSB. Mother Pinto was the Foundress and First Abbess of the Abbey of Our Lady of the Assumption, Mt. of Prayer, Coubaril. She died at the Hopital Pierre Zobda-Quitman, Le Meynard, Martinique on Thursday 3rd October, 2019 at the age of 86.
Her funeral service will be held in the foreground of the Abbey Church in Coubaril on Wednesday 30th October, at 2.00pm. Interment will be at the adjacent monastic cemetery. International dignitaries expected to join Archbishop Robert Rivas O.P. at the funeral include, Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, Mother Pinto’s brother, who is Dean of the Vatican’s Supreme Marriage Tribunal, the Roman Rota; the Papal Nuncio to the Caribbean, Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachuchwu; the President of the Bishops’ Conference of Zambia, Bishop George Zumaire Lungu; the President of the Conference of Bishops from the Caribbean, Bishop Gabriel Malzaire. Also expected are a number of other bishops, including two from Peru, one from Guyana as well as the Abbot of Mount St Benedict in Trinidad, Abbot John Pereira.
Besides the monastery in Saint Lucia, Mother Pinto had also founded the Monastery of Our Lady Queen and Gate of Heaven, in Chipata, Zambia in 2014. There, in the remote cluster of villages of Msupadzi, she built not only a church and monastery, but also a police station, a school for 400 children and living quarters for their teachers. Responding further to the cry of the poor, she built a medical clinic, and a warehouse for storage of agricultural products by the community. She raised sufficient funds to erect 12 artesian wells which now provide portable water for several of the villages.
At the time of her death Mother Marianna was working assiduously with her brother Monsignor Pinto and Bishop Antonio Santasiero Rosa of the diocese of Huacho, Peru, to establish a monastery in that diocese.