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Leopold Mandić – feast day is May 12
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by Melanie Rigney
If you had encountered this Capuchin friar, you might have given him a second glance because of his stature and then moved on. Other than being just 4 feet, 6 inches tall, there wasn’t much that was noteworthy about Leopold. He had all kinds of health issues, including stuttering and throat problems that caused him to speak very loudly. Eventually he would die of esophageal cancer. However, his ailments couldn’t keep him from being really, really good at one thing. But more about that in a bit.
The saint born Bogdan Mandić grew up in a large family in a town in what is now Montenegro. Many of the people he knew were members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and he felt a strong desire to play a role in reconciling the centuries-long schism between it and the Catholic Church. The way to do that, he believed, was to become a Capuchin friar. At 16, he entered a seminary 500 miles up the Adriatic