Pope Leo XIV has recognized the heroic virtues of Mother Mary Teresa Tallon and declared her venerable, moving her cause for canonization forward. During a June 18, 2026 meeting with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, the Pope also advanced the causes of several other men and women, including 20 Spanish martyrs killed during the Spanish Civil War.
Mary Teresa Tallon was born May 6, 1867, in Hanover, New York, to Irish immigrants. At 19, she joined the Holy Cross Sisters in South Bend, Indiana, where she spent 33 years teaching poor and neglected children in Catholic schools. In 1920 she founded a new congregation, the Parish Visitors of Mary Immaculate, dedicated to contemplation and door-to-door ministry. She wanted to “reclaim lapsed and uninstructed Catholics for the heart of the Good Shepherd.” Even as a young girl she was known for being magnetic and persuasive, with deep fervor for the things of God.
She died in 1954, leaving behind a community that continues person-to-person ministry in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and in dioceses in Nigeria and the Philippines. The congregation’s motherhouse is in Monroe, New York, in the Archdiocese of New York, where Mother Tallon is buried on the grounds.
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, then Archbishop of New York, officially opened the diocesan inquiry into her life and heroic virtues in 2013. That same year he received the U.S. bishops’ support to move her cause forward.
In the same decrees, Pope Leo XIV also approved: the martyrdom of Spanish Father Juan Torres and 19 companions, killed “in hatred of the faith” in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War; the heroic virtues of Belgian missionary Father Júlio Maria De Lombaerde, founder of several congregations in Brazil; the heroic virtues of Italian Sister Maria Agnese Tribbioli, founder of the Pious Worker Sisters of St. Joseph; and the heroic virtues of Spanish cloistered nun Sister Clara Andreu y Malferit, who lived from 1596 to 1628.