Emiliano Tardif

Emiliano Tardif was a Canadian Roman Catholic priest of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and one of the most widely known figures of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the late twentieth century. He was born on 6 June 1928 in Saint-Zacharie, a rural parish in the Beauce region of Quebec, Canada. After discerning a missionary vocation he entered the congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He was ordained to the priesthood in the 1950s and was sent to the Dominican Republic, which became the principal field of his pastoral work for many years. There he served in ordinary parish and missionary ministry and later held responsibilities within his religious province.

In the early 1970s Tardif became gravely ill with tuberculosis and was forced to leave the Dominican Republic for medical care in Canada. During this time of physical collapse he encountered the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, then spreading in North America in the years after the Second Vatican Council. He later described receiving an interior conversion and a physical healing that he attributed to the Holy Spirit. That experience reoriented his priesthood: he understood himself as called to preach conversion, to pray for the sick, and to encourage Catholics to a more explicit life of faith and the gifts of the Spirit.

From the mid-1970s until his death Tardif traveled constantly. He conducted large healing services and evangelization meetings in Latin America, Canada, the United States, Europe, and other regions. Crowds often numbered in the thousands. Numerous testimonies of physical cures, deliverance, and spiritual renewal were associated with these gatherings, and he became a familiar name in charismatic Catholic circles, especially in the Spanish-speaking world. He insisted that his ministry remained within the Catholic Church and in communion with the bishops. He also wrote and spoke about healing as a sign of the Kingdom of God rather than as a spectacle.

Tardif never left his religious congregation and continued to identify himself as a missionary priest. He died of a heart attack on 8 June 1999 at San Antonio de Arredondo in the province of Córdoba, Argentina, while on a preaching journey, two days after his seventy-first birthday. He has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church. His reputation for holiness and for a ministry of healing persists among many Catholics formed by the Charismatic Renewal, particularly in the Dominican Republic and in Latin America, where he is remembered as a missionary who combined traditional religious life with a highly public charismatic apostolate.