Born in Arcore (Milan) on April 29, 1864.
Died in Monte Oliveto Maggiore (Siena) on January 28, 1947.
Ordained a priest for the diocese of Milan in 1888, Carlo Perego entered the Olivetan order in 1893, after a few years of parish ministry in Muggiò and Seregno, assuming the religious name of Luigi Maria. On 1 August 1905 he was appointed prior of the reopened monastery-sanctuary of the Madonna del Pilastrello in Lendinara di Rovigo. On 19 November 1913 he was sent to Rome as abbot of S. Maria Nuova and attorney general of the order. Having gone to Brazil in 1919 to settle a legal dispute, he initiated the foundation of the monastery of S. Maria di Monte Oliveto in Ribeirao Preto in the state of São Paulo. Elected Abbot General on October 15, 1928, he resigned for health reasons in September 1946.
Father Perego saw Don Guanella for the first time "on the boat" in 1892, and was able to meet him personally in 1907 in Lendinara. He frequented it and visited it several times, in Rome and in Como. During his stay at the monastery of Santa Francesca Romana, as attorney general, Don Guanella often met him and involved him in preaching in his Roman institutes, such as for the Lenten 1914, by the Olivetan religious preached in the *church of S. Giuseppe. With Father Perego he then rushed on January 26, 1915 to help the victims of the Marsican earthquake. In the summer of 1915 Don Guanella accompanied him in a carriage to the Swiss border, passing through Stimmianico, where he stopped to correct his nuns who had misbehaved with the local parish priest using such strong words that the nuns began to cry. Since the fault was not entirely on their part, he commissioned Abbot Perego to give a little speech to mitigate the impression left and before leaving he himself went to console the nuns. When Don Luigi died, Father Perego wrote in the name of the Olivetans, sharing the pain of the Guanellian family.
In the meeting of 11 August 1927, the General Council of the Servants of Charity, presided over by Don *Leonardo Mazzucchi, rejected Abbot Perego's proposal to hire an orphanage with schools of arts and crafts in the state of São Paulo in Brazil.
Sources:
Data kindly transmitted by Don Roberto Donghi, Benedictine Olivetan.
Guanellian sources:
Guanellian Letters, nos. 3149, 3151, 3018, 2224.
The great mourning, in «La Divina Provvidenza», 1915, p. 180.
Epistolario «Guanelliano» by Aurelio Bacciarini, edited by Alejandro Dieguez, vol. I, p. 124, no. 214.
SACRA RITUUM CONGREGATIONE, Comen. seu Mediolanen. Beatificationis et canonizationis servi Dei Aloysii Guanella [...]. Positio super virtutibus, Summarium, Romae, Typis Guerra et Belli, 1950, pp. 580 and 687 (texts by Don Leonardo Mazzucchi and Don Martino Cugnasca).
General Archive of the Servants of Charity, Rome, Minutes of the meetings of the Superior Council of the congregation of the Servants of Charity, vol. I, August 11, 1927.
Photographs:
«L'Ulivo», September-October 1934, n 7-8; E. Mariani - A. Conti, edited by, The "100" years of the S. Rocco male Oratory in Seregno, Seregno, Tip. Ventura, 1970, p. 17 (courtesy of Don Carlo Cattaneo).