Born in Lucca on May 24, 1838.
Died in Rome on April 4, 1905.
Entering his order at a very young age, he made his religious profession on 24 May 1854 and was ordained a priest in Rome on 8 December 1860. He was prefect of novices, lecturer in philosophy and theology, general secretary and visitor to his institute. Elected abbot in 1878, he was appointed general commissioner abbot by Leo XIII on July 30, 1880 and elected general abbot in the chapter held in 1887. With his government, the order took on a new development with new houses in France, Spain, Holland and in Rome, with the new church of the Holy Family. Author of appreciated publications, with an important study he claimed the paternity of the Imitation of Christ by the regular canon Thomas of Kempis.
As consultor of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, on November 19, 1900 he delivered his vote on the request for approval presented by Don Guanella a few months earlier. On the one hand, he praised his zeal and the "almost unbridled" desire to help his unhappy and derelict neighbor in every way, throwing himself "in the ardor of his great charity" to everything and embracing "the whole immense phalanx of human miseries" , but on the other he noted that the Guanellian institutes were «far from having reached that degree of determined and solid existence which deserves to be approved by the Holy See» and he proposed that the Founder, deserving of all praise for his spirit of charity, provided for the real separation of the two institutes, reduced the vastness of the purpose of the two congregations and gave greater coherence to the constitutional texts, defined as «a true chaos, without order and without structure, although they contain beautiful maxims of spirit very useful to those lives in the community".
Sources:
City Chronicle, in «L'Osservatore Romano», 6 April 1905, pp. 2-3.
Guanellian sources:
BRUNO CAPPARONI, The papal approval of the Guanellian congregations: difficulties and positive results (1898-1935), in The Constitutions and Regulations of Don Luigi Guanella. Historical and thematic approaches, edited by Alejandro M. Dieguez, Rome, Nuove Frontiere, 1998, pp. 122-123.
Photographs:
Not found yet.
AM Dieguez
Guanellian Encyclopaedia
© 2008 Guanellian Study Center – Rome