Born in Turin on March 18, 1815.
Died in Turin on March 25, 1883.
Ordained a priest in 1837, he was aggregated to the Theological College as a professor of eloquence. A highly sought-after preacher, moralist theologian and journalist, from 1848 to 1849 he directed the periodical "Il Conciliatore Torinese", edited by Giobertian and Rosminian priests, an advocate of a Catholic-conciliatorist position. Following this experience and the contacts he had at the University of Turin with followers of Rovereto, in 1851 he entered Rosmini's Institute of Charity and was an active missionary in England. Returning to Turin in December 1862, he was appointed bishop of Saluzzo on 27 March 1867 and promoted to the archiepiscopal see of Turin on 27 October 1871. Pastorally sensitive to the workers' question, he was not equally in favor of the Opera dei Congressi, whose intransigentism and the anti-Rosminian position. His open defense of Rosmini, in fact, earned him misunderstandings and difficulties even in relations with Rome, also complicated by disagreements with Don Bosco and his institution.
In his recollections of the Salesian three-year period, Don Guanella recalled the figure of this bishop, of declared Rosminian ideas and in open break with Don *Giovanni Bosco. He was welcomed by him, as soon as he arrived in Turin, with a curt: "What ever occurred to you to go to Don Bosco?", and sent to immediately take the exam to have the faculty to confess in the diocese. Don Guanella then recalled that he had copied and secretly sent to Rome a protest against Monsignor Gastaldi's exorbitance, signed by about thirty ecclesiastics, not yet found in searches in the Vatican Archives.
Sources
- Death of Msgr. Lorenzo Gastaldi archv. of Turin, in «Salesian Bulletin», 1883, 4, p. 72.
- Hierarchia catholica medii et modernioris aevi, vol. VIII: 1846-1903, edited by Remigium Ritzler and Pirminum Sefrin, Padua, Editrice «Il Messaggero di S. Antonio», 1878, pp. 494-494, 538.
- Giuseppe Tuninetti, to the voice, in Historical dictionary of the Catholic movement in Italy, vol. III/1: representative figures, Casale Monferrato, Marietti, 1984, pp. 399-401.
Dominic Mariani Rosminian superiors and bishops, Stresa, Edizioni Rosminiane Sodalitas, 2003, pp. 127-135.
Guanellian sources
Leonardo Mazzucchi Fragments of the life and sayings of the sac. Aloysius Guanella, P. 963, tel. +991 XNUMX.
Photography
«L'Illustrazione Italiana», 1883, I, p. 241.
AM Dieguez
Guanellian Encyclopaedia
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