Don Guanella took the defense of the Concettini religious, unjustly accused of abuse. Their congregation was founded by Blessed Luigi Monti, whose birth is celebrated in the second centenary
by Don Gabriele Cantaluppi
Blessed Luigi Monti, the eighth of eleven children, was born on July 24, 1825, in Bovisio, a village about twenty kilometers from Milan. This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Although he was a contemporary of Don Guanella (Monti died on October 1, 1900), and their charisma shared many common traits, there is no evidence that the two men met in person during their lifetime. However, we would like to recall a dramatic episode in the history of the Sons of the Immaculate Conception, the congregation founded by Monti, which saw Don Guanella decisively committed to their defense. First, let's briefly review the life of Luigi Monti, a saint of charity.
The young Luigi, who lost his father at the age of twelve, practiced the carpenter's trade to help his mother and younger brothers. Strongly involved in his parish, he gathered many peers in his shop, thus starting a sort of evening oratory, in which the participants distinguished themselves for the seriousness of their Christian life, their dedication to the sick and the poor and their zeal in evangelizing those far away. He then lived six years among the Sons of Mary Immaculate, a congregation that Saint Lodovico Pavoni (1784-1849) had founded only five years earlier. That was an important period, in which he practiced as an educator and learned the profession of nurse, which he then put at the service of those affected by the cholera epidemic of 1855 in Brescia, voluntarily locking himself in the local lazaretto.
At thirty-two he was still searching for the concrete realization of his consecration and asked for light by immersing himself in the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. He was on the verge of abandoning everything, when a strong spiritual experience convinced him not to give up his search. Advised to go to Rome, he was included in the health personnel of the hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia, initially assigned to all the services reserved for auxiliary personnel, then to particular interventions such as bloodletting, after obtaining a diploma from La Sapienza University.
It was in that hospital that, in 1858, he founded a religious congregation of lay people (called Concezionisti or more simply Concettini) for the care of the sick. It was a community of "brothers", composed of non-priests and priests, with equal rights and duties, where the most suitable brother had to be elected superior of the community. Pius IX, who favored them for the seriousness with which they dedicated themselves to the sick and also because their name recalled the Marian dogma he proclaimed, in 1877, also due to the unanimous designation of the other brothers, placed the founder at the head of the congregation, where he remained for twenty-three years, until his death, and he drew up its rules of life. Although he had not received Holy Orders, he was nevertheless called "father" out of veneration by his disciples, struck by his spiritual paternity.
He opened other communities, extending the assistance work to minors, orphans of both parents, and organized a shelter for them in Saronno, where he wanted his basic pedagogical principle to be practiced, founded on the paternity of the educator and on the family spirit.
On November 1, 1909, when Father Monti had been dead for several years, two of his young religious from the community of Cantù were taken to the San Donino prison in Como on charges of corrupting minors. Their names: Brother Edmondo (aka Luigi Nutti), twenty-three years old, and Brother Gerardo (aka Minessi Bernardo), thirty years old. A few days later, it was the turn of Brother Pacifico (Antonio Terraneo), sixty years old. About thirty officers were mobilized for their arrest, and they arrested the friars at the very hour when the population of Cantù was returning from a visit to the cemetery, with the precise aim of giving resonance to the operation.
The accusation was as follows. A few months earlier, a boy had been taken into the educational institute in Saronno, abandoned by his parents because they were legally separated. He was suffering from a chronic illness and the seriousness of his health condition had become apparent to the doctors themselves, who, despite treatment, were unable to bring him to recovery. Shortly after, following the death of her husband, his mother remarried and took her son back home, even though his serious condition persisted. Hence the accusation against the Concettini religious of having committed mistreatment and other acts, also due to the accusations of the boy himself, morally marked by the environment from which he came. In the trial that followed, the other boys from the institute were called to testify, but none of the accusations were founded, so the religious were acquitted.
What most outraged Don Guanella, and with him all good people, was the fact that, while the incident had been publicly emphasized during the days of their arrest, even in the press, there was an attempt to silence the news of their release. To repair this blatant injustice, in a short article entitled "Evviva" in La Divina Provvidenza in January 1910, Don Guanella himself expressed his joy at the Concettini's recognized innocence and praised the integrity of the judging magistrates, also mentioning a similar situation experienced by the Salesians during the same period. In the following issue of the Guanellian bulletin, this incident was covered in more detail, but by another writer, no longer Don Guanella. It spoke of the two months of imprisonment endured by the three religious (seventy-two days to be precise) "in a dishonoured cell, among the scum of the taverns and the rabble of thieves." On the evening of the Epiphany of 1910, the religious were freed and returned to their headquarters, while a large crowd "in Cantù crowded around the passage of the released Concettini and greeted the martyrs of charity, the confessors of the faith, and kissed those hands furrowed by the handcuffs." Don Guanella also requested that the boys' band of the Casa Divina Provvidenza also participate in publicly celebrating the event.