Saint Anthony Mary Gianelli

He was born on April 12, 1789, at Cereta, near Chiavari in Liguria. ³⁵ When Pius XII came to speak of him, he traced the road "from the modest little house where he was born to the episcopal palace of Bobbio", words translated here from the Italian, and said that it brought Blessed Pius X to mind. ² Gianelli was poor, the pope said, and proud of being poor, and kept poverty as the companion of his whole life. ²

Vatican News says he was presented as a boy to Cardinal Giuseppe Spina of Genoa. ⁵ He entered the seminary in 1808, at nineteen, and was ordained a priest in 1812. ³⁵ After a short time at San Matteo, the old abbey church of the Doria family, he was sent to teach letters at the Piarist college at Carcare, and when the chair of rhetoric fell vacant in the seminary, the archbishop called him back to fill it. ⁴ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints adds that to welcome a new archbishop, Lambruschini, he staged a play in Genoa called "The Reform of the Seminary", which was much talked about. ³

Pius XII's Latin homily says that for many years he trained the young men preparing for the priesthood as teacher and as director, and that he led them more by the example of his holiness than by the authority of his office. ¹ The seminary did not take all his time. In the famine of 1816 and 1817 he worked for the poor, and he preached wherever he was invited. ⁴

In 1826 the archbishop sent him to govern Chiavari as its archpriest, a collegiate church of some standing, with words Vatican News quotes, translated here: "Consider that you are taking on a mission, not of a few days, but of ten or twelve years." ⁴ That is how long it lasted. He held the post from 1826 to 1838. ³⁴

He opened a seminary there and set the Summa of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the works of Saint Alphonsus Liguori as its texts. ⁴ Pius XII said he was wholly given to the salvation of souls in that large parish, and that for his charity toward the poor, the troubled and the sick he was called the common father of all, and for his untiring energy, "a man of iron." ¹

The Daughters of Mary grew out of these years. Chiavari had a Società Economica, a society for culture and charity, and Gianelli took up its work, above all the orphanage it supported, which he entrusted to the Ladies of Charity. ³⁴ Both the Dicastery and Vatican News call this the first step toward the Daughters of Mary Most Holy of the Garden, known as the Gianelline. ³⁴ Pius XII described the sisters as founded to bring up the young in Christian ways and to care for the sick and the old in hospitals and hospices, with the gentleness the Gospel asks. ¹

How his society of preaching priests began is told in two ways. Vatican News says he founded it at Chiavari in 1827, as the Liguorians, to preach to clergy and people. ⁴ The Dicastery places its refounding at Bobbio, where with the help of the Liguorians he reconstituted his congregation under the name of Oblates of Saint Alphonsus, and says that two years before his death he created a small missionary congregation for preaching to the people and organizing the clergy. ³ Pius XII, without dates, names "the Missionaries and the Oblates" as the men who carried his work further than he could. ²

On November 27, 1837, he wrote to Sister Maria Caterina, in words translated here: "They want to make me bishop of Bobbio at any cost. I have raised the objections the Lord has shown me, but it seems they are not enough. If the Supreme Pontiff does not refuse me, the King has decided." ⁴ He was ordained bishop on May 6, 1838, in the cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa. ⁴

Vatican News describes a diocese in poor shape. It had been suppressed in 1807 under the French invasion, and although it was restored ten years later the see stood vacant for a long time. ⁴ With the Liguorians he organized missions to the people and put heart back into his priests; he changed the most reluctant parish priests and sent away those who did not belong to the diocese and caused trouble. ⁴ He refounded the diocesan seminary and revived devotion to Saint Columbanus, restoring the church dedicated to him. ⁴

Pius XII listed his work as a bishop: forming the young clergy in piety and discipline, governing and spurring on his priests, preaching missions himself or sending others to preach them as often as possible. ¹ Above all, the pope said, he wanted everyone, in the turbulent times they were living through, to hold fast to the Apostolic See. ¹

Pius XII did not soften the austerity. Witnesses saw him in missions and penitential processions barefoot, with a rope around his neck and his head bound with thorns, or scourging himself hard. ² To what he chose were added trials he did not: hostility, contradiction, suspicion, slander and persecution, and even the desertion and apostasy of his dearest disciple, whose conversion, the pope said, came much later as the fruit of his prayers and tears. ² His way of governing the pope summed up in two words of Latin, fortiter et suaviter, firmly and gently. ²

The same address turns to his family. He would have thought it odious nepotism to do anything for the worldly advancement of his relatives, Pius XII said, but he kept his poor and humble mother with him, with a son's tenderness, and wrote one of his finest letters of spiritual direction at her deathbed. ² When people told him gently that he was wearing himself out, he used to answer, according to the Latin homily, that a priest has only two places of rest: the grave for his body and heaven for his soul. ¹

He died suddenly at Piacenza on June 7, 1846, where he had gone for a period of rest. ⁴⁶ Benedict XV declared his virtues heroic on April 11, 1920; Pius XI beatified him on April 19, 1925, and Pius XII canonized him on October 21, 1951, together with Francis Xavier Bianchi and Ignatius of Laconi. ¹³⁴

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for him, so none is given here. ¹²³⁴ When John Paul II visited the Gianelli Institute in Rome in 1990, run by his sisters, he spoke of it as having him for its patron, which is the school's dedication rather than a patronage of the Church. ³ The Martyrology remembers him for his dedication to the needs of the poor and the salvation of souls, and for promoting the holiness of the clergy. ⁶

Saint Anthony Mary Gianelli's feast is June 7, the anniversary of his death at Piacenza. ³⁶ The day was set at the canonization itself: the formula Pius XII pronounced directs that his memory be kept each year on June 7, the day of his birth into heaven. ¹ The Roman Martyrology enters him on that day as bishop of Bobbio and founder of the Daughters of Mary Most Holy of the Garden. ⁶

Pius XII used him to answer a familiar excuse. His whole life, the pope said, was a refutation of anyone who would use a sincere but indiscreet zeal as a pretext for escaping contemplation for the sake of action, and he asked whether history does not show the most active apostles to have been the greatest contemplatives. ² John Paul II made the same point to the students of his school: busy as he was, as a teacher, a parish priest and a bishop, he never gave up daily meditation, and never stopped urging it on his people. ³

Archbishop Tommaso Reggio of Genoa, quoted by the Dicastery and translated here, wrote that his life "could be called a continuous and perpetual act of faith, of hope and of charity toward his neighbor." ³ It was not an easy life to be near. A bishop who walked barefoot in processions and replaced reluctant parish priests made enemies, and the slander and suspicion Pius XII lists were the result. ²⁴

The disciple who left him is the hardest part of the story. Pius XII says he came back much later, through Gianelli's prayers and tears. ² The pope does not say whether Gianelli lived to see it, and the page does not guess.