Saint Antonio Maria Pucci

He was born Eustachio Pucci on April 16, 1819, at Poggiole di Vernio, which Avvenire, the Italian bishops' daily, describes as a cluster of houses in the Tuscan Apennines. ³⁴ He was born at nine in the morning, the parish register says, and was baptized by two in the afternoon. ⁴ His family were farmers, poor in means and rich in faith, in Vatican News's phrase, and there were nine children. ³⁴

His father was the village sacristan, and as a boy Eustachio liked nothing better than to help him look after the church. ³⁴ When the parish priest asked him what he would do when he grew up, Pius XII recalled, he answered, translated here, "I want to become a religious in an order consecrated to Our Lady." ¹ His father, a good farmer attached to his land, opposed it; Avvenire says the parish priest, Don Diddi, persuaded him to let the boy study so that he could work, translated here, "in a much finer vineyard," and took him himself to the Servite convent of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence. ⁴

He took the name Antonio Maria. ³ Avvenire, drawing on Paolo Orlandini's biography, says that he finished his novitiate at nineteen but that a law of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany set twenty-four as the minimum age for religious profession, so he was sent to Monte Senario for philosophy and theology. ⁴ He was ordained priest on September 24, 1843, in the church of San Salvatore in Florence. ¹

After his first Mass in his home village he was sent to Viareggio as assistant to the parish priest. ⁴ Pius XII says he spent three years in that post deepening his study of theology. ¹ He took possession of the parish of Sant'Andrea on July 25, 1847, at twenty-eight. ⁴ The sources disagree on how long he served it: forty-five years in Pius XII's address, forty-eight in Vatican News and Avvenire, about fifty in the Roman Martyrology. ¹³⁴⁵

Avvenire describes a town many knew only by that nickname: when his frail figure appeared on the quay or in the poor streets, people called out, in Avvenire's Italian translated here, "Here is the Curatino." ⁴ It was no easy place. Avvenire cites police records of thefts, robberies, murders and violence against women, children and the old, and says that one night he was beaten with sticks. ⁴ He lived, as his biographer Don Pietro Panichelli put it, in words translated here, "in an age that did not believe in saints." ⁴

Pius XII said his first sermon as parish priest put himself and all his people under the protection of Our Lady of Sorrows, and that Viareggio became, translated here, the "City of the Addolorata," Our Lady of Sorrows. ¹ John XXIII, canonizing him, said the same: he made the seat of his apostolate the city of the Sorrowful Mother and entrusted to her every hard task of his ministry. ²

Pius XII said he knew every one of his flock, visited them all, and was respected even at a time when the Church and her priests were treated with contempt. ¹ Not content with that, he gathered the faithful into associations for every group in the parish, children and young people, men and women, with rules of their own, anticipating, as three of these sources put it, the forms of Catholic Action. ¹³⁴

Vatican News lists them: the Company of Saint Aloysius and the Congregation of Christian Doctrine for the young, the Company of Our Lady of Sorrows for men, and the Congregation of Christian Mothers for women. ³ Avvenire dates the first two to 1849. ⁴ John XXIII said he gave all of them a deep Eucharistic spirit, as a badge of the Christian. ² Pius XII adds that he brought the Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul, the Propagation of the Faith and the Holy Childhood to Viareggio. ¹

In 1853, by Avvenire's date, he founded the Mantellate Servants of Mary of Viareggio. ⁴ Pius XII and Avvenire say the sisters were for the instruction and education of girls; Vatican News says they cared for sick children. ¹³⁴ He also founded the first seaside hospice for poor sick children. ¹⁴ Later he served his order as a superior, as General Definitor in Vatican News's account, and as provincial of Tuscany from 1883 in Avvenire's; a friar remembered, in words translated here, that when he came on visitation "it seemed a subject was coming, not a superior." ³⁴

When cholera struck Viareggio, in 1854 by Vatican News's date, in 1854 and 1855 by the town council's, he nursed the sick. ³⁴ Pius XII said that his heroic charity during the two years of the epidemic overcame every prejudice against him. ¹ Vatican News calls him the angel of the sick. ³

He went from house to house among the poor himself, Vatican News says, and kept nothing for himself, not even his clothes. ³ His room is still kept at Sant'Andrea, and Avvenire describes it: a bed of corn husks, a small desk, a kneeler and a few mended clothes. ⁴ Gentle as he was, Avvenire adds, he was not timid; when the convents were suppressed he spoke hard words, translated here, against the "invaders." ⁴

Vatican News says his parishioners often found him absorbed in prayer and claimed to have seen him rise from the ground, or walk without his feet touching it, so that many said, translated here, "He looks like an angel!" ³ It reports that as what the people of the parish said they saw. ³

Worn out by his work, by Vatican News's account, he died of a sudden pneumonia on January 12, 1892. ³⁴ Avvenire quotes the minutes of the town council, which it calls progressive and far from the Church, translated here: "Setting aside his character as a Catholic priest, Father Pucci, as a man, deserved well of the town, inasmuch as his life was a continual and tireless apostolate of humanity and beneficence." ⁴ The council voted sixteen to two to give him a place of honor for his burial, and named him a citizen of merit. ⁴

The whole council followed his coffin, Avvenire says, with the town banner and the town band; the schools and shops were shut and work stopped at the docks. ⁴ A reporter wrote that he had never seen such a ceremony in his life. ⁴ When it was proposed in 1900 to name a street for him, the socialists voted it down. ⁴ On April 18, 1920, his body was moved from the town cemetery to Sant'Andrea, and Giacomo Puccini and his wife Elvira were in the crowd. ⁴

Pius XII beatified him on June 22, 1952, and spoke to the pilgrims the next day. ¹ John XXIII canonized him on December 9, 1962, with Peter Julian Eymard and Francesco Maria da Camporosso, at the close of the first session of the Second Vatican Council. ² Of the three, the pope said, only he had the direct care of souls, and he had reproduced in Italy the example of the holy Curé of Ars. ²

No source used for this page names him the patron of anything. ¹²³ He is remembered above all in Viareggio, where Avvenire says people still use the phrase, translated here, "the Curatino's way" for doing things as he did them. ⁴

Saint Antonio Maria Pucci's feast is January 12, the day of his death. ³⁴ The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, enters him that day at Viareggio as a priest of the Servants of Mary who was parish priest for about fifty years and gave himself to teaching the faith and to works of charity for those in need. ⁵

He spent almost his whole priesthood in one parish. ¹³⁴ What he built there was ordinary parish life done thoroughly: a group for the children, one for the young, one for the men and one for the mothers, and a priest who knew all of them. ¹³

He was beaten in the street, and nursed the sick through an epidemic, and slept on corn husks. ¹⁴ The town council that honored him at his death did so, it said, setting aside the fact that he was a priest. ⁴

The people of Viareggio did not call him by his name. They called him the little curate, and kept the word for the way he lived. ³⁴