Saint Francesco Spinelli

He was born in Milan on April 14, 1853, to parents whose family came from the Bergamo area, according to the Sisters Adorers. ²⁷ Salt + Light Media says the family moved to Cremona while he was still a child, and that as a boy he went with his mother to visit and help the poor and the sick of the city. ⁵ It credits his mother and an uncle who was a priest with nurturing his vocation. ⁵

He studied theology at the seminary in Bergamo and was ordained for that diocese. ³⁵ The sources give two dates for the ordination. EWTN, Catholic News Agency and the Sisters Adorers give October 17, 1875; Salt + Light gives August 14, 1875. ³⁴⁵⁷

In the same year he went to Rome for the Jubilee that Pius IX had proclaimed. ³⁵ At the Basilica of St. Mary Major, kneeling in prayer before the crib of the Child Jesus, he saw in a vision a group of young women adoring the Blessed Sacrament. ³⁵ EWTN calls it a profound mystical experience. ³ Every source that tells his story starts the congregation from that moment.

Back in Bergamo he gave himself to ordinary pastoral work. EWTN lists an evening school, help for the poor, religion classes, and spiritual direction for several communities of religious women. ³ Catholic News Agency adds that he taught at the seminary. ⁴

In 1882 he met Caterina Comensoli, a young woman who wanted to consecrate her life. ³⁴ She is the same woman Vatican News calls Catherine and Salt + Light calls Geltrude, the name she took in religion. ²³⁵ EWTN, Catholic News Agency and the Sisters Adorers say the two of them founded the Institute of the Sisters Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament in Bergamo on December 15, 1882. ³⁴⁷ Vatican News tells it a little differently: he had already gathered young women in Rome who gave their lives to Eucharistic adoration, and after meeting Comensoli he founded the institute. ²

According to EWTN, the new institute was built to be flexible and included a business of its own, textile production, so that it could give decent work to vulnerable people who would have had great trouble finding it anywhere else. ³ Its houses filled quickly with the poor, the sick and people with physical and mental disabilities. ³ Catholic News Agency describes the sisters as keeping adoration day and night, and drawing their service to the poor and suffering from it. ⁴

Then it fell apart. EWTN puts the collapse down to serious misunderstandings, a lack of support and administrative carelessness, and says that in 1889 he was forced to step aside and leave Bergamo. ³ In its biography of Comensoli, the same source adds that the two founders had already differed over what came first, he putting the apostolate ahead of adoration and she the reverse, and that the financial crisis brought the final separation. ³ Salt + Light speaks more bluntly of resistance and plots against him. ⁵

Comensoli stayed in Bergamo with the sisters who later took the name Sacramentine Sisters. ³ Spinelli went to Rivolta d'Adda, in the Diocese of Cremona, and Salt + Light says he arrived dejected and without money. ³⁵ The bishop of Cremona let him take up pastoral work there, and a group of sisters followed him, keeping the name Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament and vowing perpetual adoration and service to the most marginalized. ³⁵ Salt + Light reckons the Sisters Adorers as a new foundation of 1892, with diocesan approval in 1897, and counts the Bergamo community of 1882 as the start of the Sacramentine Sisters instead. ⁵

He led the institute from Rivolta for the rest of his life. ⁴ Salt + Light says the work with the poor came from his own experience: having known what it was to be pushed to the margins, he was moved by his love of the Eucharist to meet the needs of people suffering the same way. ⁵ EWTN describes the religious life he proposed as unadorned, centered on love of God and neighbor and kept up by constant prayer. ³

He died at Rivolta d'Adda on February 6, 1913, and was buried in the sisters' church. ³⁴ By then, Catholic News Agency says, the institute had 68 communities. ⁴ Salt + Light records that it received full pontifical approval from Pius XI in 1932, and that in 1958 Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the future John XXIII, visited the Mother House and prayed at his tomb. ⁵ His remains are still kept in the church of the Mother House, and in 2025 the sisters opened a museum to him there, blessed by the bishop of Cremona. ⁶

John Paul II beatified him on June 21, 1992, at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Fountain in Caravaggio, near Bergamo. ³⁹

The healing accepted for his canonization took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Catholic News Agency reports that a baby born on April 25, 2007, at a hospital in Kinshasa served by the Sisters Adorers suffered a severe hemorrhage days later, when his mother fell on the way home and clutched him too hard. ⁴ The doctors could not find a vein for a transfusion and gave him up for dead. ⁴ The sisters asked for Spinelli's intercession and began a novena; on a last attempt the doctors found a vein, and after a small transfusion the baby began to cry and recovered within hours. ⁴ CNA says the medical examinations made during the cause found him in perfect health. ⁴

Francis canonized him in St. Peter's Square on October 14, 2018, with Paul VI, Óscar Romero, Vincenzo Romano, Maria Katharina Kasper, Nazaria Ignazia March Mesa and Nunzio Sulprizio. ¹² The homily dwelt on the rich young man who went away sad, and named Spinelli among the new saints who, Francis said, "put today's word into practice in their lives, without lukewarmness, without calculation, with the passion to risk everything and to leave it all behind." ¹

The congregation now works well beyond Italy. Catholic News Agency counts around 250 communities in Italy, Congo, Senegal, Cameroon, Colombia and Argentina, with ministries to people with HIV, orphans, people with addictions and prisoners. ⁴

None of the sources consulted for this profile names a patronage for Saint Francesco Spinelli, so this page does not claim one. ²³⁵ He is honored above all as the founder of the Sisters Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament, whose houses keep his memory and his tomb. ³⁶

His feast is February 6, the day he died in 1913. ³⁵ Salt + Light Media lists February 6 as his feast day. ⁵ The Diocese of Cremona calls February 6 his liturgical feast, and the Sisters Adorers keep it with Masses at their Mother House in Rivolta d'Adda, where his remains lie. ⁶⁸

His congregation started from a picture seen in prayer: women kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. ³⁵ What followed was not a cloister. The houses took in the sick and the disabled, and the institute ran a textile business so that people no one else would hire could earn a living. ³ The sources treat the adoration and the work as one thing, the second drawn from the first. ⁴⁵

The work also failed in his hands. By EWTN's account it collapsed through misunderstandings, a lack of support and careless administration, and he had to leave his diocese; the woman who had founded it with him stayed behind. ³ Salt + Light says he reached Rivolta d'Adda without money. ⁵ None of the sources hides this, and none turns it into a lesson. They record that he began again in another diocese and spent the next twenty-four years there. ³⁵

Francis, canonizing him, preached on a man who asked what he must do and went away sad because he had many possessions. ¹ The homily did not tell Spinelli's story. It named him among saints who left everything behind, and it set that against the sadness of the man who could not. ¹