Saint Gaspar Bertoni

He was born in Verona, then part of the Republic of Venice, on October 9, 1777, to Francesco Bertoni and Brunora Ravelli of Sirmione, and was baptized the next day by a great-uncle, Don Giacomo, in the parish church of San Paolo in Campo Marzo. ³ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints says that notaries ran in both families, that they were comfortably off, and that their faith was lived and practiced. ³

A little sister died, and he grew up an only child. ³ He went to the schools of San Sebastiano, which had passed to the city after the suppression of the Jesuits, though the Jesuits went on teaching there and running the Marian Congregation. ³ The strongest influence on him, the Dicastery and Vatican News agree, was the Abbé Luigi Fortis, later the first general elected by the restored Society of Jesus. ³⁴ Paul VI, beatifying him, called him a young priest formed in the Ignatian school. ²

He made his first Communion at eleven and felt then, the Dicastery says, a call to mystical union; at eighteen his vocation to the priesthood was settled. ³ He studied theology as an external student of the seminary, under a moral theologian, Don Nicola Galvani, who became his spiritual guide. ³

He was in his first year of theology when the French entered Verona on June 1, 1796, the beginning, the Dicastery says, of twenty years of disaster and suffering for the city. ³ He joined the brotherhood of hospitallers that Don Pietro Leonardi had just founded and nursed the sick and wounded. ³ Paul VI put it in a phrase: he spent himself for his fellow citizens, treating the wounds left by the war between France and Austria. ²

He was ordained a priest on September 20, 1800. ³⁴ His parish priest at San Paolo gave him charge of the young, and Vatican News dates to 1802 the first Marian oratory he founded for them, organized as a Marian cohort. ³⁴ Paul VI said he gathered boys and young men in it in complete poverty and humility, to give them a schooling and above all a spiritual formation through direction, the Eucharist and devotion to Mary. ² Vatican News adds that it drew criticism and jealousy when it spread beyond the parish. ⁴ In 1807 the Napoleonic suppressions dissolved it. ³⁴

From May 1808 he was spiritual director of the work Magdalene of Canossa was beginning at San Giuseppe. ³ There he also met Leopoldina Naudet, whom he guided toward the founding of the Sisters of the Holy Family, and he helped Teodora Campostrini find her own vocation and found the Minim Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Sorrows. ³ Paul VI named him an expert confessor who gave particular care to vocations and encouraged new works. ²

In September 1810, a few months after his mother's death, he moved from San Paolo to San Fermo Maggiore, and the bishop made him spiritual director of the seminarians. ³ He had already been gathering young priests at his house for study and prayer, and Vatican News says the bishop asked for him at the seminary because he had heard of it. ³⁴

The Dicastery says his program rested on unconditional loyalty to Pius VII, then Napoleon's prisoner, whom Bertoni called the "immovable first stone" of Christendom, words translated here from the Italian. ³ Reform, as he saw it, had to start inside the sanctuary, with the Church's ministers returning to a complete following of the Gospel. ³ A seminary that had been through a disastrous economic and moral crisis, a witness of the time wrote, soon took on the look of a monastery. ³

On May 30, 1812, after an ecstasy before the crucifix, he fell ill with miliary fever and came close to death. ³ He was thirty-five, Vatican News says. ⁴ He recovered, but remained an invalid for the forty-one years he had left. ³

With Napoleon gone, the Dicastery says, he saw that the people would be brought back by missions preaching the basic truths of the faith. ³ Vatican News says he showed his gift for it in a great popular mission at San Fermo. ⁴ On December 20, 1817, Pius VII gave him the title and faculties of apostolic missionary. ³⁴ The Austrian government, suspicious, would not let him preach missions, and he gave himself to occasional preaching and to catechesis instead. ³

On November 4, 1816, he withdrew with two companions to the suppressed church of the Holy Stigmata of Saint Francis in Verona, which gave his congregation its name. ³⁴ Behind the screen of a free school for the people, they lived in common and began to serve the Church and society without pay. ³⁴ The program, the Dicastery and Vatican News agree, was contemplation joined to a wide apostolate: educating the young, forming the clergy, and preaching missions, in complete availability to what the bishops asked. ³⁴ The Martyrology says he founded the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata of Our Lord Jesus Christ so that its members would be missionaries in the service of bishops. ⁵

John Paul II, canonizing him, said he turned to the young because he saw that the future of the Church lay with them, and that they had to be ready both for new battles over the faith and for the new professions of a technical age. ¹ The pope noted that he set out a plan of Christian life in which everyone was called to holiness, not only priests but married couples on the model of the holy spouses of Nazareth, the young, workers and everyone else; that was what his apostolic missionaries were to preach. ¹

From his bed, the Dicastery says, he became an angel of counsel to many, above all to people who had some good work in hand, among them Blessed Carlo Steeb and Don Nicola Mazza and Don Antonio Provolo, who came to Verona to see him. ³ Vatican News says people of every kind came, from bishops and priests to founders of religious orders and ordinary Christians. ⁴ He underwent close to three hundred surgical operations on his right leg. ³⁴

Vatican News collects some of his sayings, among them, translated here: "Let us trust God, for it is a fine thing to trust him." ⁴ His last words were an answer to the nurse who asked whether he needed anything: "I need to suffer." ²³ He died at half past three in the afternoon on Sunday, June 12, 1853. ³

Paul VI beatified him on November 1, 1975, and John Paul II canonized him on November 1, 1989, both on the feast of All Saints, the second time together with Riccardo Pampuri. ¹²³ By then, the Dicastery says, his congregation had spread beyond Verona to other Italian cities, the United States, Brazil, Chile, the Philippines and mission countries in Africa and Asia. ³

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for him, so none is given here. ¹²³⁴ Paul VI called him the apostle of the young. ²

Saint Gaspar Bertoni's feast is June 12, the anniversary of his death in Verona in 1853. ³⁵ The Roman Martyrology enters him on that day, and the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives June 12 as his liturgical memorial. ³⁵

John Paul II placed him among the saints, the blessed and the servants of God who sprang up in the Veneto at the start of the nineteenth century, in the middle of wars, devastation and poverty. ¹ He had known that world from the inside: the French occupation, the wounded, an oratory shut down, a pope in prison. ³

Most of his work was done lying down. The fever of 1812 left him an invalid for forty-one years, and the people he advised came to his bed. ³⁴ Paul VI called his life a continual immolation, ending in the last purification of his illness. ²

His last words do not make that easier to read. Asked whether he needed anything, he said he needed to suffer. ³ John Paul II heard in such lives the hope that God has drawn near to human suffering through the Cross, and said that the Spirit still shows his closeness to the poor and the afflicted through his friends, the saints. ¹