Saint Giovanni Battista Scalabrini

He was born on July 8, 1839, at Fino Mornasco, a small town near Como, and the Holy See's biography for his beatification says he was baptized the same day. ⁴⁸¹¹ The Center for Migration Studies of New York, a Scalabrinian institution, names his parents as Luigi, a wine merchant, and Colomba Trombetta; the Holy See makes him the third of eight children in a devout, middle-class family. ⁴⁸ The Scalabrinians' own American province gives his birthplace simply as Como. ¹⁰

He went to the Volta school in Como and then to the diocesan seminary, and he was ordained a priest on May 30, 1863. ⁴⁸ For his first years he taught at the Como seminary of Saint Abbondio and became its rector, and in 1870 he was made pastor of Saint Bartholomew's, one of the largest parishes in the city, where he stayed until 1875. ⁴¹⁰¹¹

Pius IX named him Bishop of Piacenza, and he was consecrated on January 30, 1876, at the age of thirty-six. ⁴⁷⁸ The diocese had 365 parishes, half of them, the Holy See says, reachable only on horseback or on foot, and he made the visitation of every one of them five times. ⁴¹¹ He held three synods, one of them on the Eucharist, reorganized the seminaries and consecrated some two hundred churches. ⁴¹¹

Pius IX called him the "Apostle of the Catechism" because he worked to have the Church's teaching given systematically in every parish, to adults as well as children. ³⁴ He organized and presided over Italy's first national catechetical congress, in 1889, and founded the country's first catechetical periodical. ⁴

The Holy See's biography describes a charity that was practical. He nursed the sick in a cholera epidemic, visited the sick and the imprisoned, and saved thousands of peasants and workers from hunger by stripping himself of everything, selling his horses and even the chalice and pectoral cross that Pius IX had given him. ⁴ He also founded an institute for deaf girls, mutual aid societies, workers' associations and rural savings banks. ⁴

He was not a comfortable bishop to have. In an 1885 pamphlet, Intransigenti e transigenti, he argued that Catholics should accept the loss of the Papal States and look for a new relationship with the Italian government, a position that, according to the Center for Migration Studies, isolated him: colleagues among the bishops and officials in the Vatican thought him too "liberal." ⁸ Paul VI said later that his views had been "then hotly contested, but in fact far-sighted." ¹¹

The work he is remembered for began, the Center for Migration Studies says, in the railway station at Milan. ⁷⁸ In a published English translation of his own account, he describes a waiting room, porticoes and piazza filled with three or four hundred emigrants: "Their faces, bronzed by the sun and marked by premature wrinkles drawn by privation, reflected the turmoil agitating their hearts at that moment." ⁸

Between 1880 and 1914, according to the Scalabrinians, some thirteen million Italians sailed for North and South America, twenty-eight thousand of them from the diocese of Piacenza alone, and little was being done for them on the other side. ¹⁰ The Holy See's biography says many lived abroad in conditions close to slavery and were in danger of losing their faith. ⁴ John Paul II, beatifying him, said that for these compatriots "he was a father and sure guide." ³

On November 28, 1887, he founded the Missionaries of Saint Charles, priests and brothers who were to be, as he put it, "migrants with the migrants." ⁴⁸¹⁰ In 1889 he urged Frances Xavier Cabrini to go to North America to care for Italian children, orphans and the sick. ⁴ The Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo followed on October 25, 1895. ⁴¹¹ The Holy See's biography says he founded the sisters himself; the Center for Migration Studies calls them co-founded by Scalabrini, Assunta Marchetti and her brother Giuseppe Marchetti, one of his priests. ⁴⁷ With a layman, Giovanni Battista Volpe-Landi, he also organized the Saint Raphael Society, whose agents met emigrants at the ports. ⁷⁸

In 1901 he crossed the Atlantic himself. He was in the United States from August 3 to November 12, traveling mostly by rail to nearly twenty cities between Boston, Saint Paul and Kansas City, and he began his ministry on the ship, among the emigrants traveling third class. ⁷ He toured Ellis Island on August 7, and on October 10 he met President Theodore Roosevelt, to whom he described watching an official strike a migrant who was struggling with two heavy suitcases. ⁷

He was in Boston on September 6 when newsboys announced that President McKinley had been shot. ⁷ He canceled everything planned for that evening except the devotions, and there he led prayers for the president's recovery. ⁷ At the Catholic Club of New York on October 15 he described America as a country where "peoples of different origin can very well conserve their language, their proper national existence, and at the same time be politically and religiously united." ⁷⁸

Before he sailed home he gave a monstrance to Saint Joachim's, his missionaries' first parish in New York, whose people were ragpickers from the mountains of southern Italy. ⁷⁸ Emperor Franz Joseph had given it to Leo XIII, and Leo had given it to Scalabrini in recognition of his work for immigrants. ⁷⁸

In 1904 he visited his missionaries in Brazil. ⁸⁹ In 1905 he wrote to Pius X about extending the model he had built for Italians to migrants of other nations, and the Scalabrinians say that three weeks before his death he submitted a plan asking the Holy See to set up an office for all who had been uprooted. ⁷¹⁰

John Paul II said he was "extraordinarily devoted to the Eucharist," and the Holy See's biography adds that he spent hours in adoration and asked to be buried with everything needed to celebrate Mass. ³⁴ He loved to repeat, the pope said, "Would that I could sanctify myself and all the souls entrusted to me!" ³

He died on June 1, 1905, which that year was the feast of the Ascension. ⁴⁸ The Holy See's biography records his last words as a short declaration to the Lord that he was ready to go. ⁴ John Paul II beatified him on November 9, 1997, and Pope Francis canonized him on October 9, 2022, together with the Salesian brother Artemide Zatti. ¹³¹¹

Migrants. Vatican News, announcing the decree for his canonization, called him "a bishop already recognized throughout the world as a patron of migrants." ⁵ The day after the canonization Pope Francis urged the Scalabrinian missionaries to be inspired by "your founder Saint, father of migrants, of all migrants." ² Agenzia Fides notes that he is also called the "Apostle of migrants." ⁶

His feast is June 1, the anniversary of his death. ⁴⁶⁹ Agenzia Fides marked it on that date in 2021, while he was still a Blessed, and the Center for Migration Studies of New York called June 1, 2023 his first feast day as a saint. ⁶⁹

Pope Francis, canonizing him, quoted his conviction that the migrations of his own day would make the Church "an instrument of peace and of communion among peoples," and said that "Scalabrini looked forward to a world and a Church without barriers, where no one was a foreigner." ¹

It started with a crowd in a railway station, the kind most travelers walk past. ⁸ He looked at it, and spent the rest of his life asking where those people were going and what became of them when they got there. ⁸

He did not get everything right. In Boston he pressed for an Italian-language parish school against the warning of the pastor, Giacomo Gambera, that the sisters spoke no English, and the school failed as Gambera had said it would. ⁷⁹ Scalabrini moved him to a post where his English was essential, and the sisters found other work, caring for the children of working mothers. ⁷

For most of his life he was the bishop of a small diocese who rarely left Italy, and the Center for Migration Studies says that few people were listening to him in his own time. ⁸ What could be done from Piacenza, he did: he wrote, he found priests, and he sent them. ⁸⁹