Saint Justin de Jacobis

He was born on October 9, 1800, at San Fele, in the province of Potenza in the south of Italy, to Giovanni Battista de Jacobis and Giuseppina Muccia. ²³ Paul VI spoke of an honest and numerous family. ¹ Around 1812 they moved to Naples, the Dicastery says perhaps for money reasons, and FamVin, the Vincentian Family's encyclopedia, says the move cost them their country home and their old standard of living. ³⁶

In Naples a Carmelite priest saw his vocation and pointed him to the Vincentians. ⁴⁶ He entered the Congregation of the Mission there on October 17, 1818, and took his vows on October 18, 1820. ²⁶ The date of his ordination at Brindisi is given two ways: June 12, 1824, in the Catholic Encyclopedia and FamVin, and June 18, 1824, in the cathedral of Brindisi, in the Dicastery and Vatican News. ²³⁴⁶

After his ordination he was sent to give missions and retreats. ⁶ The encyclopedia places him in the care of souls at Oria and Monopoli and then as superior at Lecce and at Naples. ² FamVin dates the house at Monopoli to 1829, Lecce to 1834 and his return to Naples to 1836, as director of the seminarians. ⁶ Naples had cholera in 1836 and 1837, and he was among the priests who worked through it; FamVin cites a letter in which he says he is writing in a barber's shop at midnight. ⁴⁶ Paul VI named that epidemic among the things that prepared him. ¹

FamVin adds that King Ferdinand II, hearing of him, thought he would make a good bishop, and that de Jacobis, hearing the rumor, took steps not to become one in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, though he said he would accept it in a missionary country where a bishop was really needed. ⁶

In 1838 he offered himself for a new mission to Ethiopia. ⁶ He set out in 1839 as Prefect Apostolic of Abyssinia, appointed by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. ¹² Paul VI made a point of that: his own vocation and the formal mandate of the Church met in the same journey, and the pope saw in the meeting the ground of all his later fruitfulness. ¹ FamVin says he left in May 1839 with a fellow Vincentian, Luigi Montuori; Vatican News says he reached Adwa on October 13, 1839, and took charge of the region of Tigray. ⁴⁶

FamVin describes how the missionaries began. They put on Ethiopian dress, ate Ethiopian food and learned three languages: Amharic, Tigrinya and Ge'ez, the language of the liturgy. ⁶ He came to know them well enough to write books in Amharic, followed the Ethiopian calendar of seasons and feasts, visited the sick, began catechism for the children and talked about religion with anyone, lay or clergy, who came to his house. ⁶

The encyclopedia records that in 1846 the Holy See divided Ethiopia into two vicariates and gave Abyssinia to the Lazarists. ⁷ He was named titular bishop of Nilopolis and Vicar Apostolic in 1847, but refused the office, the encyclopedia says, "until it was finally forced upon him in 1849." ² Paul VI gives the date of his ordination as January 8, 1849, and the bishop who ordained him as Guglielmo Massaia, the Capuchin, later cardinal, another great missionary of that country. ¹ FamVin says the ordination was done in secret at Massawa, and that Massaia overcame his reluctance by suggesting that pride lay behind it. ⁶

Paul VI picked out two things in his work that he thought a guide for missions in the modern age. The first was his constant concern to form a native clergy, anticipating, the pope said, what the Second Vatican Council would later take as settled. ¹ Working in Tigray, at Adwa and then at Guala, he founded a seminary for Ethiopian priests and named it the College of the Immaculate. ¹³

FamVin says he insisted that converted clergy and the men he trained for the priesthood stay in the Ethiopian rite and not be Latinized, and that in this he stood alone among the missionaries, with one young confrere, Carlo Delmonte, the only exception. ⁶ Even the coadjutor named to succeed him said he would not continue the policy. ⁶

The second thing Paul VI named was what he called ecumenical action. Working among people of ancient religious tradition, de Jacobis sought out the Ethiopian Orthodox and also Muslims, and although it brought him grave hostility and misunderstanding, he tried to strengthen the Christian values already present there. ¹ Paul VI quoted, translated here, a letter from the Ethiopian bishops: "Blessed Justin de Jacobis was a father to the Church of Ethiopia." ¹

Among the priests he received and ordained was Ghebre Michael, an Ethiopian monk. ¹⁴ Vatican News puts the converts at around five thousand; FamVin gives an estimate of twelve thousand. ⁴⁶

The encyclopedia says his labors and successes "awakened the jealousy" of the Orthodox clergy, and that the Abuna of Ethiopia and Kassa, anointed emperor as Theodore, joined to persecute the Catholics and drive out the missionaries. ⁷ Under Theodore's persecution, Vatican News says, Ghebre Michael was martyred in 1855, and the bishop was sent into exile. ⁴ Paul VI recalled that Ghebre Michael died in suffering after long months of agony; the Church beatified him as a martyr on October 31, 1926. ¹

FamVin calls the last eleven years of his life a series of problems, harassment and persecution, with a spell in prison, and says he was imprisoned for several months and then marched to the area of Halay, spending his last months in mission work near the Red Sea. ⁶ The encyclopedia sums it up: "Despite imprisonment, exile, and every other kind of persecution", he founded numerous Catholic missions and built schools to train a native clergy. ² The Martyrology remembers that he suffered hunger, thirst, tribulation and prison. ⁵

He died on July 31, 1860. ²⁴ The encyclopedia says it was in the plain of Eydele, between the mountains Chedene and Hamamo, while he was on his way to Halay in the hope of regaining his health; Vatican News names the place Eidale, in Eritrea; and the Martyrology, the valley of Alighede in Ethiopia. ²⁴⁵ The Dicastery heads his page with words of his, translated here: "My children, all of you will have a share in my affection; I want to bless you!" ³

His cause was introduced on July 13, 1904. ² Pius XII beatified him on July 25, 1939, and Paul VI canonized him on October 26, 1975, in the Holy Year, a rite the pope said continued the celebration of World Mission Day. ¹³

Paul VI said at the canonization that the missionary cause, always essential in the Church, "can count today on another intercessor and patron," translated here from the Italian, and asked that he be invoked for his fellow Vincentians and for all missionaries. ¹ That is the only patronage any source here gives, and it rests on that one sentence. The pope also asked that he be invoked in particular for Ethiopia and for the whole of Africa. ¹

Saint Justin de Jacobis's feast is July 31, the day he died in 1860. ²³ The Roman Martyrology enters him on that day as a bishop of the Congregation of the Mission, gentle and full of charity, who worked at the formation of the local clergy. ⁵ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives July 31 as his liturgical memorial. ³

He went to a country that had been Christian since the fourth century, and FamVin notes that he soon saw how far from the truth was the idea, held in Rome, that Ethiopia could be quickly brought to Catholic unity. ⁶ What he did instead was slow: learning the languages, keeping the calendar, sitting with whoever came to the door. ⁶ Paul VI spoke of the Christian values already present there, which he wanted to strengthen. ¹

He was often alone in his judgments. His own superiors in Paris, FamVin says, resented that he was not French, and most of his confreres disagreed with his methods. ⁶ He kept to them, and Paul VI, a century later, held them up as a model. ¹

The cost fell on others too. Ghebre Michael, the priest he had received and ordained, died in suffering after months of agony, and de Jacobis himself died in exile, on the road, far from the seminary he had founded. ¹⁴ Paul VI asked the Church to invoke him for Ethiopia and for all Africa, the lands where that cost was paid. ¹