Saint Luigi Orione

He was born on June 23, 1872, at Pontecurone, a village in the diocese of Tortona, in northern Italy. ¹⁶ Vatican News says his mother raised him in the practices of piety, and that from the age of ten he spent three years helping his father, who paved roads, work he never forgot. ⁵ John Paul II called him "this humble son of a man who repaired roads". ²

At thirteen he entered the Franciscan friary at Voghera, but poor health sent him home after a year. ¹ From 1886 to 1889 he was a pupil of John Bosco at the Valdocco oratory in Turin. ¹⁵ Vatican News says Bosco counted him among his favorites, and that in Turin he also came to know the charitable works of Joseph Cottolengo, close by. ⁵ He seemed ready for the Salesian novitiate, but in October 1889 he went home instead and entered the diocesan seminary of Tortona. ¹⁵⁶

As a seminarian he joined the San Marziano Society for mutual help and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. ¹ Vatican News says that while serving in the cathedral one summer he began to dream of the Christian care of boys, and that Bishop Igino Bandi, convinced the idea came from God, gave him the garden of the bishop's house for the first of them. ⁵ On July 3, 1892, he opened his first oratory in Tortona. ¹

On October 15, 1893, at twenty-one and still a seminarian, he started a boarding school for poor boys in the San Bernardino district of the city. ¹⁵ When he was ordained on April 13, 1895, the bishop gave the clerical habit to six of its pupils in the same ceremony. ¹⁵ New houses soon followed at Mornico Losana, at Noto in Sicily, at Sanremo and in Rome. ¹

Seminarians and priests gathered around him, and they became the first core of the Little Work of Divine Providence. ¹⁵ He founded the Hermits of Divine Providence in 1899. ¹ On March 21, 1903, Bishop Bandi gave canonical approval to the Sons of Divine Providence, priests, lay brothers and hermits, whose aim was to bring "the little ones, the poor and the people" to the Church and to the Pope through works of charity, with a fourth vow of special fidelity to the Pope. ¹⁵ Their first Constitutions, in 1904, included work for the union of the separated Churches, and Vatican News adds that he wrote it in with the personal encouragement of Leo XIII. ¹⁵

On June 29, 1915, twenty years after the first foundation, he began the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity, and beside them the Blind Sisters, Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament; contemplative sisters and lay associations came later. ¹⁵ The British province of his congregation counts two active congregations, two contemplative orders and a lay movement, and calls the poor, the young, the elderly, the sick and people with disabilities "his special friends". ⁶ His motto, it says, was "Do good always, to all, evil to none". ⁶

When earthquakes struck Reggio and Messina in 1908 and the Marsica in 1915, he hurried to help the survivors. ¹ Vatican News puts the dead at 90,000 at Messina and nearly 30,000 in the Marsica, and says he took the homeless into his own houses. ⁵ At the request of Pius X he stayed in Messina for three years as vicar general of the diocese. ¹⁵

After the First World War his schools, boarding houses, agricultural schools and charitable works multiplied. ¹ Among the most original were the Little Cottolengos, homes for the suffering and abandoned, usually built on the edges of large cities from Genoa and Milan to Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Santiago, which he called "new pulpits" from which to speak of Christ. ¹⁵ He sent his first religious to Brazil in 1913, and then to Argentina and Uruguay and Palestine in 1921, Poland in 1923, Rhodes in 1925, the United States in 1934, England in 1935 and Albania in 1936. ¹ He made two missionary journeys to Latin America himself, in 1921-1922 and 1934-1937. ¹

Popes trusted him with confidential tasks, the Holy See's biography says, inside the Church and in its relations with society, and he followed the questions of his time closely: the Roman question, modernism, socialism, the evangelization of industrial workers. ¹ He preached, heard confessions and organized pilgrimages, missions, processions and living Nativity scenes. ¹ His seminarians built two shrines to Our Lady with their own hands, Our Lady of Safe Keeping at Tortona and Our Lady of Caravaggio at Fumo, which Vatican News dates to 1931 and 1938. ¹⁵

In the winter of 1940, hoping to ease the heart and lung complaints that troubled him, he went to the house at Sanremo, though he said that "it is not among the palm trees that I would like to die, but among the poor who are Jesus Christ". ¹ Three days later, on March 12, 1940, he died among his confreres. ¹⁵ The sources record his last words two ways. The Holy See's biography gives "Jesus, Jesus! I am going", and Vatican News's Italian says the same. ¹⁵ Catholic News Service and the British Sons of Divine Providence give "Jesus ... Jesus ... Jesus." ⁴⁶

His body was found intact when it was first exhumed in 1965, and has lain in the shrine of Our Lady of Safe Keeping at Tortona since October 26, 1980, the day John Paul II beatified him. ¹⁵ The cure recognized for his canonization was that of Pierino Penacca, a man of seventy-eight from the diocese of Tortona who had known him in his youth, diagnosed in 1990 with lung cancer that his doctors judged beyond treatment, and sent home; the decree was published on July 7, 2003. ⁶ John Paul II canonized him on May 16, 2004, with five others, among them Gianna Beretta Molla. ²

At the canonization John Paul II quoted him: "Christ, the Church, souls are loved and served on the cross and through crucifixion or they are not loved and served at all." ² The Pope said he proclaimed that "only charity will save the world", and that he would often say that "perfect joy can only be found in perfect dedication of oneself to God and man, and to all mankind". ²

Benedict XVI gave the same saying as "Charity alone will save the world" when he visited the Don Orione Center on Monte Mario in Rome in 2010, and called him "the Saint of Charity". ³ There, in 1944, Orione's followers had collected the signatures of more than a million Romans for a vow to Our Lady, made on June 4, the day Rome was liberated, and they set a statue of her on the hill in 1953. ³ Benedict also recalled the founder's own exhortation: "Look down from Heaven, pray, then go ahead courageously and work. Hail Mary and on we go!" ³

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for him, so none is given here. ¹²⁴⁵ What they record is the people his houses were built for: the poor, the sick, the elderly, the blind and people with disabilities. ⁴⁶

His feast is March 12, the anniversary of his death in 1940. ¹⁴⁵ Catholic News Service, the news agency of the United States bishops, prints it as his feast day, and Vatican News lists him under that date in its Italian calendar of saints. ⁴⁵

He began before he was ordained: a seminarian with an oratory in a garden his bishop lent him, then a boarding school for poor boys. ¹⁵ On the day he became a priest, six of those boys received the clerical habit in the same ceremony. ¹

John Paul II did not present his life as a success story. He spoke of "physical and moral sufferings, fatigue, difficulty, misunderstandings and all kinds of obstacles", and quoted his conviction that Christ and souls are served on the cross or not at all. ²

His Little Cottolengos were built on the outskirts of cities for the suffering and the abandoned. ¹ He called them pulpits. ¹⁵ Benedict XVI put the idea in the founder's own words: "charity is the best apology for the Catholic faith". ³

At the end he went to rest among the palm trees, and said he would rather die among the poor. ¹ He died three days later, away from them, saying the name of Jesus. ¹⁴