Saint Nunzio Sulprizio

He was born on April 13, 1817, at Pescosansonesco, in the province of Pescara, and baptized the same day. ¹⁵ His father, Domenico, was a shoemaker and his mother, Rosa, a spinner; he was their only child. ¹⁵ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints says he was confirmed at three, and that his father died three months later. ¹ His mother remarried, and in Corvara, where the new household lived, he first went to school. ¹ She died on March 5, 1823. ¹

The boy went back to Pescosansonesco to his maternal grandmother. ¹² From her, the Dicastery says, he learned his love of the Eucharist, of priests and of the Virgin Mary, and to her he first confided that he wanted to receive Communion, though the local custom was to admit children only at fourteen. ¹ In 1826 she died too, and at nine he was alone. ¹²

A maternal uncle, Domenico Luciani, took him in. The Dicastery describes him as a gruff, violent man given to drink, who took the boy out of school and used him as the drudge of his blacksmith's shop. ¹ Vatican News adds that he made him carry enormous loads for miles in freezing cold and scorching heat. ⁵ Nunzio was poorly built for it. ¹ On one of those errands, on an icy winter day, the first clear signs of his illness appeared. ¹

The sources do not name it the same way. The Martyrology says gangrene of the leg; the Dicastery speaks of a festering wound on his left foot and of bone caries; the canonization booklet calls it osteosarcoma; and Vatican News says gangrene and, later, bone cancer, probably brought on by the conditions of his work. ¹²⁵⁶ In the evenings, the Dicastery says, he went to the stream to wash his bandages and clean the wound, and prayed there to the Virgin. ¹ When the pain was worst he did not curse; he was heard to say only, "My Lady, help me", words translated here from the Italian. ¹ Vatican News records sayings of his from these years, also translated from the Italian: "Jesus suffered so much for me. Why can I not suffer for him?" ⁵

At the end of April 1831 he was taken into the hospital at L'Aquila, where, though very ill himself, he went from bed to bed to comfort the other patients. ¹ The doctors declared him incurable, and since the hospital did not keep chronic cases, he was sent home a month later. ¹ A paternal uncle, a corporal in the grenadiers at Naples, told his colonel about him: Felice Wochinger, a nobleman known, Vatican News says, as "the father of the poor". ¹⁵ Wochinger took the boy under his protection, and in Naples he was admitted to the hospital of Santa Maria del Popolo, called the Incurables. ¹² Vatican News dates the meeting to the summer of 1832, when Nunzio was fifteen. ⁵

He made his first Communion as soon as he arrived, and from then on, the Dicastery says, never wanted to go without it. ¹ He brought other patients water, gave away the meals the colonel sent him, taught the children in the wards their catechism and persuaded people who had stayed away for years to go to confession. ¹ The 2018 booklet puts it in one phrase: suffering among the suffering, he brought relief and help. ² He stayed twenty-one months, according to the booklet. ²

In April 1834 Wochinger brought him home to his own quarters in the Maschio Angioino, the castle then used as a garrison. ¹ For a while he improved and almost gave up his cane. ¹⁵ He became sure he was called to be a priest and began to study. ¹ The colonel introduced him to Don Gaetano Errico, who was preparing to found a congregation and promised to take him in as soon as it opened; the Dicastery notes that Errico was himself canonized in 2008. ¹ But the illness came back. Nunzio turned his room into a cell, gave himself a rule of prayer and wore a brown habit blessed by a Carmelite. ¹ In the middle of 1835 dropsy set in, and the doctors considered amputating the leg but judged him too weak to survive it. ¹⁵

He died on May 5, 1836. ¹²³ The Dicastery says he asked for the crucifix to embrace and received the sacraments; Vatican News that he told the priest, "Be cheerful, from heaven I will always assist you." ¹⁵ Two hours later, in the Dicastery's account, he exclaimed "Our Lady! See how beautiful she is!" and died. ¹ Both are translated here from the Italian. His remains lie in the church of San Domenico Soriano in Naples, and part of them in his sanctuary at Pescosansonesco. ¹⁵

The diocesan process opened in Naples in 1843. ¹ In 1859, under Pius IX, the decree introducing the cause made him venerable, as was then the custom; Vatican News instead says Pius IX declared him heroic in virtue on July 9 of that year, while the Dicastery dates the decree July 14. ¹³⁵ In 1891 Leo XIII recognized his heroic virtues and, Paul VI recalled, associated him with Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, to whom he was devoted and who also died young. ¹³ Paul VI beatified him on December 1, 1963, with the bishops of the world gathered in Rome for the Council. ¹³⁵

The cure approved for his canonization was of a young man from Taranto left in a vegetative state by a motorcycle accident in 2004. ¹⁵ Francis canonized him on October 14, 2018, with Paul VI, Oscar Romero and four others, and called him "our Abruzzese-Neapolitan young man, Nunzio Sulprizio: the saintly, courageous, humble young man who encountered Jesus in his suffering, in silence and in the offering of himself." ¹⁴

Vatican News, reporting the consistory that set the date of his canonization, says he is "considered the protector of the disabled and of the victims of work", words translated here from the Italian. ⁵ That is the only patronage any source consulted here names, and the page lists him under people with disabilities on its strength. ⁵ Paul VI presented him to workers as one of their own, "this poor and suffering colleague of yours", which is a model rather than a patronage. ³

Saint Nunzio's feast is kept on May 5, the day he died. ¹ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives it as his liturgical memorial, and the Roman Martyrology enters him on that day. ¹⁶

Paul VI asked the obvious question about him: how a childhood of poverty, loneliness and brutality had produced not a sick and rebellious adolescence but, in his words, "innocent, patient and smiling goodness". ³ He did not claim to have the answer. Humanly speaking, he said, that goodness remains inexplicable. ³

His suffering was not a test he chose. An uncle worked a frail boy past what he could bear, and the illness that followed was most likely made by that work. ¹⁵ Nothing in the sources calls that good. What it canonized was what he did with the years that were left: the water carried to other patients, the meals given away, the children taught. ¹²

He wanted to be a priest, and Gaetano Errico promised him a place. ¹ He did not live to take it. He made a cell of his room instead and kept his rule there. ¹

The Martyrology's one sentence about him says he bore it all "with a serene and joyful spirit", translated here from the Italian, and that, poor as he was, he tried in every way to relieve the poverty of the poor. ⁶ Paul VI told the young that he would teach them that sacrifice and the cross are salvation, and said that the young understand that calling. ³