Saint Riccardo Pampuri

He was baptized Erminio Filippo, the tenth of the eleven children of Innocenzo and Angela Pampuri, at Trivolzio, in the province of Pavia. ¹² The Holy See's English biography gives his birth date as August 12, 1897; its Italian biography and the Hospitaller Order's own profile give August 2. ¹²⁴ He was baptized the day after he was born. ¹²

His mother died when he was three, and he was taken into the home of her sister at Torrino, a hamlet of Trivolzio; the Italian biography speaks of his maternal aunt and uncle. ¹² His father died in Milan in 1907. ¹² After primary school in two nearby villages and a year in Milan, he boarded at the College of Saint Augustine in Pavia and then enrolled in the medical faculty of the University of Pavia. ¹² As a boy he wanted to be a missionary priest, and was dissuaded each time because his health was delicate. ¹²

His studies were interrupted by the war. From 1915 to 1920 he served in the medical service in the war zone, first as a sergeant and then as an officer cadet in the medical corps. ¹² Br. Giuseppe Magliozzi of the Hospitaller Order quotes a letter of March 13, 1915, two months before Italy entered the war, to one of his sisters, a missionary in Egypt, praying that God would spare Italy "that terrible scourge which will cause grief to every family". ⁵

On September 1, 1917, writing to her from a hospital at Ruda, on the lower Isonzo, he described "such horrible destruction of our poor human flesh, such huge gaping wounds, and so many mangled limbs!" ⁵ Magliozzi also gives the testimony of a fellow soldier, Professor Giulio Meda, about the retreat from Caporetto: unwilling to abandon the medical supplies meant for the small hospitals of the zone, Pampuri found an ox-cart and drove it for two days through cold, torrential rain as far as Latisana, crossing a bridge minutes before it was shelled. ⁵ The Order connects the illness that later killed him to those two days. ⁵

He graduated in medicine and surgery at Pavia on July 6, 1921, with the highest marks. ¹² After practical training with his uncle, who was a doctor, and a short time as a substitute at Vernate, he was appointed the municipal doctor of Morimondo, near Milan. ¹² In 1922 he completed further training at the obstetric and gynecological institute in Milan. ¹²

The Holy See's biographies describe a doctor who visited the sick by day and by night, in every corner of a district that was then hard to get around. ¹² Most of his patients were poor, and he gave them medicines, money, food, clothing and blankets, and helped the laborers and the needy of the farmsteads around Morimondo and beyond. ¹² When he left after some six years to become a religious, the regret at losing the "holy doctor" was so widespread that the daily press took it up. ¹²

He was a member of the Catholic university club Severino Boezio in Pavia, of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and of the Franciscan Third Order. ¹² At Morimondo he helped the parish priest found a Catholic Action youth club, of which he was the first president, and a band, both named for Saint Pius X, and he organized retreats for the young men, the farmhands and the workers at the Jesuits' Villa del Sacro Cuore at Triuggio, usually paying their costs himself. ¹² He went to Mass and Communion often, spent long periods in adoration, and prayed the Rosary sometimes more than once a day. ¹²

In a letter to his sister that the Order quotes, he asked her to pray that pride and selfishness would not "prevent me from seeing the suffering Christ at all times in my patients, so that I can heal them and comfort them." ⁴ The Order's General Postulation recalls a phrase he often used, translated here from the Italian: "Do everything, even the smallest things, with great love." ⁶

He joined the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God, known in Italy as the Fatebenefratelli, so as to follow the way of holiness more closely and still practice medicine. ¹² He entered at Milan on June 22, 1927, made his novitiate at Brescia, and professed vows on October 24, 1928, taking the name Riccardo; the Holy See's English calls him Richard. ¹² He was then made director of the dental clinic attached to the order's hospital in Brescia, which served mainly the poor and working people. ¹²

John Paul II, in the canonization homily, quoted from a letter to his sister of September 6, 1923, in which, translated here, he hoped to answer Christ "with an ever readier and more generous response, with an ever more complete abandonment" to the Sacred Heart. ³ The Order quotes another prayer from his letters: "O God, I wish to serve you in future with perseverance and with the deepest love: for my superiors, my confrères, and the sick, who are the ones you love most." ⁴

The sources name his last illness differently. The Holy See says a pleurisy he had contracted in military service flared up again and turned into bronchopneumonia. ¹² Magliozzi says the days of the retreat had revived the tuberculosis he had carried since childhood, and that he died of it. ⁵ On April 18, 1930, he was taken from Brescia to Milan, and he died there on May 1, at the age of thirty-three. ¹²

In the homily John Paul II recalled what he said to his spiritual director in a last conversation, translated here: "Father, how will God receive me? ... I have loved him so much, and I love him so much." ³ The decree on his heroic virtues, of June 12, 1978, says he left "the memory of a doctor who knew how to transform his own profession into a mission of charity". ¹

John Paul II beatified him on October 4, 1981. ¹² The Holy See biography quotes that day's homily: "The brief, but intense life, of Brother Richard Pampuri is a stimulus for the entire People of God, but especially so for youth, doctors and religious brothers and sisters." ¹ The Order's profile gives the same words as spoken at the canonization in 1989, though the Italian text of that homily does not contain them. ³⁴

The miracle approved for his canonization took place on January 5, 1982, at Alcadozo, in the Spanish province of Albacete. ¹² According to the Order's Postulation, a ten-year-old boy, Manuel Cifuentes Rodenas, had a serious injury to his left eye and was due for a delicate operation; his father placed a picture of the saint among the bandages, and the eye healed overnight. ⁶ He was canonized on the feast of All Saints, November 1, 1989, together with Gaspare Bertoni. ¹³ John Paul II said that in just thirty-three years, the age of the Christ he loved above all, his life had been entirely a gift, among university students, among soldiers in the trenches and among the people of his parish. ³

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for him, so none is given here. ¹⁴⁵ The Order says he is venerated by many of its young brothers and by young physicians, and holds him up as a model for the young. ⁴

His feast is May 1, the day he died in 1930. ¹²⁵ The Hospitaller Order keeps it in its liturgy every year, and the Postulation's page for the day is titled for it. ⁵⁶ His body rests in the parish church of Trivolzio, where pilgrims still come. ¹⁴

His holiness was mostly ordinary work done thoroughly: house calls at night, medicine paid for out of his own pocket, retreats for farmhands that he paid for himself. ¹² The phrase the Postulation remembers him by, doing even the smallest things with great love, describes that life fairly. ⁶

He saw the war at its worst, as a young man in a field hospital, and wrote about it plainly. ⁵ The cart of medical supplies he would not leave behind at Caporetto cost him his health, by the Order's account. ⁵ Nothing in the sources turns that into a lesson.

He wanted to be a missionary priest and was told no, more than once, because of his health. ¹² He became a doctor, and later a brother of a hospital order, and his last recorded question was how God would receive someone who had loved him so much. ¹³