The “Don Camillo” stories by Giovanni Guareschi tell of the clashes between the Catholic curate and the Communist mayor of a fictional Italian town. These charming fables reflect real social conflicts in early and mid-twentieth-century Italy.
The life of Blessed Luigi Orione (1872-1940) was played out against the same backdrop, but it reads more like a heroic epic than a comedy. The third son of a liberal-minded manager of a roadbuilding crew, he might very easily have become a revolutionary. Instead, he answered a call to the priesthood and became an ardent apostle of charity and the founder of several religious congregations.
At the age of thirteen Luigi entered a Franciscan novitiate, but the following year he developed an inflammation of the lungs and was sent home. When he had regained some strength, he began to work with his father in road construction. Later on Don Orione remarked that this was an important phase of his education, for he learned first-hand about the plight of laborers.
In 1886 Luigi went to Turin to study at the Salesian Oratory. Don Bosco was his father confessor for a short time and had a profound influence on the spirituality and future apostolate of the young seminarian. As his mentor had done, Luigi began to gather youngsters around him on Sundays and holy days, befriending, teaching, entertaining and inspiring them.
Luigi’s zeal was matched by his organizational skills. While still a seminarian he founded the “Oratory of Saint Louis” and a boarding school. He trusted absolutely in God’s Providence. Benefactors appeared so quickly in answer to his prayers that he earned the nickname “God’s bandit”.
He was ordained to the priesthood on Holy Saturday, 1895 and then devoted his entire priestly life to charitable work among the poor and abandoned. The “Little Work of Divine Providence”, a men’s religious community that he founded to train youths in an agricultural school, was approved by the Bishop of Tortona in 1903.
A terrible earthquake struck Sicily and Calabria three days after Christmas in 1908. Don Orione immediately thought of those who were orphaned, but traveling from Tortona in northern Italy to Sicily was an expensive venture. He consulted with his community, sold a pair of oxen, and began the journey with a confrere.
Troops had been sent from Palermo to help find the survivors and to restore order to the disaster area; Don Orione organized the relief efforts for the orphans and the homeless. The Italian government later honored him for his services by presenting him with a gold medal. As a token of gratitude, the Pope gave his community a house outside of Rome, the “Colonia Santa Maria”, to use as an orphanage.
The clergy of Eastern Sicily had been decimated and demoralized by the magnitude of the catastrophe, and so the Archbishop of Messina asked the Pope to appoint a Vicar General from outside the diocese. The weighty responsibility fell to Don Orione. His unswerving loyalty to the Holy Father and his charity toward all, even those who were resentful and hostile, enabled him to take charge of the chaotic situation. After three years at this post he returned to his own community in Tortona, having gained considerable prestige.
The Little Work of Divine Providence was designed to offer education and job training to disadvantaged youngsters. As an indirect consequence, it slowed the inroads that the Communist movement was making among the working class in Italy. Yet even when some of his boys went off and became Communists, Don Orione (like Don Camillo) would stay in touch with them and continue to show them kindness.
His policy of charity, first and foremost, enabled him to carry on a quiet but very fruitful ministry to apostate priests as well. In the early 1900’s, Modernism had seriously undermined clerical discipline, not only in the disaster areas, but throughout Italy. Don Orione took in defrocked priests at his institutions and rehabilitated quite a few of them.
His spiritual work was misunderstood; people gossiped about how “poorly educated” his community must be, since so many of “them” were being laicized. But Don Orione took it all in stride. He knew the infinite worth of a single soul, and made it his practice to “go right to the edge” of the precipice in his search for a lost sheep.
Don Luigi Orione made no specious distinctions between the hierarchical structure of the Church and her pastoral ministry. His filial obedience to the Pope was the source of his moral strength and his inexhaustible energy. As he used to say to his community, “To love the Pope is to love Jesus Christ.”
In 1912 Don Orione requested an audience with the Pope so as to make his solemn profession as a member of the Sons of Divine Providence. While kneeling in the presence of the Holy Father, he remembered the canonical rule, that when a religious takes solemn vows (usually before the local bishop) two witnesses must be present. He hesitated, summoned his courage, and asked the Pope whether he might make an exception in this instance. Pope St. Pius X smiled and said, “Your guardian angel and mine will be the witnesses.”
The Holy Father guided and supported the Little Work of Divine Providence as the community rapidly expanded and diversified its apostolic labors. Don Orione made a very successful tour of Latin America, founding new houses, schools, and orphanages, especially in Argentina. It was not so easy introducing his community to Old-World Catholic cities like Genoa and Milan, where traditional religious orders and charities had long since staked out their territories. Nevertheless, in the spirit of St. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo, Don Orione took on the most difficult tasks, and his community has staffed mental hospitals and workshops for the mutilatini (boys who had lost limbs in wartime).
The first foundation of the Little Work of Divine Providence in the United States was a home for the elderly Italian immigrants in Boston.
In spite of a series of strokes at the age of sixty-five, Don Orione remained alert and active. He was determined “to die standing”, and he continued to write long letters advising distant houses of his community until the day of his death in 1940. His last words were, “Gesù, Gesù, Gesù.”
Don Luigi Orione was beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 26, 1980. The second miracle required for the canonization of Blessed Luigi was approved in July of this year. May the work of his Sons of Divine Providence and his powerful intercession continue to repair and rebuild the Church.
Michael J. Miller translated the books entitled New Saints and Blesseds of the Catholic Church Vols. 1, 2, 3, and Married Saints and Blesseds Through the Centuries for Ignatius Press.
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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
