St John Leonardi

Confessor (1541-1 609)

Saint of the day October 9

Even as a boy in his native Tuscany (Italy), St John Leonardi was wont to seek out solitude for undisturbed meditation and prayer. He studied for the priesthood while earning his living as a pharmacist’s apprentice in Lucca, and while still a layman worked for the salvation of souls. With his ordination at age 31 there began his truly apostolic life in hospitals and prisons, where he preached, catechized and heard confessions with remarkable zeal.

John Leonardi is revered as the founder of the Congregation of Clerks Regular of the Mother of God. This consisted at first merely of a group of laymen who had been attracted by St John’s evident holiness, and who wished to live under his guidance and assist him in his beneficent work of bringing sinners to conversion. His contemporaries, St Philip Neri and St Joseph Calasanz, were united with him in a deep friendship by the identity of their aspirations.

St John was also one of the founders of the great Roman College of the Propaganda Fide for the philosophical and theological training of missionary Priests. His memory was held so high in the Holy City that Pope Leo XIII had his name placed in the Roman Martyrology and ordered the Roman clergy to celebrate his Mass and Office an honour which is otherwise strictly limited to beatified Popes.

John died of influenza whilst nursing his brethren stricken with the same disease. Beatified in 1861 and canonized in 1938, his relics lie enshrined in Santa Maria in Campitelli, Rome.