Giovanni Battista Scalabrini
Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, CS (8 July 1839 – 1 June 1905) was an Italian Catholic missionary who served as Bishop of Piacenza from 1876 until his death. He was the founder of both the Missionaries of Saint Charles (also known as the Scalabrinians) and the Mission Sisters of Saint Charles.
Scalabrini's rise to the rank of bishop came at a rapid pace due to a series of lectures he gave on the First Vatican Council in 1872 and his staunch dedication to catechism, which led Pope Pius IX to dub him the "Apostle of the Catechism"; successive popes Leo XIII and Pius X held him in high esteem, but both failed to convince him to accept appointments as head of an archdiocese or as a cardinal. He made five pastoral visits across his diocese, which proved to be an exhaustive but effective mission of evangelization and his efforts at reforming seminaries and pastoral initiatives earned him praise even from the secular detractors who criticized him for his strict obedience to the pope.
His tenure as bishop resulted in the establishment of the "Saint Raphael Association" dedicated to the care of Italian migrants. This solidified through the actions of his twin religious congregations and his visits to both Brazil and the United States, where he went to meet Italian immigrants. He also dealt with the Paolo Miraglia-Gulotti schism that took place in his diocese and had known the faux-bishop after ordaining him in 1879. Scalabrini also held three important episcopal gatherings in his diocese that revitalized parish and diocesan practices and made his diocese the ground for the first-ever National Catechetical Congress in 1899; he was in the process of planning another before his death that was later celebrated in 1910.
Patron saint of Diocese of Piacenza; Catholic Action; Migrants; Italian immigrants; Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo; Missionaries of Saint Charles; Mission Sisters of Saint Charles; Catechists; Missionaries
In the Martyrology
- June 1 Saint Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, bishop of Piacenza, founder of the Scalabrinians