At Verona in the Veneto, Saint Gaspar Bertoni, priest, who founded the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that its members might become missionaries in the service of the bishops.
Lifespan: 1777–1853
Beatified: 1 November 1975 by Pope Paul VI
Canonized: 1 November 1989 by Pope John Paul II, Vatican Basilica
Memoria liturgica: 12 June
“Father,” the nurse asked him, “do you need anything?” “I need to suffer.”
Gaspare Bertoni was born in Verona, in the Republic of Venice, on 9 October 1777, the son of Francesco and Brunora Ravelli of Sirmione. He was baptized the following day by his great-paternal-uncle, Don Giacomo, in the parish church of San Paolo in Campo Marzo. In both families of his parents the notarial profession predominated, and alongside a modest material comfort there shone the vitality of a faith consistent with practice.
After the death of a younger sister he became an only child, and received an excellent education at home and at the schools of San Sebastiano — which had become municipal following the suppression of the Jesuits, though the Jesuits continued to hold their chairs and to direct the Marian Congregation. He was above all decisively influenced by Father Luigi Fortis, the future first Superior General elected by the restored Society of Jesus.
Called from his first Holy Communion — at the age of eleven — to the way of mystical union, he matured in his priestly vocation at the age of eighteen. Attending theology courses as an external student of the Seminary, he found in the professor of Moral Theology, Don Nicola Galvani, an enlightened spiritual guide.
During his first year of theology he witnessed the French invasion (1 June 1796), which marked the beginning of two decades of tragic misfortune and suffering for his city. Driven by his charitable zeal, he devoted himself to the care of the sick and wounded within the Evangelical Brotherhood of Hospital Attendants, newly established by the Servant of God Don Pietro Leonardi.
At his priestly ordination on 20 September 1800, he stood at the threshold of a new century, with a world in turmoil and in need of manifold responses to the grave problems that beset it.
Entrusted by the parish priest with the care of youth, he threw himself with all his energy and organizational gifts into this new field of apostolate. He founded a first Oratory in the form of a “Marian cohort,” aiming at the Christian and social formation of young people; but the Napoleonic suppression of 1807 brought this abruptly to an end, and Don Gaspare reserved the fulfillment of his plans for better times.
Meanwhile, from the very beginning he assumed the spiritual direction of the work of Maddalena di Canossa at San Giuseppe (May 1808). There he also encountered the Servant of God Leopoldina Naudet, whom he guided to the heights of the mysticism of holy abandonment and to the founding of the Sisters of the Holy Family. He extended his spiritual assistance likewise to another Servant of God, the noblewoman Teodora Campostrini, both in discerning her vocation and in the founding of the Minim Sisters of the Charity of Our Lady of Sorrows.
In September 1810, Don Bertoni — who a few months earlier, following his mother’s death, had transferred from San Paolo to San Fermo Maggiore — was charged by the bishop with the spiritual direction of the seminarians. The solid spiritual and intellectual formation of the young clergy had long been a precise objective of his, pursued through frequent gatherings held in his own home. He now set his work on a more organic plan of renewal, grounded in unconditional loyalty to the Supreme Pontiff Pius VII, held prisoner by Napoleon yet regarded by Bertoni as ever the “first immovable stone” of Christendom. The reform of the Church was to proceed from within the sanctuary — a return of its ministers to the full following of the Gospel. Indeed, the Seminary, which had passed through one of the most disastrous economic and moral crises, recovered its proper character in a short time and took on, as a contemporary witness wrote, the aspect of a monastery.
With the fall of Napoleon, the need for restoration was universally felt. Don Bertoni understood that to bring the masses back to the fold they must be roused by the presentation of the fundamental truths of faith through the preaching of popular missions. On 20 December 1817, Pope Pius VII gave him a precise mandate, conferring on him the title and faculties of “apostolic missionary.” And while the suspicious Austrian government obstructed this specific ministry, Don Gaspare devoted himself to occasional preaching and catechesis.
While making himself all things to all people in order to win all for Christ, Don Gaspare also cultivated an intense interior life, enriched — as his Private Memorial attests — by various mystical gifts. Among these was notably the call, through particular signs from on high, to found a religious family.
On 4 November 1816, he withdrew with two companions to the suppressed church of the Sacred Stigmata of Saint Francis — from which the adapted name of his Congregation derives, along with the spread of devotion to the Passion and wounds of the Lord. There he began, quietly and under the guise of a popular school, his free service to the Church and to society: a common life of strict observance and rigorous penance, with a program of intense contemplation and broad apostolate encompassing the education of youth, the formation of the clergy, and missionary preaching — all in a spirit of perfect availability to the requests of bishops.
The day after an ecstasy experienced before the Crucifix (30 May 1812), he was struck by a miliary fever that brought him to the brink of death. He recovered almost miraculously, but for the remaining forty-one years of his life he was an invalid, giving a marvelous example of patience through a heroic and trusting abandonment into the hands of God.
On the bed of his unspeakable sufferings he became an angel of counsel for countless souls, especially for those engaged in works of charity — among them Blessed Carlo Steeb, the Servants of God Don Nicola Mazza and Don Antonio Provolo, and others who came to Verona even from afar to seek him out.
A true image of the crucified Christ — having undergone nearly three hundred surgical operations on his right leg — he seemed never to have had his fill of suffering for the good of the Church and the salvation of souls. “Father,” the nurse asked him, “do you need anything?” “I need to suffer,” was his reply with his final breaths.
In a vision of living hope in the Risen Christ bearing the signs of his triumph, sustained by his holy patrons Mary and Joseph, he died holily at half past three in the afternoon on Sunday, 12 June 1853.