At Naples in Italy, Blessed Paul Manna, priest of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, who, having relinquished his work as a missionary in Burma on account of ill health, labored greatly for the cause of evangelization and with the utmost zeal devoted himself to fostering the preaching of the word of God and the unity of Christians.
Lifespan: 1872–1952
Beatified: 4 November 2001 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 15 September
“Only the missionary who faithfully copies Jesus Christ in himself… can reproduce His image in the souls of others.”
Paul Manna was born in Avellino on 16 January 1872. After completing his elementary and technical studies in Avellino and Naples, he pursued his studies in Rome. While attending the Gregorian University for Philosophy, and following the Lord’s call, in September 1891 he entered the Seminary of the Foreign Missions Institute in Milan for his theological studies. On 19 May 1894 he received priestly ordination in Milan Cathedral.
On 27 September 1895 he departed for the Mission of Toungoo in Eastern Burma, where he worked in three separate stints over a decade, until in 1907 a serious illness compelled him to return home for good.
From 1909 onwards, for more than forty years, he devoted all his energies — through his writings and through practical works — to spreading the missionary idea among the faithful and the clergy. In order to “resolve in the most radical way possible the problem of Catholic cooperation in the apostolate,” in 1916 he founded the Missionary Union of the Clergy, elevated by Pius XII to “Pontifical” status in 1956. His conviction was that a missionary-minded clergy would animate the entire Christian people with a missionary spirit. Today the Missionary Union of the Clergy is spread throughout the Catholic world and includes in its ranks seminarians, religious men and women, and consecrated laity.
Director of Le Missioni Cattoliche from 1909, in 1914 he founded Propaganda Missionaria, a popular leaflet with an extremely wide circulation, and in 1919 also Italia Missionaria for young people.
By commission of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, with a view to greater missionary development in southern Italy, Father Manna opened at Ducenta (Caserta) the Southern Seminary of the “Sacred Heart” for Foreign Missions, a project he had long championed.
In 1924 he was elected Superior General of the Foreign Missions Institute of Milan, which in 1926, through its union with the Missionary Seminary of Rome and by the will of Pius XI, became the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (P.I.M.E.).
On the mandate of the General Assembly of P.I.M.E. (1934), in 1936 he played a leading role in the founding of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate.
From 1937 to 1941 he directed the International Secretariat of the Missionary Union of the Clergy.
With the erection in 1943 of the P.I.M.E. Province of Southern Italy, Father Manna became its first Superior, relocating to Ducenta, where he also founded Venga il tuo regno (“Come, Thy Kingdom”), a missionary periodical for families.
Father Manna was a prolific writer and publicist whose pamphlets and books left a lasting mark — among them Operarii autem pauci, I Fratelli separati e noi (“Our Separated Brethren and Us”), Le nostre Chiese e la propagazione del Vangelo (“Our Churches and the Propagation of the Gospel”), and Virtù Apostoliche (“Apostolic Virtues”). He also put forward innovative proposals concerning missionary methods, anticipating the Second Vatican Council. But above all, what endures is the example of a life wholly animated by a consuming missionary passion, which no trial or illness could ever diminish. His first biographer, Tragella, rightly called him “a soul of fire.” His motto to the end was: “The whole Church for the whole world!”
Father Paul Manna died in Naples on 15 September 1952. His remains rest at Ducenta, in “his Seminary,” which Pope John Paul II visited on 13 December 1990.
The process for the Cause of Beatification was begun in Naples in 1971 and concluded in Rome on 24 April 2001 with the papal decree on the miracle attributed to the Servant of God.