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Biography

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Andrea Caccioli, also known as Andrea da Spello or Blessed Andrew of Spello, was an Italian priest and an early professed member of the Order of Friars Minor. He was born in 1194 in Spello, an Umbrian town then within the Papal States, to the nobles Pietro and Maria Caccioli, who named him in honor of the apostle Saint Andrew. Raised in that household, he received an education appropriate to his rank and was ordained a priest while still a young man. In 1221 he encountered Francis of Assisi, who was preaching in the region. Moved by Francis's example of evangelical poverty and itinerant preaching, Caccioli sought admission to the Friars Minor and was received, becoming one of the first ordained priests to enter an order that in its earliest years was composed largely of lay brothers.

As a Franciscan he devoted himself to preaching and missionary work, including journeys in the towns of northern Italy, and he is recorded as having taken part in a provincial chapter of the order at Recanati. Later tradition presents him as a faithful disciple of Francis's spirit, noted for humility, austerity, and zeal for souls, though surviving thirteenth-century documentation of the details of his itinerary is sparse. After years of apostolic labor he returned to his native Spello and lived at the modest Franciscan house associated with the church of San Lorenzo, continuing a life of prayer and pastoral service among his fellow townsfolk.

Caccioli died in Spello on 3 June 1254 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo. A local cult formed around his tomb; his relics were later translated and are now venerated in the church of Sant'Andrea in Spello. On 25 July 1738 Pope Clement XII confirmed the immemorial cultus, an equipollent beatification that authorized his public liturgical honor in the Catholic Church. His feast is observed on 3 June, and he is honored as a patron of Spello. He was never formally canonized and remains a blessed.

Because he belongs to the first generation of Franciscans, later hagiographers sometimes drew him more closely into the inner circle of Francis than the thin contemporary record can confirm. Historical caution therefore rests on the well-attested facts of his origin in Spello, his priesthood, his entry into the Friars Minor during Francis's lifetime, his death in 1254, and the eighteenth-century Roman confirmation of his cult, while treating pious elaborations that cannot be independently verified with reserve. He remains an important figure in Umbrian Franciscan memory and a representative example of the diocesan clergy who joined the mendicant movement in its formative decades.

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