Antonio Augusto Intreccialagli

Antonio Augusto Intreccialagli was born on 17 February 1852 in Monte Compatri, a hill town of the Roman Campagna then still under the temporal government of the Papal States. He entered the Order of Discalced Carmelites as a young man and received his religious and priestly formation in the Teresian tradition of contemplative prayer, evangelical poverty, and apostolic work. He was ordained a priest in 1875. For more than three decades thereafter he lived as a Carmelite of the Roman province, occupying posts of government and formation within the order and becoming known in Roman ecclesiastical circles for prudence, interior life, and fidelity to the Discalced Carmelite reform.

In 1907 Pope Pius X appointed him Bishop of Caltanissetta, a diocese in the Sicilian interior whose people lived amid the hardships of the sulfur-mining economy, rural poverty, and large-scale emigration. Intreccialagli took up residence in Sicily and devoted himself to visitation of parishes, the care of clergy and seminarians, and the encouragement of Catholic life in a society marked by social tension. Contemporary accounts of his episcopate stress simple personal habits and attention to the poor, in keeping with his Carmelite formation. He remained at Caltanissetta until he was transferred to a second Sicilian see.

In 1914 he was named titular archbishop and coadjutor with right of succession to the Archdiocese of Monreale, the historic Norman metropolitan see of western Sicily, whose cathedral is among the great monuments of medieval Christendom. He succeeded to Monreale in 1919 and governed the archdiocese until his death. As archbishop he continued the same style of rule: emphasis on prayer, clerical discipline, and pastoral presence among the faithful of the Conca d’Oro and the mountain parishes. He died in Monreale on 19 September 1924.

After his death a reputation for holiness persisted in Sicily and among the Discalced Carmelites. A cause for beatification was introduced, and the Holy See later recognized that he had practiced the theological and cardinal virtues to a heroic degree, declaring him Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonized, and he is not the object of an official universal feast or of formally approved patronages. His historical importance lies in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century current of religious observance in Italian Carmel and in the Sicilian episcopate of the pontificates of Pius X, Benedict XV, and the opening years of Pius XI.