Bernard of Corleone

Bernard of Corleone was born Filippo Latini in 1605 in Corleone, in the Kingdom of Sicily, into a modest artisan family. His father was a shoemaker, and the boy learned that trade. In youth, however, he became far better known as a swordsman than as a cobbler. Period accounts present him as quick-tempered and as one of the most formidable duelists on the island, living a worldly and often violent life of the kind not uncommon among young men of his milieu in early seventeenth-century Sicily.

A duel in which he inflicted a grave wound on his opponent became the turning point of his life. Believing he might have killed the man and fearing both legal penalty and divine judgment, he fled and sought refuge. The crisis led to a religious conversion. After a period of discernment he asked admission among the Capuchin Franciscans and was received as a lay brother, taking the name Bernard. He made his profession in the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and was never ordained a priest. He received the habit in Sicily, associated in the sources with the Capuchin house at Caltanissetta, and later lived in other houses of the province, including Palermo.

As a lay brother he performed the ordinary work of the kitchen, collected alms, and served the community. At the same time he embraced a life of unusual austerity: frequent fasting, often on bread and water, little sleep on a hard surface, and other corporal penances. He gave long hours to prayer, with particular devotion to the Passion of Christ and to the Blessed Virgin. Confreres and lay witnesses attributed to him ecstasies and gifts of counsel and of reading consciences. Drawing on his own past, he urged conversion, reconciliation, and the abandonment of hatred, and he was remembered for charity toward the poor and the sick.

He died in Palermo on 12 January 1667 after a life spent almost entirely in Sicily. Popular veneration began soon after his death. Pope Clement XIII beatified him in 1768; Pope John Paul II canonized him on 10 June 2001 in Saint Peter's Square. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 12 January. He is invoked as patron of Corleone and is remembered as an example of radical conversion and of holiness lived in the hidden state of a lay brother rather than in the priesthood.