Suggest an Edit — Bonfiglio

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Biography

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Bonfiglio, known in Latin as Bonfilius, was a Benedictine monk and bishop of Foligno who lived in central Italy in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries. He was a native of Osimo in the March of Ancona. Drawn to the monastic life, he entered the Benedictine community of Santa Maria di Storaco, a house also associated in the sources with Santa Maria di Valdicastro in the Fabriano district of the Marche. There he lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict. Contemporary documentation of his family, education, and early career is extremely thin; later notices that assign a birth around the middle of the eleventh century are conventional rather than archival.

In 1078 he was chosen bishop of Foligno in Umbria. His episcopate fell in the age of the Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Controversy, but surviving records say little about any specific part he played in those struggles. After some years in the see, in 1096 he left the diocese to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a journey that coincided with the preaching and first expeditions of the First Crusade. He remained in the East for about a decade. Whether he lived there chiefly as a pilgrim, a hermit, or in some other capacity is not firmly established by contemporary evidence.

He returned to Italy in the first years of the twelfth century, around 1104 to 1106 according to the usual reconstruction. He did not resume active government of Foligno. He resigned the bishopric and withdrew again to Santa Maria di Storaco, seeking the contemplative life of his earlier monastic years. He died at that monastery on 27 September. The year most often given in the hagiographical tradition is 1115, though some later notices have 1125; the day of the month is the more stable element in the tradition. He was buried at Storaco.

Veneration of Bonfiglio grew locally in Umbria and the Marche. The Catholic Church commemorates him as a saint, with the feast kept on 27 September. He was a figure of the pre-Congregation era: no reliable source names a pope who formally canonized or beatified him by the later juridical process. He is remembered as a monk-bishop who combined pastoral office with a long pilgrimage and a final return to monastic solitude. Many particulars of his episcopate and of his years in the East were not preserved in contemporary chronicles, and later legendary expansions should be treated with caution.

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