Confessor Leonard of Port Maurice

Leonard of Port Maurice was born on 20 December 1676 at Porto Maurizio, a port on the Riviera di Ponente in the Republic of Genoa (now part of Imperia in Liguria, Italy). He was the son of Domenico Casanova, a sea captain, and Anna Maria Benza. In youth he was sent to Rome to live with his uncle Agostino and to study at the Jesuit Collegio Romano. Family hopes that he would follow a secular profession gave way when, in 1697, he entered the Riformella, a strict reform of the Observant Franciscans, and took the religious name Leonard. He completed his studies at the convent of San Bonaventura on the Palatine Hill and was ordained priest in 1703.

After ordination he wished to go as a missionary to China, but a grave illness made that impossible. Sent to recover at a Franciscan house near Florence, he regained his strength and from 1708 devoted himself to popular missions. For more than four decades he preached throughout Tuscany, the Papal States, Liguria, and Corsica, calling hearers to repentance, frequent Communion, and devotion to the Passion, the Sacred Heart, and the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which he strongly defended before it was defined as dogma. His preaching combined moral severity with practical instruction in the sacraments and drew very large crowds in towns and countryside alike.

His most lasting pastoral work was the spread of the Stations of the Cross. He is traditionally credited with erecting the Via Crucis in more than five hundred churches and public places. During the Holy Year of 1750 he obtained from Pope Benedict XIV permission to establish the Stations in the Colosseum at Rome, linking that ancient amphitheatre to Christian meditation on the Passion. He also founded retreat houses for clergy and laity, among them a well-known house of recollection near Florence, and wrote widely circulated ascetical works, including treatises on the Mass (known as The Hidden Treasure), sermons, and manuals for the Way of the Cross.

Exhausted by travel and preaching, he returned to Rome in 1751 and died on 26 November of that year at the convent of San Bonaventura on the Palatine, where he had been formed as a young friar. He was buried in the adjoining church. Veneration began at once. Pope Pius VI beatified him on 19 June 1796, and Pope Pius IX canonized him on 29 June 1867. His feast is kept on 26 November. He is invoked as a patron of parish missions and of Imperia, and he remains a principal figure of eighteenth-century Italian popular preaching and Franciscan reform.