Francis Mary of Camporosso

Francis Mary of Camporosso was born Giovanni Croese on 27 December 1804 in Camporosso, a Ligurian town then under Napoleonic rule and later incorporated into the Kingdom of Sardinia. He was the son of Anselmo Croese and Maria Antonia Garzo and the fourth of five children in a poor peasant household. In youth he worked as a shepherd and farm laborer. Drawn to the Franciscan life, he sought admission among the Capuchins and entered the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin in Genoa in the 1820s, taking the religious name Francesco Maria da Camporosso. He remained a lay brother for the whole of his religious life and was never ordained to the priesthood.

After novitiate and profession he was assigned to the Capuchin community in Genoa. For decades his principal duty was that of questor, going out each day to collect alms for the support of the friars in the streets, markets, and harbor. At first he met indifference or rebuff, but he became a familiar and respected figure in the city and was popularly called Padre Santo. He did not retain for the convent all that was given him; he shared freely with the destitute and visited the sick, the imprisoned, and others in distress. He continued this work through the political and social upheavals of mid-nineteenth-century Genoa.

Contemporaries described him as humble, patient, and detached, a man of simple prayer who accepted insult and hardship without complaint. Popular reputation already in his lifetime credited him with wonders and with a gift of counsel, and people sought him out for intercession. He lived as a brother among the poor rather than as a public or clerical figure, embodying the Capuchin ideal of itinerant poverty and charity in an urban port city.

In 1866 a severe cholera epidemic struck Genoa. Francesco Maria persisted in assisting the victims and himself contracted the disease. He died in the Capuchin convent in Genoa on 17 September 1866. Devotion to him grew rapidly after his death, and his remains were later enshrined in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Genoa. Pope Pius XI beatified him on 30 June 1929, and Pope John XXIII canonized him on 9 December 1962. The Church keeps his feast on 17 September. He is especially venerated in Camporosso and in Genoa as a model of Capuchin poverty and of service to the poor.