Gaspar del Bufalo

Gaspar del Bufalo was born in Rome on 6 January 1786, the feast of the Epiphany, and received the names Gaspar Melchior Balthazar after the three Magi. His father, Antonio del Bufalo, worked as a cook in a Roman princely household; his mother was Annunziata Quartieroni. As a child he suffered from a serious affliction of the eyes that family tradition held was cured through the intercession of Saint Francis Xavier, a devotion that remained with him throughout his life. He was educated in Rome, including at the Collegio Romano, and from youth he taught catechism and assisted the poor. He was ordained a priest on 31 July 1808 and began pastoral work in the city at a moment when the Papal States were already under severe political pressure from Napoleonic France.

After Napoleon annexed the Papal States and Pope Pius VII was removed from Rome, clergy were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the emperor. Del Bufalo refused, a stance later summed up in the words attributed to him that he could not, must not, and would not take the oath. In 1810 he was exiled from Rome and then held in successive places of confinement in northern Italy, including Bologna, Imola, and Lugo, until the collapse of Napoleonic power in 1814. Upon returning to Rome he hoped to enter the foreign missions, but Pius VII instead directed him to the spiritual reconstruction of the Papal States, whose parishes and rural districts had been left disordered by occupation, war, and the disruption of ordinary church life.

On 15 August 1815, at the former monastery of San Felice in Giano dell'Umbria, he founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, a society of priests devoted to preaching parish missions and to promoting devotion to the Precious Blood of Christ. Over the following two decades he conducted missions across central Italy, with particular attention to neglected countryside and to towns associated with brigandage, among them Sonnino. He opened a network of mission houses and repeatedly had to defend the identity and independence of his congregation against ecclesiastical officials who wished to suppress, absorb, or recast it. In 1834, with his support and spiritual direction, Maria De Mattias founded at Acuto the Sisters Adorers of the Blood of Christ, a related institute of women religious.

Del Bufalo continued missionary work despite chronic ill health. During the cholera epidemic of 1836–1837 he ministered to the sick; he died in Rome on 28 December 1837, aged fifty-one. He was beatified by Pope Pius X on 18 December 1904 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on 12 June 1954. His remains are venerated in the Church of Santa Maria in Trivio in Rome, a church associated with his congregation. His liturgical memorial is kept on 21 October, especially by the Missionaries of the Precious Blood.