Giovanni Battista Scalabrini

Giovanni Battista Scalabrini was born on 8 July 1839 in Fino Mornasco, a town near Como in northern Italy, then part of the Austrian-ruled Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia. He was the third of eight children of Luigi Scalabrini and Colomba Trombetta. Raised in a devout Catholic family of modest means, he entered the seminary of the Diocese of Como and received the classical and theological formation typical of mid-nineteenth-century northern Italian clergy. He was ordained a priest in 1863. In the years that followed he taught at the Como seminary and served as its rector, forming priests during the political and religious tensions that accompanied Italian unification.

As a young priest he also undertook parish ministry. From 1870 he was pastor of San Bartolomeo in Como, a populous urban parish, where he organized catechesis, promoted associations for workers and youth, and became known as a preacher. His pastoral energy and loyalty to the Holy See brought him to the attention of Rome. In 1876 Pope Pius IX appointed him Bishop of Piacenza. He was consecrated that same year at the age of thirty-six, becoming one of the younger diocesan bishops in Italy. The Diocese of Piacenza comprised hundreds of parishes, from the agricultural plain of the Po to scattered mountain villages in the Apennines.

As bishop, Scalabrini made personal visitation the foundation of his government of the diocese. Over nearly three decades he completed multiple rounds of visits to every parish, often traveling on difficult roads. He insisted on the instruction of children and adults in the catechism, published catechetical materials, and held a diocesan synod to renew clerical and lay life. He founded or supported institutions for orphans, for the deaf, and for the poor, and he encouraged more frequent reception of Communion in an era when that practice was still uncommon in many places. He also took an interest in the social question, seeking to apply the emerging Catholic social teaching of the late nineteenth century to the conditions of peasants and factory workers in Emilia.

The phenomenon that most marked his later years was the great wave of Italian emigration to the Americas. Observing that millions of Italians were leaving with little spiritual or legal protection, he argued that the Church had a duty to follow them. In 1887 he founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of Saint Charles Borromeo, whose members—known as Scalabrinians—were to serve Italian migrants in ports, on ships, and in immigrant neighborhoods. In 1895 he established a corresponding congregation of sisters, the Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo. He supported the Saint Raphael Society for the Protection of Emigrants and wrote and spoke on emigration as both a social and a pastoral crisis. In 1901 he spent months in the United States visiting Italian parishes and missions; in 1904 he made a long journey through Brazil for the same purpose.

Scalabrini returned from Brazil with his health weakened and died in Piacenza on 1 June 1905. He was buried in Piacenza Cathedral, where his tomb became a place of prayer, especially for members of the institutes he had founded. The cause for his beatification proceeded in the twentieth century; Pope John Paul II beatified him on 9 November 1997 in Saint Peter’s Square. Pope Francis canonized him on 9 October 2022, holding him up as a bishop who saw in the movement of peoples a call to charity and evangelization. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 1 June. He is honored as a patron of migrants and of pastoral workers who serve people on the move.