Giuseppe Allamano

Giuseppe Allamano was born on 21 January 1851 in Castelnuovo d'Asti (now Castelnuovo Don Bosco) in Piedmont, then in the Kingdom of Sardinia. He belonged to a family already linked to the Turin clergy: his mother, Marianna Cafasso, was a sister of Saint Joseph Cafasso, the priest and spiritual director who shaped a generation of Piedmontese seminarians. Allamano’s father died while Giuseppe was still a child. He grew up in the same small town that had produced Saint John Bosco, in the climate of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival in northwestern Italy. He entered the diocesan seminary of Turin rather than a religious order, was ordained a priest of that archdiocese on 20 September 1873, and remained a secular priest for the rest of his life even after founding missionary congregations.

As a young priest he was appointed spiritual director of the Turin seminary, continuing in a modest way the formation work associated with Cafasso and the Turin school of clergy. In 1880 he became rector of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Consolation (the Consolata) in Turin, an ancient Marian shrine at the centre of the city’s religious life, and he held that office until his death. From the sanctuary he restored buildings, organized pastoral and charitable work, promoted the Consolata devotion, and developed publications that publicized both the shrine and the missions. He was not a popular itinerant preacher; contemporaries described a reserved, exacting, and administrative temperament, with persistent poor health that kept him in Turin.

Out of that shrine-centred ministry he founded, in 1901, the Istituto Missioni Consolata (Consolata Missionaries) for priests and brothers destined for unevangelized territories, above all in Africa. The first members left in 1902 for British East Africa, in what is now Kenya, and began work among the Kikuyu and neighbouring peoples. In 1910 he founded a parallel institute of women, the Consolata Missionary Sisters, so that teaching, nursing, and catechesis could be carried on by religious sisters. He governed both institutes from Turin and never visited the African missions himself. A phrase often attached to his formation programme was that missionaries must be saints first and apostles second. The congregations remained diocesan in origin and only later received fuller pontifical status; Allamano himself was their founder and first superior, not a member of an older order such as the Jesuits or Franciscans.

He died in Turin on 16 February 1926. His remains were placed at the motherhouse of the Consolata Missionaries in that city. The cause of canonization proceeded in the twentieth century; Pope John Paul II beatified him on 7 October 1990 in Saint Peter’s Square. Pope Francis canonized him on 20 October 2024. His liturgical memorial is kept on 16 February. He is remembered principally as founder of the Consolata missionary family and as a figure of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italian movement that sent new institutes from northern Italy into East Africa, rather than as a bishop, pope, or member of a medieval religious order.