Hildebrand Gregori

Hildebrand Gregori was born Alfredo Gregori on 8 January 1894 in Poggio Cinolfo (also written Poggio Ginolfo), a hamlet in the Abruzzo highlands of the province of L'Aquila, in what was then the Kingdom of Italy. In his youth he left that mountainous district for Rome and entered the Benedictine monastery attached to the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. He received the monastic name Hildebrand, recalling the baptismal name of Pope Saint Gregory VII, and was formed in the Rule of Saint Benedict. He made religious profession in the Order of Saint Benedict and was ordained a Catholic priest in the early 1920s. From that point his life was that of a Roman Benedictine monk-priest, lived through the two world wars and the social and ecclesial changes of the twentieth century.

Gregori became closely identified with modern Catholic devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. That current of reparative piety had nineteenth-century roots in France, in the circle of Sister Marie of St. Peter of Tours and the lay apostle Leo Dupont, and it received a strong Italian impulse in the twentieth century through Sister Maria Pierina De Micheli and the Holy Face medal. Gregori promoted this devotion and, in the middle of the twentieth century, founded a new community of women, the Benedictine Sisters of the Reparation of the Holy Face (Benedettine Riparatrici del Santo Volto di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo). The congregation united Benedictine monastic observance with a charism of reparation for blasphemies and outrages against the Holy Face of Christ and of spreading that devotion among the faithful. He remained founder and spiritual reference for the sisters for the rest of his life.

He received abbatial dignity within the Benedictine order and spent nearly all of his adult years in Rome, combining monastic life, priestly ministry, and care for the congregation he had established. Those who knew him described a reserved, prayerful priest, pastorally available and steady in encouraging Eucharistic and reparative spirituality both before and after the Second Vatican Council. He died in Rome on 12 November 1985, at the age of ninety-one.

After his death the sisters he had founded and other faithful preserved his memory and sought the opening of a cause of beatification. A diocesan inquiry was conducted in Rome and he was named a Servant of God. He has not been beatified or canonized, and the Catholic Church has not assigned him an official feast day or a list of patronages. His historical importance rests on his role as a twentieth-century Benedictine founder and as a promoter of Holy Face devotion in Italy.