Humilis of Bisignano

Humilis of Bisignano was born Luca Antonio Pirozzo on 26 August 1582 in Bisignano, a town in Calabria then belonging to the Kingdom of Naples. He was the son of Giovanni Pirozzo and Elisabetta Cariati and grew up in a poor and devout household. In the religious climate of post-Tridentine southern Italy, convents of the Reformed Franciscans offered a path of strict poverty and hidden prayer that drew him from youth. In 1604 he received the Franciscan habit at the Reformed convent of Mesoraca and took the name Umile, in Latin Humilis. He professed vows as a lay brother in 1605 and thereafter lived the obscure life of a frate laico, occupied with cooking, gardening, and collecting alms for the community.

Although he remained illiterate, witnesses later examined for his cause testified that he possessed an infused understanding of Scripture and of theological questions, so that learned men who tested him were surprised by the solidity of his replies. He was subject to frequent ecstasies, which sometimes interrupted his manual work, and he acquired a contemporary reputation for prophecy, discernment of consciences, and miraculous intercession. Superiors investigated these phenomena and found him obedient and meek. In the early 1620s his fame reached Rome. He was summoned to the city, lived for a time in Franciscan houses there, and was received by Pope Gregory XV; he later stood in the esteem of Pope Urban VIII. After this period at the centre of the Church he was allowed to return to Calabria.

Humilis spent his last years in the convent of his native Bisignano, continuing the same round of prayer, penance, and humble labour. He died there on 26 November 1637. A local cult arose at once and persisted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Calabria. The cause of beatification advanced in due course, and Pope Leo XIII beatified him in 1882. On 19 May 2002 Pope John Paul II canonized him in Saint Peter's Square, presenting him to the universal Church as an example of Franciscan minority and of holiness lived in obscurity. His liturgical memorial is kept on 26 November, the anniversary of his death.

The documentary basis for his life consists chiefly of the depositions assembled for beatification and of later hagiography rather than of writings by Humilis himself, who left no treatise or substantial correspondence. Those sources agree in portraying a lay brother of peasant origin whose lack of schooling stood in contrast to the spiritual gifts attributed to him, and whose identity was bound to the Reformed Franciscan observance in Calabria. He is remembered especially in Bisignano and in the Franciscan tradition of southern Italy as a mystic of humility rather than as a founder, preacher, or ecclesiastical reformer.