Ignatius of Laconi

Ignatius of Laconi was born Vincenzo Peis on 10 December 1701 in Laconi, a small agricultural town in the interior of Sardinia. His parents, Mattia Peis Cadello and Anna Maria Sanna Casu, were poor peasant farmers who supported their household by work in the fields. Vincenzo received only rudimentary schooling. From childhood he was noted for a gentle disposition, regular attendance at church, and a marked devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He spent his youth laboring on the family farm and in the religious life of his parish.

As a young man he wished to join the Capuchin Franciscans. After a grave illness he vowed to enter the order if he recovered; once restored he delayed, in part because his labor was needed at home. A later accident, in which he was thrown from a horse, brought the vow back with force, and his father at last consented. Vincenzo went to Cagliari and in the early 1720s received the Capuchin habit, taking the religious name Ignatius. He professed vows as a lay brother and was never ordained a priest. His remaining decades were spent in Capuchin houses on the island, principally in Cagliari.

For about forty years he served as questor, the friar charged with collecting alms for his community. Daily he walked the streets of Cagliari and the surrounding countryside with a sack, begging food and money for the friars and for the poor. He became a familiar and beloved figure across social classes. Testimony gathered for his later cause of canonization attributed to him healings, knowledge of hidden faults, prophetic insight, and the conversion of people living in public sin. He was said to refuse gifts that he believed came from injustice and to offer blunt spiritual advice despite his lack of formal education. He remained austere, obedient, and attached to the humblest work of the friary, and many called him the holy father even though he was not a priest.

Ignatius died in the Capuchin friary at Cagliari on 11 May 1781 at the age of seventy-nine. Large crowds attended his burial, and popular veneration spread through Sardinia. Pope Pius XII beatified him on 16 June 1940 and canonized him on 21 October 1951. His feast is kept on 11 May. He is the patron saint of Laconi, where a sanctuary is dedicated to him, and his relics are venerated in the Capuchin church of Saint Anthony of Padua in Cagliari. In Capuchin memory he stands with other lay brothers of the order as an example of evangelical poverty and of holiness exercised in ordinary streets among the poor of eighteenth-century Sardinia.