Innocenzo Marcinnò

Giuseppe Marcinnò (also spelled Marcinò), known in religion as Innocenzo da Caltagirone or Innocenzo Marcinnò, was born on 24 October 1589 in Caltagirone, in the interior of Sicily, then part of the Kingdom of Sicily under the Spanish Habsburgs. Traditional biographies name his parents as Mario Marcinnò and Giovanna La Manna and describe a devout household. In 1604, at about fifteen years of age, he entered the Capuchin Franciscan novitiate in his native city and received the name Innocenzo. After the novitiate and clerical studies he was ordained a priest of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and spent the rest of his life in that observance.

Within the Sicilian Capuchin province he became known as a preacher of popular missions and as a superior. He served as guardian of convents and as definitor, and he was elected provincial minister of the Capuchins in Sicily. In that office he was associated with efforts to uphold regular discipline and to extend the order’s work among the poor and the sick in seventeenth-century Sicilian towns. Later pious accounts stress his personal austerity, his counsel to both clergy and laity, and a strong Marian devotion, especially to the Immaculate Conception, which he promoted well before the later dogmatic definition of that title. Claims of prophecy, miracles, or extraordinary phenomena belong to hagiographical tradition rather than to independently controlled documentation and should be treated with caution.

He remained closely tied to Caltagirone. He died there on 16 November 1655 in the Capuchin community and was buried in the Capuchin church of the city. A reputation for holiness persisted locally and within the order. A cause for beatification was in time introduced, and some Capuchin and Sicilian sources have styled him Venerable, but he was not raised to the altars as Blessed or Saint by a clearly attested papal act recorded in the principal martyrologies. His memory has continued to be kept in Caltagirone and among Sicilian Capuchins, customarily on the anniversary of his death.