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Biography

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Joseph Cafasso was born in 1811 in Castelnuovo d'Asti, a Piedmontese town in the Kingdom of Sardinia, into a rural family of modest means. The same locality later produced John Bosco, several years his junior, who became his most celebrated spiritual son. Frail in health and small in stature from youth, Cafasso nonetheless showed marked piety and aptitude for study. He trained for the priesthood in the seminary of Turin and was ordained in the early 1830s while still a young man. Instead of taking an ordinary parish post he entered the Convitto Ecclesiastico attached to the church of San Francesco d'Assisi in Turin, an institute founded by the priest Luigi Guala to give newly ordained clergy a deeper formation in moral theology and pastoral practice. Cafasso remained associated with the Convitto for the rest of his life, first as a student, then as a lecturer in moral theology, and eventually as rector after Guala's death.

In the lecture hall and in the confessional he became one of the principal moral theologians of nineteenth-century Piedmont. He taught a middle way between Jansenist rigorism and worldly laxity, drawing especially on the moral theology of Alphonsus Liguori. Priests from across the region sought him as a confessor and spiritual director. Among them was John Bosco, whom Cafasso encouraged in his work for poor and abandoned boys and in the foundations that grew into the Salesian congregation. Cafasso also stood in close friendship with Joseph Benedict Cottolengo, whose large charitable complex in Turin belonged to the same generation of so-called social saints of that city. Cafasso himself never entered a religious order; he remained a diocesan priest of Turin, forming clergy rather than establishing a new institute of his own.

His most distinctive pastoral work was among the prisoners of Turin. He visited the city's jails regularly, heard the confessions of inmates, and prepared those condemned to capital punishment for death, often accompanying them to the scaffold. That ministry earned him the popular name of priest of the gallows. He worked in a Turin that was industrializing rapidly and that was also the political centre of the Savoyard state during the Risorgimento, a period of anticlerical legislation and social dislocation. His response was not political pamphleteering but the patient care of souls, especially of those whom society had cast aside.

Cafasso died in Turin in 1860, not yet fifty years of age. A reputation for holiness spread quickly in Piedmont and beyond. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1925 and canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1947. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 23 June. He is invoked as a patron of prisoners, prison chaplains, those condemned to death, captives, and Italian prisons, and is remembered as a model of the diocesan priest as formator of clergy and as minister to the abandoned.

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