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Biography

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Giustino de Jacobis, known in English as Justin de Jacobis, was born in 1800 at San Fele in Basilicata, then in the Kingdom of Naples. He entered the Congregation of the Mission, the institute founded by Vincent de Paul and commonly called the Vincentians or Lazarists, and was ordained a priest in 1824. For about fifteen years he worked in southern Italy as a preacher of parish missions, a seminary instructor, and a superior of Vincentian houses. In 1839 his congregation and the Holy See sent him to restore the Catholic mission in Abyssinia, a field covering much of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, where Catholic life had nearly vanished after the collapse of earlier Jesuit missions and long hostility toward Catholics.

He reached the Red Sea port of Massawa and moved among coastal and highland communities that today lie in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. He learned local languages, including Tigrinya and Amharic, and studied the Ge'ez liturgical heritage of Ethiopian Christianity. Instead of imposing the Latin rite, he celebrated the Alexandrian Ge'ez liturgy in communion with Rome and trained native clergy so that Catholic life would be Ethiopian in culture and leadership. He opened schools and a seminary, ordained local priests, and sought the reunion of Orthodox Christians with the Catholic Church without requiring Latinization. That method became foundational for the modern Ethiopian Catholic Church and Eritrean Catholic Church, both of the Alexandrian rite.

In the 1840s Rome reconstituted the mission as the Apostolic Vicariate of Abyssinia, and in 1849 de Jacobis was consecrated a bishop as titular Bishop of Nilopolis. As vicar apostolic he traveled constantly through the highlands, often in poverty and danger. He collaborated closely with Abba Ghebre Michael, an Ethiopian monk who entered Catholic communion and the priesthood and later died in detention; Ghebre Michael was subsequently beatified. Orthodox hierarchs and some local rulers treated the Catholic presence as a religious and political threat. De Jacobis was imprisoned, driven from various districts, and forced into intervals of exile, yet he continued to form small Catholic communities and to insist that Catholicism in the region should be Ethiopian in rite and personnel.

In 1860, while on a pastoral journey, he contracted a fever and died at Hebo in the highlands of what is now Eritrea. He was buried there, and Hebo became a shrine and place of pilgrimage. Devotion to him spread among Catholics in the Horn of Africa and in the Vincentian family. Pope Pius XII beatified him in 1939, and Pope Paul VI canonized him in 1975. His feast is kept on 31 July, the anniversary of his death. He is honored as a missionary bishop, as an apostle of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and as a principal heavenly patron of the Ge'ez-rite Catholic churches of that region.

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