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Biography

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Leonard of Port Maurice was born Paolo Girolamo Casanova on 20 December 1676 at Porto Maurizio on the Ligurian coast, then belonging to the Republic of Genoa. His father, Domenico Casanova, was a sea captain; his mother was Anna Maria Benza. After early schooling in his native town he was sent as a youth to Rome to live with an uncle who practiced medicine and to study at the Jesuit Collegio Romano. A medical career was at first contemplated, but he discerned a vocation to religious life. In 1697 he entered the Riformella, a strict reform of the Observant Franciscans, at the convent of San Bonaventura on the Palatine Hill in Rome, taking the name Leonard.

He completed his studies and was ordained a priest in 1703. A grave pulmonary illness soon threatened his life and forced a return to Porto Maurizio; he recovered after promising to devote himself to missionary preaching. From 1709 he undertook an intense apostolate of popular missions, first in Tuscany and then across the Italian states. For more than four decades he preached parish missions marked by personal austerity, long hours in the confessional, and sermons on repentance and the Last Things, drawing large crowds in cities and rural districts. He repeatedly declined episcopal appointments in order to remain a traveling missionary.

Leonard became one of the principal promoters of the Stations of the Cross in the eighteenth century and is traditionally credited with establishing the devotion in several hundred churches and public sites, including the Colosseum in Rome, where he obtained permission from Pope Benedict XIV to erect the Stations during the Holy Year of 1750. He also fostered frequent Communion, Eucharistic adoration, devotion to the Sacred Heart, and belief in the Immaculate Conception, writing in support of the last well before its later dogmatic definition. His spiritual treatises and collections of sermons, including works on the Holy Mass and on Christian resolution, circulated widely.

In 1744 Benedict XIV appointed him apostolic visitor to Corsica, charging him with preaching missions and restoring ecclesiastical order on the island amid political turbulence; the assignment proved difficult and only partly successful. In his final years he continued to preach in Rome despite failing strength. He died on 26 November 1751 at the convent of San Bonaventura on the Palatine. Pope Pius VI beatified him on 19 June 1796, and Pope Pius IX canonized him on 29 June 1867. His liturgical feast is observed on 26 November. He is invoked as a patron of parish missions and of Imperia, and he remains buried at San Bonaventura al Palatino in Rome.

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