Ludovico of Casoria

Ludovico of Casoria was born Arcangelo Palmentieri on 11 March 1814 in Casoria, a town near Naples in southern Italy, then part of the Kingdom of Naples. The son of a butcher, he worked in his youth as a cabinetmaker before entering the Order of Friars Minor in 1832 and taking the religious name Ludovico. He was ordained a priest in 1837. In the following years he taught philosophy, mathematics, and related subjects in Franciscan houses of study in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, combining intellectual work with the observant life of a Friar Minor.

A spiritual turning point in the late 1840s led him to set aside much of his teaching in order to devote himself to the poor, the sick, and the socially abandoned of Naples. He opened infirmaries and pharmacies for those who could not pay, night shelters, and schools for neglected children. He took a particular interest in African boys who had been freed from the slave trade and brought to the port of Naples; he founded an institute in which they received education, trades training, and Christian formation, hoping that some might later serve as missionaries in Africa. These works were staffed in part by lay collaborators and by members of the Franciscan Third Order.

In 1859 he established the Congregation of the Gray Friars of Charity (Frati Bigi della Carità), Franciscan tertiaries in a gray habit dedicated to active works of mercy, and later a corresponding community of women, the Gray Sisters of Saint Elizabeth (Suore Elisabettine Bigie). The two institutes extended his network of hospitals, hospices, and schools. He also promoted vocational and arts training and, in a spirit he traced to Saint Francis of Assisi, showed an unusual openness for mid-nineteenth-century Catholic Naples toward dialogue with non-Catholics and with Muslims.

Ludovico spent his last years in failing health at a hospice he had founded in Naples and died there on 30 March 1885. Popular veneration followed quickly. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 18 April 1993. Pope Francis canonized him on 23 November 2014 in Saint Peter’s Square. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 30 March, the day of his death.