Luigi Orione

Luigi Giovanni Orione was born on 23 June 1872 in Pontecurone, a small town in the province of Alessandria in Piedmont, northern Italy. He was the son of Vittorio Orione, a paving labourer of modest means, and Carolina Flex. From childhood he showed a marked religious vocation and a practical concern for the poor. At about the age of thirteen he entered a Franciscan convent at Voghera, but ill health obliged him to leave. In 1886 he was accepted at the Salesian oratory of Valdocco in Turin, where he came under the personal influence of Saint John Bosco. After Bosco’s death in 1888, Orione continued his studies and entered the diocesan seminary of Tortona.

He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Tortona on 13 April 1895. Even as a seminarian he had begun gathering neglected boys, opening a boarding house in 1893 that became the seed of his life’s work. In the years that followed he founded the Little Work of Divine Providence (Piccola Opera della Divina Provvidenza), a family of institutes that came to include the Sons of Divine Providence (priests and brothers), the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity, contemplative sisters, and lay associations. The Orionini charism was service of the poorest—orphans, the elderly, the homeless, and people with physical and mental disabilities—under the motto of doing good to all without distinction. He established numerous “Little Cottolengos,” hospices modelled on the work of Saint Giuseppe Benedetto Cottolengo in Turin.

Don Orione became widely known for disaster relief. After the Messina–Reggio Calabria earthquake of December 1908 he organised aid and took in orphans; he responded similarly after the Avezzano earthquake of 1915. His houses spread from Piedmont and Liguria across Italy and, from the 1920s, to Poland, Brazil, Argentina, and other countries. He himself travelled in Latin America in the 1930s to visit and found works. A priest of intense Eucharistic and Marian devotion, he promoted the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Guardia on a hill above Tortona as a pilgrimage centre and headquarters of his congregation, and he maintained close ties with the Holy See, including an audience with Pope Pius XI.

In later years he suffered from cardiac and respiratory illness. In early 1940 he was sent to Sanremo on the Ligurian coast in the hope that the climate would restore his strength. He died there on 12 March 1940, aged sixty-seven. His body was brought back to Tortona and is enshrined in the crypt of the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Guardia, where it has been venerated as incorrupt. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 26 October 1980 and canonized him on 16 May 2004 in Saint Peter’s Square. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 12 March. The congregations he founded continue his work in many countries, especially among the marginalized and the disabled.