Luigi Tezza

Luigi Tezza was born on 1 November 1841 in Conegliano, in the province of Treviso in northern Italy’s Veneto region, then part of the Habsburg Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. His father, a physician named Augusto Tezza, died while Luigi was still a child; his mother, Augusta Micheli, thereafter oversaw his upbringing and encouraged a devout life. Attracted both to the priesthood and to the service of the sick, he entered the Order of Clerics Regular, Ministers to the Sick—the Camillians—in his mid-teens. He completed novitiate and studies and was ordained a priest in 1864. Early assignments included teaching, the formation of younger religious, and ministry in hospitals, in keeping with the Camillian fourth vow to serve the sick even when they were contagious.

In subsequent decades Tezza was given offices of government in the order, among them that of provincial of the Roman province and later procurator general. He was regarded as a restorer of regular observance and of the original charism of Saint Camillus de Lellis. In the later nineteenth century he was sent to France to revive Camillian communities that had suffered from revolution, war, and secularizing laws; he founded or restored houses and worked among the hospitalized poor. His combination of administrative ability and personal austerity led the Holy See and his superiors to rely on him for visitations and reforms.

In Rome he collaborated with Giuditta Vannini, a Roman woman who had long sought a religious vocation in the care of the sick. In 1892 they founded the Congregation of the Daughters of St. Camillus, a women’s institute that took up the Camillian spirit and the special commitment to the infirm, including those with infectious diseases. Vannini became the first superior general; Tezza remained co-founder and spiritual director. The congregation grew in Italy and later abroad, and Vannini was in due course beatified and then canonized.

In 1900 Tezza was sent to Peru as apostolic visitor to the Camillian houses there, which had fallen into decline. He settled in Lima and spent the remaining twenty-three years of his life in that country, living as a simple priest: hearing confessions, directing souls, serving in hospitals, and patiently rebuilding religious discipline. Cut off from much of his earlier European work, he accepted a hidden and often difficult missionary existence. He died in Lima on 26 September 1923.

Pope John Paul II beatified Luigi Tezza on 4 November 2001. His liturgical memorial is celebrated on 26 September. He is remembered within the Camillian family—the Ministers of the Infirm and the Daughters of St. Camillus—as a faithful heir of Saint Camillus and as a missionary who spent his last years far from home in the service of the sick and of religious reform.