Marcantonio Durando

Marcantonio Durando was born on 22 May 1801 in Mondovì, in Piedmont, in what was then the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia. He belonged to a family of some local standing. His parents were Giovanni Durando and Maddalena Bongioanni. Several of his brothers followed military and political careers during the Italian Risorgimento: Giacomo Durando became a general, senator, and minister of the Kingdom of Italy, and Giovanni Durando likewise became a general. Marcantonio took another course. Drawn to the priesthood and to the missionary and charitable spirit of Saint Vincent de Paul, he entered the Congregation of the Mission, the community of priests and brothers commonly called Vincentians or Lazarists. He made his religious formation in that congregation and was ordained a priest in the 1820s.

Turin became the centre of his work for the remainder of his life. Durando served as superior of the Vincentian house in the city and, for many years in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as provincial visitor of the Congregation of the Mission in northern Italy. In that office he strengthened Vincentian houses, sent priests out on popular missions, and promoted the works typical of the Vincentian family: service of the poor, care of the sick, and cooperation with the laity. He supported the Daughters of Charity and the Association of Ladies of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul in Piedmont. In the Turin of his generation, a city noted for a cluster of priests later honoured by the Church, he was known as a prudent spiritual director and confessor. He had contact with Saint John Bosco and with other clergy engaged in charity, the formation of priests, and work among the urban poor.

In the 1860s Durando established a community of women religious dedicated to nursing the sick in their own homes, especially the poor who were not reached by hospitals. The institute, known as the Sisters of Jesus the Nazarene (Suore di Gesù Nazareno), took its name from his devotion to Christ in the Passion. He declined episcopal appointments in order to remain a Vincentian missionary and superior in Turin. His spirituality joined devotion to the Passion of Christ, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and to Saint Vincent de Paul with a practical charity directed toward the abandoned sick and the neglected poor. He lived through the political and legal changes that accompanied Italian unification and the secular policies of the Savoyard state, keeping his attention on the internal life of his congregation and on pastoral work rather than on public office.

Durando died in Turin on 10 December 1880. A reputation for holiness continued among Vincentians and among those who had known his direction or the work of his sisters. The cause for his beatification was taken up in the twentieth century. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 20 October 2002. His liturgical commemoration is kept on 10 December, the day of his death. He is remembered as a builder of Vincentian institutions in nineteenth-century northern Italy and as a representative figure of the Catholic pastoral revival in Turin in that century.