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Biography

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Nicola Saggio was born Giovanni Battista Clemente Saggio on 6 January 1650 in the town of Longobardi, in Calabria, then part of the Kingdom of Naples. He was the son of Fulvio Saggio and Antonia Barone and grew up in a pious family of modest means. Longobardi lay not far from Paola, the birthplace of Saint Francis of Paola, founder of the Order of Minims, and the spiritual climate of seventeenth-century Calabria was strongly marked by that saint’s memory and by the houses of his order. As a boy and young man, Giovanni Battista received the ordinary Christian instruction of his parish and was known for seriousness and an inclination to prayer and penance rather than for any public career or advanced schooling.

In 1671, at the age of twenty-one, he entered the Order of Minims and received the name Nicola. He was formed as a lay brother, never receiving priestly ordination, and he made religious profession according to the Minim rule, which is distinguished by a fourth vow of perpetual Lenten abstinence and by an emphasis on humility and minoritas. After spending time in convents of the order in the Kingdom of Naples, he was transferred to Rome and assigned to the community at San Francesco di Paola. For the remainder of his life he lived in that Roman house, occupied with the lowly tasks entrusted to lay brothers: the quest for alms, porter’s duty, kitchen and garden work, and care for the poor who came to the monastery gate. He observed the austere diet and penitential practices of the Minims with regularity and was regarded by his brethren as a model of obedience and hidden virtue.

During his decades in Rome, which spanned the late seventeenth and the first years of the eighteenth century, Nicola Saggio became known beyond the convent for a reputation of holiness. Visitors and the poor sought him out; priests and laypeople asked his prayers and advice. The processes later compiled for his beatification gathered testimony about his devotion to the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament, his filial piety toward the Virgin Mary, and his patience in illness and humiliation. Hagiographic sources also record claims of mystical phenomena and miraculous healings associated with him in life; these belong to the traditional portrait of the saint and were part of the material submitted to the Holy See, but they cannot be treated as independently verified historical facts. What is historically secure is that he died with a public fame of sanctity in the Minim convent in Rome on 3 February 1709.

A cultus developed quickly after his death. The cause of beatification proceeded in the eighteenth century, and Pope Pius VI beatified him on 17 September 1786. Devotion remained especially strong in Longobardi and among the Minims, while the general cause for canonization moved slowly. In the early twenty-first century the process was completed, and Pope Francis canonized Nicola Saggio on 23 November 2014 in Saint Peter’s Square, in a ceremony that also raised several other blesseds to the altars. He is honored as the patron of Longobardi. His feast is observed on 2 February. In the Catholic Church he is commemorated as a humble lay brother whose life illustrated the Minim ideal of penance, poverty, and charity in the urban setting of baroque Rome as well as in his native Calabria.

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