Nicolás D'Onofrio

Nicola D'Onofrio (often rendered Nicolás in Spanish-language Catholic writing) was born on 24 March 1943 in Villamagna, a town in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. He was raised in a Catholic family in the rural postwar Mezzogiorno and from childhood showed a strong religious disposition and an attraction to the care of the sick. The life and charism of Saint Camillus de Lellis, founder of the Ministers of the Infirm, shaped his sense of vocation. While still an adolescent he left Villamagna to enter the Camillian seminary in Rome, beginning studies meant to lead to religious profession and priestly ordination in that order.

In Rome he followed the ordinary course of Camillian formation. Companions and superiors later remembered him as diligent, cheerful, obedient, and markedly devoted to the Eucharist and to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He took part in the community life of an order whose apostolate was hospital ministry and the care of the dying, and he hoped to share that work as a priest. In the early 1960s he received the Camillian habit and continued preparation for vows. Those years coincided with the opening of the Second Vatican Council in the same city.

In 1963 he developed persistent pain in one leg. Medical examination in Rome revealed an aggressive malignant bone tumor. He underwent treatment, including surgery, but the disease advanced. Accounts of his last months, written by members of his community and later used in the canonical process, emphasize his patience, his continued reception of the sacraments, and his offering of suffering in union with the sick he had wished to serve. He remained in the care of the Camillians until the end and died in Rome on 12 June 1964, aged twenty-one, without having been ordained.

His body was taken back to Villamagna and buried in the parish church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which became a place of local prayer. The Camillians and the Diocese of Chieti-Vasto promoted his cause for canonization. After the diocesan inquiry and Roman examination of his life and writings, Pope Francis authorized the decree on his heroic virtues on 5 May 2016, conferring the title Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonized and has no universal liturgical feast or official patronages. His memory is kept mainly within the Camillian family and in Abruzzo as that of a young seminarian who joined a vocation to the sick with the acceptance of a brief and painful death.