Paolo Manna

Paolo Manna was born on 16 January 1872 in Avellino, in the Campania region of southern Italy. He received his early formation in the local diocesan seminary and later studied at the Pontifical Urban College of Propaganda Fide in Rome, the Roman institution charged with preparing clergy for the missions. Ordained a priest in the mid-1890s, he entered the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), a society of apostolic life founded in the nineteenth century for work in non-Christian lands.

In 1895 he was assigned to the PIME missions in eastern Burma (present-day Myanmar), serving principally in the Toungoo region among the Karen people. There he engaged in pastoral care, catechesis, and the building up of local Christian communities under difficult climatic and cultural conditions. After about twelve years in the field, serious illness compelled him to leave Burma in 1907 and return permanently to Italy, though he never abandoned the missionary cause.

In Italy he became a leading animator of missionary awareness. He directed the magazine Le Missioni Cattoliche and in 1916 founded the Missionary Union of the Clergy, later known as the Pontifical Missionary Union, whose purpose was to instill a missionary spirit in priests and to coordinate support for the missions. He served as Superior General of PIME from 1924 to 1934. His writings insisted that the missionary mandate belonged to the whole Church, not only to specialist institutes, and he argued strongly for the formation of a native clergy in mission territories. He also showed an early concern for ecumenical questions arising in the missions.

Manna spent his later years in Naples, continuing to promote vocations and the work of PIME. He died there on 15 September 1952. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 4 November 2001 in Saint Peter's Square. His liturgical memorial is kept on 15 September.