Peter of Mogliano

Pietro Corradini, known in English as Peter of Mogliano and in Italian as Pietro da Mogliano, was a fifteenth-century Italian priest of the Observant branch of the Order of Friars Minor. He was born in 1435 at Mogliano in the March of Ancona, in what is now the Marche region of central Italy and was then part of the Papal States. As a young man he entered the Franciscan Observants, the reform current within the order that stressed poverty, itinerant preaching, and a stricter reading of the Rule of Saint Francis. After religious profession and the studies required for ministry he was ordained a priest and took up the apostolic work typical of Observant houses in the Marche.

In his lifetime the Marche was a heartland of Observant Franciscanism, already marked by the preaching of Bernardino of Siena and by local figures such as James of the Marches. Corradini worked in that milieu as a preacher in towns and countryside and was also given responsibility for the government of Franciscan communities. Later tradition describes him as austere in personal life and effective in the pulpit, but contemporary documentation of the exact sequence of his assignments is thin. His reputation for holiness spread among the Observant convents and the lay populations they served.

In the later part of his career he was closely associated with Camerino. There he served the local friars and acted as confessor and spiritual director to the Poor Clare community, including Camilla Battista da Varano, a daughter of Giulio Cesare da Varano, lord of Camerino. Battista da Varano, herself later beatified, entered the Poor Clares of Camerino in the early 1480s and left spiritual writings that reflect the direction she received. Corradini died in Camerino on 25 July 1490.

A local cult grew after his death in Camerino and in his native Mogliano. He came to be venerated in the Catholic Church as Blessed Peter of Mogliano; he was never canonized. His liturgical commemoration is kept on 25 July, the anniversary of his death. Surviving biographical information is limited and depends in part on later hagiography and on the testimony of those who knew him in Camerino. Precise records of his early formation, of every office he held, and of the later confirmation of his cult are not all established with equal certainty in the historical sources.