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Biography

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Stefano Gobbi was born on 22 March 1930 in Dongo, a town on the western shore of Lake Como in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. Publicly available historical sources give few verified details about his family, childhood, or the course of his seminary studies. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1964. In the years after ordination he became a member of the Company of Saint Paul, a secular institute of pontifical right whose members live in the world while pursuing apostolic work.

In May 1972, while on pilgrimage at the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, Gobbi reported receiving an interior locution from the Virgin Mary. According to his account, Mary asked him to gather priests in a movement of consecration to her Immaculate Heart and of unity with the Pope, so as to help the Church in a time of trial. From this reported experience he founded the Marian Movement of Priests. Over the following decades he claimed to receive further interior locutions, which were written down and circulated among the movement’s members.

Those texts were collected in a volume commonly known in English as To the Priests, Our Lady's Beloved Sons. The messages, spanning from the early 1970s until 1997, call for recitation of the rosary, Eucharistic devotion, personal consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and fidelity to the Pope and the Magisterium. They also interpret contemporary events in the Church and in the world in a strongly eschatological key, speaking of a period of purification and of a future triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart. The Marian Movement of Priests organized cenacles of prayer for priests and laity and spread to many countries. Gobbi himself traveled widely to lead these gatherings.

Gobbi was received in audience by Pope John Paul II on several occasions, and the movement obtained a measure of pastoral recognition as a private association of the faithful in various places. The alleged locutions were never given a definitive judgment of supernatural authenticity by the Holy See as public revelation. Stefano Gobbi died in Milan, Italy, on 29 June 2011, at the age of eighty-one. No official cause of beatification or canonization has been opened for him by the Catholic Church.

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