Tommaso Reggio

Tommaso Reggio was born in Genoa on 9 January 1818, in what was then the Kingdom of Sardinia, into a Ligurian family of standing. He received his education in his native city and entered the seminary of the Archdiocese of Genoa. He was ordained a priest on 18 September 1841. In the decades that followed he remained in Genoa as a diocesan priest, serving in pastoral work and in the formation of clergy. He taught and later served as rector of the seminary, and he acquired a reputation for personal austerity, regularity of life, and attention to the poor. He belonged to the secular clergy rather than to a religious order, and he lived the celibate discipline required of Latin-rite priests of his time.

In 1877 Pope Pius IX appointed him Bishop of Ventimiglia, a Ligurian see on the coast near the French frontier, whose territory included both seaboard towns and poor inland communities. He was consecrated bishop in May 1877. During some fifteen years in that diocese he devoted himself to visitation, catechesis, and the material needs of a region marked by poverty and social change. In 1878 he founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Martha (Suore di Santa Marta), a community of women religious dedicated to the care of the sick, the elderly, and the destitute. The foundation became the principal institutional expression of his charitable program. His manner of life as bishop was noted for simplicity rather than display.

In 1892 Pope Leo XIII transferred him to the metropolitan see of Genoa, so that he returned as archbishop to the city of his birth and of his priesthood. As Archbishop of Genoa from 1892 until his death he continued the same pastoral emphasis: care of workers and the urban poor in a major port, support of schools and charitable houses, and close attention to the congregation he had founded. Genoa was a suffragan metropolitanate, not a patriarchal see; he never held the office of patriarch, nor was he Bishop of Rome. Despite age he maintained an active round of administration and visitation.

Tommaso Reggio died on 22 November 1901 at Triora in Liguria, in his eighty-fourth year. His remains were taken to Genoa and buried in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. The cause of beatification proceeded in the twentieth century, and on 3 September 2000 Pope John Paul II beatified him in Saint Peter's Square. He has not been canonized. His liturgical memorial is kept on 22 November, the anniversary of his death. He is remembered in the Church of Genoa and among the Sisters of Saint Martha as a pastor of charity rather than as the declared patron of a long list of causes or places.