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Biography

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Tommaso Struzzieri was an Italian Roman Catholic prelate of the eighteenth century and a member of the Congregation of the Passion of Jesus Christ, commonly called the Passionists. He was born in 1706 in Senigallia, a port on the Adriatic coast of the Papal States, in what is now the Marche region of Italy. The Passionist congregation, founded in 1720 by Paolo Francesco Danei (Saint Paul of the Cross), was still a young institute when Struzzieri entered it. Its members professed a life of prayer, poverty, and penance and devoted themselves especially to preaching parish missions focused on the sufferings of Christ. Struzzieri was ordained to the priesthood in 1729 and spent the following decades in that missionary apostolate within the Papal States.

As one of the more capable early Passionists, he was trusted by the founder and by Roman authorities. The congregation did not yet have a bishop among its members and therefore depended on outside prelates for ordinations and for the consecration of churches and altars. In 1764 Pope Clement XIII provided a remedy by appointing Struzzieri titular bishop of Tium, a former diocese in Bithynia that survived only as a titular see. After his episcopal consecration the same year, Struzzieri could confer holy orders on Passionist candidates and perform other pontifical rites without leaving the congregation. He thus occupied a position similar to that of a bishop serving the internal sacramental needs of a religious family rather than that of a diocesan ordinary.

More than a decade later, in 1775, Pope Pius VI transferred him from the titular see of Tium to the residential diocese of Todi in Umbria. Todi was an ancient bishopric whose cathedral and chapter stood at the center of a typical Papal-State diocese of modest size. Struzzieri took up his duties as bishop of Todi and remained in that office until his death. Surviving biographical notices do not record major synods, controversies, or large-scale reforms associated with his brief episcopate; he appears to have administered the diocese in the ordinary manner of an eighteenth-century Italian bishop who had come from the ranks of a missionary congregation.

Struzzieri died in Todi in 1780. He was never beatified or canonized, and the Catholic Church has not assigned him a liturgical feast or named him patron of any place, profession, or cause. No widely cited source identifies his place of burial with certainty. His historical importance is therefore limited but clear: he was among the first Passionists to receive episcopal consecration, he served the internal sacramental needs of his institute, and he ended his life as bishop of Todi in the closing years of the ancien régime in the Papal States.

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