Vincenzo Maria Sarnelli

Vincenzo Maria Sarnelli was a Roman Catholic prelate of the nineteenth century whose entire known career was bound up with Naples and the neighboring sees of Campania. He was born in Naples on 5 April 1835, while the city was still the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He belonged to the secular diocesan clergy, not to a religious order. After ecclesiastical formation he was ordained a priest on 18 December 1858. He then spent nearly three decades in priestly ministry in the Neapolitan church, through the fall of the Bourbon kingdom, Italian unification, and the prolonged conflict between the Holy See and the new Italian state known as the Roman Question.

In 1887 Pope Leo XIII appointed him Bishop of Castellammare di Stabia, a historic diocese on the Bay of Naples whose territory included the ancient site of Stabiae. He received episcopal consecration on 3 April 1887. The principal consecrator was Cardinal Guglielmo Sanfelice d'Acquavella, the Benedictine Archbishop of Naples. Sarnelli governed Castellammare di Stabia for about a decade. Readily available sources record the fact of this episcopate more fully than they record his individual pastoral measures; his years there coincided with Leo XIII's wider efforts to encourage Catholic social teaching and to manage the Church's difficult legal and political position in united Italy.

After Cardinal Sanfelice died in January 1897, Sarnelli was promoted to the metropolitan Archdiocese of Naples and appointed archbishop on 19 April 1897. Naples was one of the principal sees of the Italian Mezzogiorno, with a large urban population and a dense, long-established Catholic culture. His tenure as archbishop was extremely short. He died in Naples on 2 January 1898, after fewer than nine months in office, and was succeeded later that year by Giuseppe Antonio Ermenegildo Prisco, later a cardinal.

Sarnelli is not to be confused with Blessed Gennaro Maria Sarnelli (1702-1744), the Redemptorist priest, writer, and companion of Saint Alphonsus Liguori. Vincenzo Maria Sarnelli himself was not beatified or canonized, and no feast day or patronage is attached to his name. He left no widely cited body of published work in standard historical notices. His significance is that of a Neapolitan diocesan priest who became a local bishop and then, very briefly, metropolitan archbishop of his native city in the later pontificate of Leo XIII. Surviving accounts of his life are those typical of episcopal directories and local church records rather than of an independent full-length biography.