Zeno Saltini

Zeno Saltini was born on 30 August 1900 in Fossoli, a hamlet of Carpi in the province of Modena, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. He came from a large farming family and grew up in the rural world of the Po Valley. After his early schooling he studied law at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, intending at first to put a legal training at the service of the poor. He then entered the seminary of the Diocese of Carpi and was ordained a priest in 1931. From the outset of his ministry he devoted himself to abandoned, orphaned, and troubled boys, taking them into his care and forming them into a group known as the Piccoli Apostoli (Little Apostles).

In the years after the Second World War, Italy faced a severe crisis of displaced and parentless children. Saltini obtained the use of the former internment camp at Fossoli, near his birthplace, as a home for the youths he had gathered. In 1948 he gave the community the name Nomadelfia, a word he derived from Greek and explained as meaning that fraternity is the law, or the law of brotherhood. Nomadelfia was not conceived as a conventional orphanage or as a traditional religious institute, but as a people of families who would live the Gospel in common, hold goods in common after the manner of the first Christian community in the Acts of the Apostles, and adopt abandoned children so that no child would grow up without a father and a mother. The experiment drew both admiration and suspicion in postwar Catholic Italy.

The novelty of the foundation, its economic fragility, and Saltini’s independent manner of proceeding brought him into serious conflict with ecclesiastical authorities. In 1952 the Holy Office required him to leave Nomadelfia and withdrew authorization for him to exercise the priesthood publicly. He submitted to the decision. The families of the community left Fossoli and eventually settled on land in the Maremma of Tuscany, in the territory of Grosseto, which became the permanent seat of Nomadelfia. After a period of trial lasting nearly a decade, Pope John XXIII restored Saltini to the priestly ministry in 1962. He returned to Nomadelfia and lived there as priest and founder among the families for the remainder of his life.

Saltini died at Nomadelfia on 15 January 1981 and was buried there. He was a diocesan priest, not a member of a religious order; he never married and had no biological children. The community he established has continued after his death as a distinctive Catholic association of families dedicated to the reception of abandoned children and to a shared life based on the Gospel. He has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church and is not the subject of an official liturgical feast or of formally declared patronages.