Priest and Saint

On 23rd June 1872 Luigi Giovanni Orione was born in Pontecurone, in the diocese of Tortona, from honest and simple parents, in particular his mother was a wise educator and was a valid help to him in his future activities with the children.
He worked in the fields in his childhood, attending a little school and devoted himself to religious practices.

At the age of 13 he entered among the Friars Minor of Voghera, unfortunately due to serious pneumonia, he had to return to his family.
Rehabilitated, he helped his father to pave the roads, an experience that was very useful to him in understanding the suffering and mentality of the workers. In 1886 he entered the oratory of Turin directed by St. John Bosco, where he remained for three years. The teaching he received and the experience he had lived with the saintly innovator no longer wiped from his mind, constituting an essential directive for his future activities in the youth field.
Unexpectedly he left the Salesians and in 1889 he entered the seminary in Tortona to study philosophy for two years. At the end of the course he continued his theological studies, staying in a small room above the cathedral, where he served for Masses; he also received a small fee for his needs.

In the cathedral he had the opportunity to approach the boys to whom he gave catechism lessons, but his small room was not enough, so the bishop, aware of the importance of the initiative, granted him the use of the bishop's garden.
On July 3, 1892, the young cleric Luigi Orione, inaugurated the first oratory named after St. Louis; the following year he managed to open a boarding school called St. Bernardino, immediately attended by about one hundred boys.

On 13th April 1895, he was ordained a priest, celebrating the first Mass among his boys, who in the meantime had moved to the former convent of St. Clare.
Other priests and clerics gathered around him, forming the first nucleus of the future congregation; he committed himself with all his strength to many activities: visits to the poor and the sick, the fight against Freemasonry, the spread of good press, frequent preaching, and the care of the boys.
He rushed to help the people affected by the earthquake of 1908 in Messina and Reggio Calabria, sending many orphans to his homes and became the centre of both civil and pontifical aid. Pope Pius X gave him the task, which lasted three years, of vicar general of the diocese of Messina.
He showed the same industriousness in helping the earthquake victims of the Marsica earthquake in 1915, taking in other orphans, to whom he gave, as he did to all, life, education and work.

If St. John Bosco was an example for the education of children, St. Louis Orione was an example for works of charity; he travelled Italy several times to collect vocations and material aid for his many works. To take care of so many activities, he founded the Congregation of the Sons of Divine Providence and the Little Missionaries of Charity; on the spiritual and contemplative side, he founded the Hermits of Divine Providence and the Sacramentine Sisters, to these two Institutions he also admitted the blind.

Again the missionary spirit pushed him to send his children and nuns to Latin America and Palestine since 1914; twice to support his works, he went himself in 1921 and in 1934 to Buenos Aires, where he stayed for three years organizing schools, agricultural colonies, parishes, orphanages, charity houses called “Piccolo Cottolengo”.
Always on the move, he led a penitent and very poor life, even though he was in poor health, he organised popular missions, living nativity scenes, processions and pilgrimages, with the intention that faith must permeate all phases of life.
He always spent the last three years of his life in Tortona, visiting the 'Piccolo Cottolengo' in Milan and Genoa on a weekly basis; giving in to pressure from his doctors and confreres, he allowed himself a few days of rest in Sanremo in the villa of S. Clotilde, where he died after a few days, on 12th March 1940.

The funeral was very solemn and he received the homage of all the cities of Northern Italy from where the funeral procession passed; he was buried in the crypt of the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Guardia of Tortona, which he had built. Twenty-five years later, in 1965, a reconnaissance of the body was carried out and it was found completely intact and buried again.

In these brief biographical notes, we cannot describe the importance that Don Orione's social and spiritual work, as it has always been called, had in the human context, first with the consequences of natural disasters and then with the disasters caused by the human madness of the two World Wars.
Personages of every social and cultural class knew him and contacted him, from the popes St. Pius X and Benedict XV to the master Lorenzo Perosi, from national and local political authorities to the saints of his time.

The founder of the « Little Work of Divine Providence » was beatified on 26 October 1980 by Pope John Paul II, in a rejoicing of many of his sons and daughters from many nations.

He was proclaimed a saint by John Paul II on 16 May 2004, a date of worship on which the Congregation he founded remembers him every year.

(Text: Author: Antonio Borrelli)