15/02/2015
Life Story of St. Leonard of Port Maurice
Life
Leonard was born 20 December 1676, the son of Domenico Casanova and Anna Maria Benza. He was given the name Paul Jerome Casanova.Leonard’s father was a ship captain whose family lived in Port Maurice on the northwestern coast of Italy. At 13, Leonard went to Rome to live with his uncle Agostino and study at the Jesuit Roman College. He was a good student and destined for a career in medicine. In 1697, however, he joined the Friars Minor. When he decided against medicine, his uncle disowned him.On 2 October 1697, he received the habit and took the name Brother Leonard, after a relative who had been kind to him.After making his novitiate at Ponticelli in the Sabine mountains, he completed his studies at St. Bonaventura on the Palatine at Rome.
After his ordination he remained there as lector (professor), and expected to be sent on the Chinese missions. After ordination Leonard contracted a bleeding ulcer and was sent to his hometown where there was a monastery of the Franciscan Observants (1704). After four years he was restored to health, and began to preach in Porto Maurizio and the vicinity
Mission work
When Cosimo III de' Medici handed over the monastery del Monte (on San Miniato near Florence, also called Monte alle Croci) to the members of the Riformella, St Leonard was sent hither under the auspices and by desire of Cosimo III, and began shortly to hold missions among the people of Tuscany. His colleagues and he practiced austerities and penances during these missions. In 1710 he founded the monastery of Icontro, on a peak in the mountains about four and a quarter miles from Florence, whither he and his assistants could retire from time to time after missions, and devote themselves to spiritual renewal.
Alphonsus Liguori called Leonard "the great missionary of the 18th century".A great preacher, he was often invited to visit and preach in other areas. Leonard spent over forty years preaching retreats, Lenten sermons and parish missions throughout Italy. His missions lasted 15 to 18 days, and he often stayed an additional week to hear confessions.
In 1720 he crossed the borders of Tuscany and held his celebrated missions in Central and Southern Italy. Everywhere the saint made conversions, and was very often obliged both in cities and country districts to preach in the open, as the churches could not contain the thousands who came to listen. Pope Clement XII and Pope Benedict XIV called him to Rome; the latter especially held him in high esteem both as a preacher.Pope Benedict XIV appointed him to several complex diplomatic assignments. In Genoa and Corsica, in Lucca and Spoleto the citizens expected a jeweled cardinal to represent the intentions of the pope. Instead, they were confronted by a humble, shoeless, muddy friar to confound their hostility and pride. For a time, St. Leonard was the spiritual director of Clementina Sobieska of Poland, the wife of King James II of England.
He founded many pious societies and confraternities, and exerted himself to spread devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the perpetual adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament. He was among the few to insist that the concept of the Immaculate Conception of Mary be defined as a dogma of the faith.Besides the celebrated stations in theColosseum at Rome, St Leonard erected 571 others in all parts of Italy, while on his different missions.
Though many saints were devoted to the Stations of the Cross, few if any did more to promote it than St. Leonard. As a Franciscan priest, he preached the Way of the Cross at missions for forty-three years and reportedly set up stations in 571 locations throughout Italy, including the Colosseum in Rome.
From May to November, 1744, he preached in Corsica, which at that time belonged to the Republic of Genoa and which was torn by party strife. In November, 1751, when he was preaching to the Bolognese, Benedict XIV called him to Rome, as already there were indications of his rapidly approaching end. The strain of his missionary labours and his mortifications had completely exhausted his body. He arrived on the evening of 26 November 1751, at his beloved monastery of St. Bonaventura on the Palatine, and expired on the same night at eleven o'clock at the age of seventy-five.
Veneration
Pope Pius VI pronounced his beatification on 19 June 1796, and Pope Pius IX his canonization on 29 June 1867.The Franciscan Order celebrates his feast on 26 November, but outside this Order it is often celebrated on 27 November.
The partly incorrupt body of the saint is kept in the high altar of the church of St. Bonaventure monastery in Rome, where he died.
St. Leonard’s Church in Boston, founded in 1873, is the first Roman Catholic Church in New England built by Italian immigrants. The church is located in the historic North End of Boston at the corner of Hanover and Prince Streets on Boston’s Freedom Trail.
