Blessed · Feast September 26 · 1841–1923

Bl. Luigi Tezza

Luigi Tezza was born in 1841 in Conegliano, near Treviso, Italy. His father, a doctor, died when he was nine.

The story

Luigi Tezza was born in 1841 in Conegliano, near Treviso, Italy. His father, a doctor, died when he was nine. At fifteen he joined the Camillians, an order that cares for the sick; his mother then entered a convent herself.

He hoped to be a missionary in Africa, but his superiors sent him instead to train novices in Rome and then in France. Expelled from France in 1880 as a foreigner, he returned in secret to hold the scattered community together. In 1892 in Rome he co-founded the Daughters of St Camillus, with St Giuseppina Vannini, to nurse the sick. At fifty-nine he was sent to Lima, Peru, to reform the Camillian community there, and he spent the rest of his life in Peru. He became known in the city as a confessor and a visitor of the sick and prisoners. He died there in 1923 and was beatified in 2001.

Blessed, not yet a saint

Luigi Tezza was beatified in 2001.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.

Sources

Sources & notes

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