Bl. Paul Joseph Nardini

Paul Josef Nardini was born in 1821 in Germersheim on the Rhine. His unmarried mother could not support him and gave him to her aunt and her aunt's husband, Anton Nardini, who raised him as their own. Years later, as a parish priest, he took his birth mother to live with him.

He was ordained in 1846 and in 1851 became parish priest of Pirmasens, a poor shoe-making town in the Palatinate. To care for neglected children, the sick and the elderly there, he founded the Franciscan Sisters of the Holy Family (the "Mallersdorf Sisters") in 1855. He died in 1862, aged forty, after catching an illness while visiting the sick. He was beatified in 2006.

Paul Joseph Nardini was beatified in 2006.

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