Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, CS (8 July 1839 – 1 June 1905) was an Italian Catholic missionary who served as Bishop of Piacenza from 1876 until his death. He was the founder of both the Missionaries of Saint Charles (also known as the Scalabrinians) and the Mission Sisters of Saint Charles.
Scalabrini's rise to the rank of bishop came at a rapid pace due to a series of lectures he gave on the First Vatican Council in 1872 and his staunch dedication to catechism, which led Pope Pius IX to dub him the "Apostle of the Catechism"; successive popes Leo XIII and Pius X held him in high esteem, but both failed to convince him to accept appointments as head of an archdiocese or as a cardinal. He made five pastoral visits across his diocese, which proved to be an exhaustive but effective mission of evangelization and his efforts at reforming seminaries and pastoral initiatives earned him praise even from the secular detractors who criticized him for his strict obedience to the pope.
His tenure as bishop resulted in the establishment of the "Saint Raphael Association" dedicated to the care of Italian migrants. This solidified through the actions of his twin religious congregations and his visits to both Brazil and the United States, where he went to meet Italian immigrants. He also dealt with the Paolo Miraglia-Gulotti schism that took place in his diocese and had known the faux-bishop after ordaining him in 1879. Scalabrini also held three important episcopal gatherings in his diocese that revitalized parish and diocesan practices and made his diocese the ground for the first-ever National Catechetical Congress in 1899; he was in the process of planning another before his death that was later celebrated in 1910.
Scalabrini's holiness was renowned across the Italian peninsula and there were countless who attested to his saintliness in an ensuing canonization process; his first title at the outset of the process was that of a Servant of God that Pope Pius XI bestowed upon him on 30 June 1926 while the confirmation of his heroic virtue allowed for Pope John Paul II to title him as Venerable on 16 March 1987. John Paul II later beatified Scalabrini in Saint Peter's Square on 9 November 1997. Pope Francis canonized him as a saint on 9 October 2022.
Life Education and priesthood Giovanni Battista Scalabrini was born in Fino Mornasco as the third of eight children to Luigi Scalabrini and Colomba Trombetta; he was baptized just hours later at the parish church of Fino. Two brothers emigrated to the Americas (one being the educator and naturalist Pietro Scalabrini who migrated to Argentina and was the father of the writer, philosopher, journalist, essayist and poet Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz) and one sister was Luisa while a brother was Angelo. He received his Confirmation from Bishop Carlo Romano on 8 September 1840 in the Fino parish.
In his adolescence he wrote a poem in praise of the life of Aloysius Gonzaga and in his childhood often recited the Angelus while each October reciting it in the Como Cathedral. He had a devotion to Saint Joseph and Francis de Sales as well as Charles Borromeo which extended for the remainder of his life.
He first attended the local state high school where he demonstrated a remarkable intelligence that made him a top student held in high esteem and then entered the Liceo Volta college in Como where he often received prizes for his academic excellence; he had interests in both science and foreign languages. Scalabrini underwent his philosophical and theological studies in Como from the fall of 1857. In 1857 he was made a prefect of the Gallio College (a boarding school) where one of the students under his ward was Luigi Guanella. Scalabrini received the tonsure on 1 June 1860 and then went on to receive the first two minor orders on 21 December 1860 and the second two on 24 May 1861. He was elevated into the subdiaconate on 14 June 1862 in Bergamo and then into the diaconate on 12 September 1862. He later received his ordination to the priesthood in mid-1863 from Bishop .
After being ordained he expressed a strong desire to join the missions in the Indies (his mother had consented to this wish and he had applied to PIME) but Bishop Marzorati had other ideas for him and said to him: "Your Indies are in Italy". The bishop instead appointed Scalabrini as a professor and then on 6 October 1868 rector of seminarians at Saint Abundius; he taught the Greek language and history there. On 17 July 1870 he was appointed as the pastor of the San Bartolomeo church and remained there until 1876. He distinguished himself during a cholera epidemic in 1867 through his tireless efforts to alleviate the suffering of the victims. As the pastor of the parish he opened a kindergarten in the area and wrote the "Little Catechism for Kindergartens" to go with it. In 1872 he delivered a series of eleven addresses on the First Vatican Council – something that Giovanni Bosco appreciated – and these addresses were printed in 1873 and even reached Rome which was a considerable factor in his later episcopal appointment. These were reprinted in a reduced form at the behest of Bosco himself.
Episcopate
Scalabrini received word from Pope Pius IX that he was to become the next Bishop of Piacenza at the beginning of 1876 despite the fact that the pope made up his mind in December 1875; Pius IX had once dubbed him the "Apostle of the Catechism" on 7 June 1877 and sent him a golden chalice on 6 February 1878 (just a day before the pope died). It was also Giovanni Bosco who advised Pius IX to appoint Scalabrini as a bishop. Scalabrini received his episcopal consecration from Cardinal Alessandro Franchi in Rome in the chapel of the Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide in Piazza di Spagna and was installed in his new see a couple of weeks after this. He set his enthronement date because he wanted to preside over the celebrations that his predecessor had called for in regards to the sixth centennial of the death of Pope Gregory X. From 1877 to 1878 he prompted the reopening of the Pontifical Lombard in Rome and was a collaborator of those in charge of it. On 17 January 1878 a group of ruffians attacked the bishop's coach along the road and threatened him for his obedience to the pope in his denial of a requiem Mass for King Vittorio Emmanuele II.
The bishop conducted five diocesan visitations and visited all the 365 parishes with half accessible via foot or mule due to being in mountainous places but this never hindered his desire to be with the people and review the conditions of each parish for himself. The first visitation began on 4 November 1876 where he learned that 11% of its members had emigrated and the visit ended on 28 August 1880. That first pastoral visitation proved to be so exhausting that his staff did not think that he would manage a second. He addressed his third pastoral letter in August 1876 to priests reminding them of the need for the Spiritual Exercises and the need to re-examine one's life. On 5 July 1876 he founded the first ever Italian catechetical magazine entitled "The Catholic Catechist". He began courses in the Gregorian Chant – something Pope Pius X later did and in 1876 licensed the first Italian catechetical review which was the second in the world; he also issued the book "Catholic Catechism" in 1876.
He held three diocesan synods with one being on the Eucharist; the first was held from 2–4 September 1879 (the first in 156 years) which focused on the needs of children while the other two were held in 1893 and 1899. The 1899 synodal document spanned 350 pages and he alone wrote the text for it. The synod on the Eucharist was held from 26 to 30 August 1899 and in that he ordered that altars be made of marble and he revived Eucharistic confraternities as well as asking that chalices be made of gilded silver. The bishop also resumed the procession of Corpus Christi despite government and secular opposition. The second synod was held from 2–4 May 1893 and dealt with diocesan administration.
He reorganized seminaries and reformed their curricula and this could be considered quite interesting since it precluded the Thomistic reform of Pope Leo XIII. Leo XIII later dubbed Piacenza "the City of Catechsis" while Cardinal Giovanni Nasalli Rocca di Corneliano praised Scalabrini's heroic efforts for leading his diocese and for the championing of the migrants. He organized collections to help farmers that were affected from the landslides at Tollara in 1895 and of Villanova and Bettola in 1904. He sent aid to flood victims in the Veneto and Polesine in 1882 as well as for the earthquake of Casamicciola in 1883. He also sent aid for those affected from the cloudburst in Campidano in 1889 as well as the families affected from the explosion of an arms depot in 1894 in Pontremoli. He made a third diocesan visitation from 1888 to 1891.
He also tended to the ill and to prisoners to comfort them. He also saved thousands of farmers and workers from the 1879–80 famine and twice sold his horses (used for pastoral visitations) as well as a pectoral cross and a golden chalice that Pope Pius IX had given him to purchase food. He oversaw the distribution of 244 460 bowls of soup with flour and firewood coupons in just two months though when pawning his valuables people believed he was at detriment; people said he would end up dead on nothing but straw but he countered and said it would be good to die where Jesus Christ was born. He often spent hours in Eucharistic adoration in addition to giving Marian homilies and going on Marian pilgrimages. He was perceived to be an eloquent orator and Luigi Orione once said that his words "showed how he burned with apostolic zeal". His master of ceremonies once said that Scalabrini recited rosaries each day and when on foot on diocesan visits often stepped aside at times from the path to recite them.
He also founded the "Deaf and Dumb Institute" in November 1879 to aid the hearing and speech impaired people and ordered that catechism be instructed in all the parishes in the diocese while in 1880 starting the diocesan newspaper "The Truth". In June 1884 a bout of colic threatened his health and it took a prolonged period to recover from his illness – this was also attributed to sheer exhaustion from his pastoral visitations. He planned and presided the first National Catechetical Congress in 1889 which opened on 24 September and closed on 26 September. One cardinal as well as eleven bishops and 400 priests were in attendance to this congress; questions discussed included his proposal for a unified catechism that the then-Bishop of Mantua Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (the future Pope Pius X) supported. On 9 July 1887 he established the "Saint Raphael Association" (which was later disbanded in 1923) dedicated to the care and protection of migrants and he often gave lectures on the subject in various cities such as Milan. The bishop established the association with the aid of the Marquis Giovanni Volpe Landi and Giuseppe Toniolo. In 1893 or 1894 he once contracted a hydrocele during a horse ride and kept this a close secret but his brother Angelo knew about it.