Sanctus Ioannes Leonardi, Confessor — 9 October, III classis
With commemoration of Saints Denis, Bishop, Rusticus and Eleutherius, Martyrs
In sermonibus Domini opera eius: sol illuminans per omnia respexit, et gloria Domini plenum est opus eius. “By the words of the Lord are his works: the sun giving light hath looked upon all things, and full of the glory of the Lord is his work.” — Introit of the Mass, from Ecclus. 42:16
I. Identitas et Origines
John Leonardi was born in 1541 at Diecimo, a village in the Serchio valley belonging to the Republic of Lucca, the youngest of a family of smallholders of modest means and solid piety. Lucca in his boyhood was a small, proud, and nervous city-state: jealous of its liberty against Florence, wary of Rome, and — in the very years of his youth — troubled by a circle of educated citizens who had gone over to the doctrines of the Reformers, several of whom fled to Geneva. The boy grew up, in other words, in a Catholic town that had seen what heresy looks like at close range.
He was sent to Lucca as a young man and apprenticed to an apothecary, and he qualified in that trade. The detail is not incidental. For roughly a decade he compounded remedies, weighed doses, and learned that a medicine is useless unless it is given in the right measure to the right patient at the right hour. He would spend the rest of his life applying that lesson to souls.
In the same years he joined a lay confraternity of the city devoted to prayer and works of mercy, visiting the hospitals and the prisons. There his vocation ripened. At about the age of twenty-six he left the shop, took up the study of theology, and was ordained priest in December 1572.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The virtue most visible in John Leonardi is not brilliance but steadiness. He wrote no great treatise, founded no school of spirituality, and left behind no mystical writings. What he left was a pattern of fidelity under prolonged contradiction, and a mind that consistently asked what the Church actually needed rather than what would be admired.
Zeal ordered by obedience. He was a priest of the Council of Trent in the most literal sense: the decrees had been closed only nine years before his ordination, and he took them as a programme to be executed rather than a document to be praised. Catechesis, frequent confession and Communion, the dignity of public worship, the formation of good priests — these were Trent’s own priorities, and they became his.
Patience under exile. For most of his priestly life he was unwelcome in his own city. The governing families of Lucca regarded his growing community with suspicion, as an independent religious body answerable to Rome rather than to the Republic, and they made his residence there impossible. He was effectively barred from his native place for years at a time and conducted much of his work from Rome. He did not answer with recrimination. He kept working, kept his community together by letter and visit, and left the vindication to Providence.
Friendship among the saints. At Rome he came into the circle of St. Philip Neri, who became his confessor and counsellor and esteemed him for exactly the qualities that Philip, a humorist, prized most in others: soundness of judgment and freedom from self-importance. Oratorian tradition preserves the story that when Philip vacated his rooms at San Girolamo della Carità, he left them to Leonardi together with the care of the cat he kept there — a commission the Founder of the Oratory is said to have enquired after with mock solemnity. The anecdote belongs to pious memory rather than to the documentary record, but it is wholly in character for both men. John also knew and assisted St. Joseph Calasanctius in the early years of the Pious Schools, and the two works were later, for a brief season, joined under a single government.
Devotion. Two images governed his interior life. The first was the Volto Santo, the ancient crucifix venerated in the cathedral of Lucca, before which he had prayed from boyhood: the face of Christ crucified as the measure of every reform. The second was the Mother of God, whose name his congregation would bear.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
The catechist. His first work as a priest was the instruction of children and the unlettered in the parishes of Lucca. He organized the teaching of Christian doctrine on a regular footing, trained laymen as catechists, and composed a compendium of Christian doctrine for their use. Behind this lay a conviction that Trent had stated and that he never tired of repeating: that the ruin of souls in his century had come less from the cleverness of heretics than from the ignorance of the faithful.
The founder. In 1574 a small group of young men, several of them his former catechists, gathered around him with the intention of living in common as priests devoted to preaching, the sacraments, and teaching. The bishop of Lucca approved the foundation, and the community took up residence at the church of Santa Maria della Rosa. They promoted the devotion of the Forty Hours, frequent Communion, and the decent celebration of the liturgy. Clement VIII confirmed the congregation in 1595; under Paul V it received the form of clerks regular, and in time it took the title by which it is still known: the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God (Clerici Regulares Matris Dei).
The reformer of others. His reputation for discretion led Clement VIII to entrust him with the apostolic visitation and reform of two monastic families that had fallen into disorder: the Benedictine congregation of Monte Vergine and the Vallombrosan monks. It was delicate work, requiring a secular priest to correct religious older than his own institute, and he carried it out without leaving enemies behind him — a rarer accomplishment in the Rome of 1600 than any miracle.
The missions. The Collect of his Mass praises God for having stirred him up for the propagation of the faith among the nations, and the phrase is precise. In the first years of the seventeenth century, together with the Spanish prelate Juan Bautista Vives and the Jesuit Martín de Funes, he laboured for the foundation of a college at Rome to train priests for the foreign missions. The project took shape in 1603 and stands at the origin of what would become, after his death, the Urban College and the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide. The apothecary of Lucca is thus among the founders of the instrument by which the Church organized her missions for the next three and a half centuries.
The memorial on reform. Toward the end of his life he set down for Paul V his counsel on the reform of the Church. Its substance is a sentence every reformer should have by heart: that those who would reform the morals of others must seek first and above all the glory of God, and must begin with themselves and with those who govern. Reform, he argued, descends from the head to the members; it is accomplished by good pastors, by the careful formation of the clergy, and by the instruction of the young, and it is not accomplished by denunciation. He loved the Church as she was — wheat and tares together — and he set about healing her without ever despising her.
IV. Mors et Cultus
In the autumn of 1609 an epidemic sickness — the sources speak of a contagious fever, variously described as influenza or plague — spread through Rome. Leonardi went among the sick of his own community and of the city, contracted the disease, and died at Rome on the ninth of October, 1609, at the age of sixty-eight. He died as he had begun, a dispenser of remedies.
His body rests in the church of Santa Maria in Campitelli, which was later entrusted to his congregation and remains its principal church in Rome.
He was beatified by Pius IX in 1861 and canonized by Pius XI on the seventeenth of April, 1938. His feast was subsequently inserted into the General Roman Calendar on the day of his death, where the 1962 Missale Romanum keeps it as a feast of the third class, with the commemoration of the ancient martyrs Denis of Paris and his companions Rusticus and Eleutherius, whose day it had long been. The Mass is proper in its Collect, with the Introit In sermonibus Domini; the Epistle (2 Cor. 4:1-6, 15-18) and the Gospel of the sending of the Seventy-two (Luke 10:1-9) frame him exactly as he was — a labourer sent into a great harvest, preaching not himself but Christ Jesus.
[For orientation only: the reformed calendar retains him on 9 October as an optional memorial. In 2006 he was named patron of pharmacists.]
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Christ is the medicine, and the dose matters. The apothecary never forgot his trade. Men need Christ more than anything else, as the sick need the remedy; but the remedy must be given with knowledge and patience, suited to the soul that receives it. This is the whole theology of catechesis in a single image: not the scattering of truths, but the careful administration of the one Truth to each person according to his capacity. St. Paul, in the Epistle of the day, says the same: Non enim nosmetipsos praedicamus, sed Iesum Christum Dominum nostrum — “For we preach not ourselves, but Jesus Christ our Lord; and ourselves your servants through Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:5).
Reform begins with the reformer. Leonardi lived in an age when every party claimed to be reforming the Church. The Reformers had left her; certain zealots within her preferred to accuse rather than to labour. His answer was the Tridentine one: the reform of the Church is the sanctification of her members, beginning with oneself and with those in authority, and carried out within her communion and under her obedience. He never confused love for the Church with complacency about her sins, and he never confused grief at her sins with license to stand outside her.
Exile is not failure. For years he could not live in his own city, and his work was carried on under suspicion. He did not interpret this as God’s verdict on the work. The Gospel of his Mass sends the disciples out with the instruction that where they are not received, they are to go on; their peace returns to them (Luke 10:6). He went on.
The least labour feeds the greatest. The catechism lessons of a parish priest in Lucca led, within a single lifetime, to a missionary college that would send priests to every continent. Messis quidem multa, operarii autem pauci — “The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few” (Luke 10:2). He began by training a handful of lay catechists. God supplied the rest.
VI. Oratio
Collect of the feast:
Deus, qui beatum Ioannem Confessorem tuum ad fidem in gentibus propagandam mirabiliter excitasti, et per eum novam in Ecclesia tua erudiendis fidelibus Clericorum familiam congregasti: da nobis famulis tuis; ita eius institutis proficere, ut praemia consequamur aeterna. Per Dominum.
“O God, who for the propagation of the faith among the nations didst in a wondrous manner stir up blessed John, Thy Confessor, and through him didst gather in Thy Church a new family of clerks for the instruction of the faithful: grant unto us Thy servants so to profit by his teaching that we may attain the everlasting rewards. Through our Lord.”
Commemoration of Saints Denis, Rusticus and Eleutherius:
Deus, qui hodierna die beatum Dionysium Martyrem tuum atque Pontificem virtute constantiae in passione roborasti, quique illi, ad praedicandum gentibus gloriam tuam, Rusticum et Eleutherium sociare dignatus es: tribue nobis, quaesumus; eorum imitatione pro amore tuo prospera mundi despicere, et nulla eius adversa formidare. Per Dominum.
“O God, who on this day didst strengthen blessed Denis, Thy Martyr and Bishop, with the virtue of constancy in his passion, and didst vouchsafe to join with him Rusticus and Eleutherius for the preaching of Thy glory to the nations: grant us, we beseech Thee, by their imitation to despise for love of Thee the prosperity of the world, and to fear none of its adversities. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiratio
Sancte Ioannes Leonardi, ora pro nobis: ut Christum, non nosmetipsos, praedicemus.
“St. John Leonardi, pray for us: that we may preach Christ, and not ourselves.”
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
For the life: the Acta of the canonization process and the historical publications of the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, s.v. 9 October; and the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Clerks Regular of the Mother of God.” For the Tridentine background of his catechetical work: the decrees de reformatione of the Council of Trent (Sessions V, XXIII, and XXIV), and the Catechismus Romanus issued by St. Pius V in 1566, which was the doctrinal standard of every catechist of his generation.
On the Lives of the Saints path, John Leonardi belongs to the great generation of Roman founders who knew one another — Philip Neri, Camillus de Lellis, Joseph Calasanctius — and whose works were braided together in the same few streets. On the Church History path, he opens the history of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide and the organization of the missions after Trent. On the Theology and Doctrine path, his memorial to Paul V is a fitting entry into the question of what true reform of the Church is, and what distinguishes it from rupture.
Practice
Examine. When I am grieved by the faults of the Church or of those set over me, do I begin the reform with myself? Is my criticism ordered to the glory of God, or to my own sense of being in the right?
Do. Teach one article of the faith this week, carefully and at the right measure, to someone who does not know it: a child the Apostles’ Creed, a friend the meaning of the Forty Hours, a fellow parishioner the reason for frequent confession.
Pray. The Collect of the feast; and for those who labour in the missions, the Gospel verse said slowly: Rogate ergo Dominum messis, ut mittat operarios in messem suam — “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send labourers into his harvest” (Luke 10:2).
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries before an image of the Holy Face, as he prayed before the Volto Santo of Lucca; or, in this month of the Rosary, the Joyful Mysteries offered for the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God and for all who catechize the young.
Sancte Ioannes Leonardi, ora pro nobis.