Saint Bernardino Realino

Saint Bernardino Realino was an Italian Jesuit who, before becoming a priest, worked for years as a lawyer and public official. For more than forty years he served in Lecce in Apulia as a confessor, preacher, and helper of the sick, the poor, and prisoners. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on July 2.

He was born on December 1, 1530, in Carpi near Modena, into a noble family. His father served at the courts of the powerful and was often away from home, so it was above all his mother who handed on the faith to her son. Bernardino studied in Modena and then in Bologna, first philosophy and medicine. At the urging of a young woman whom he loved with a chaste love, he switched to law, and in 1556 he received his doctorate in Bologna.

He had a hot temper. When an arbiter gave an unjust ruling in a property dispute involving his family and insulted him, Bernardino drew his sword and slightly wounded him on the forehead. He bitterly regretted it, asked forgiveness of God and of the injured man, and accepted the penalty of exile without protest. From then on he mastered his anger so well that he became an exceptionally gentle man. In Milan, Cardinal Madruzzo, who then governed the Duchy of Milan, entrusted him with the office of podestà, that is, administrator and judge, in Felizzano, Cassine, and Castelleone, and then with the office of fiscal advocate in Alessandria.

In the end he came to Naples. There in 1564, at the age of thirty-four, he gave up his offices and his property and entered the Society of Jesus. According to a decree of the Holy See from 1941, he was led in this by a call from the Mother of God. He wanted to become a lay brother, but his superiors told him to receive priestly ordination, which he did in 1567. In Naples he was novice master, and during his ten years in the city he preached, taught children the catechism, heard confessions, visited the sick and prisoners, and accompanied those condemned to death.

In 1574 his superiors sent him to Lecce to found a new house of the order there. He remained there forty-two years, until his death. He built a church dedicated to the Name of Jesus and, thanks to the generosity of the townspeople, a Jesuit college as well. He founded a confraternity of the town’s leading citizens and with them visited hospitals and prisons, reconciled feuding families, provided dowries for poor girls, and cared for Turkish captives. The fame of his holiness reached far beyond Apulia: Pope Paul V, King Henry IV of France, and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine commended themselves to his prayers.

He worked until advanced old age. As he lay dying, the authorities of Lecce, on behalf of its people, asked him to become the city’s patron before God, and he accepted their request. He died on July 2, 1616, in the eighty-sixth year of his life. His relics rest in the Church of the Gesù in Lecce.

Leo XIII beatified him on January 12, 1896, and Pius XII canonized him on June 22, 1947, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, together with the Jesuit martyr Saint John de Britto and Saint Joseph Cafasso.