Saint Joseph Benedict Cottolengo

Saint Joseph Benedict Cottolengo was an Italian priest who in Turin, trusting only in Divine Providence, opened a house for the poor, the sick, and the abandoned. His work, the Little House of Divine Providence, is known simply as the Cottolengo. The Church commemorates him on April 30.

He was born on May 3, 1786, in Bra in Piedmont, the eldest of twelve children, six of whom died in infancy. He was ordained a priest in Turin on June 8, 1811; two of his brothers also became priests. He was a sought-after confessor and preached retreats and conferences for students. At the age of thirty-two he became a canon at the Church of Corpus Domini in Turin, but he found no peace in that role.

The turning point came on Sunday, September 2, 1827. A French family arrived in Turin by stagecoach from Milan; the mother, far along in her pregnancy, had a high fever. Turned away by one hospital after another, the family found a place in a public dormitory. Called there, Father Cottolengo stayed with the young woman until her death. Afterward he prayed for a long time before the Blessed Sacrament, asking God what he wanted of him. At last he had the bells rung and the candles lit, and he told those gathered in the church: “The grace has been granted!”

From then on he devoted his gifts for organization and finance to those most in need. In January 1828 he set up a small shelter for the sick poor in rented rooms in the center of Turin. When it had to be closed during a cholera epidemic, he did not give up: on April 27, 1832, he opened the Little House of Divine Providence on the outskirts of the city. There he took in the sick whom the hospitals turned away and the poor of every kind, and he called people with intellectual disabilities his “good children.” He gave the successive buildings names: house of faith, house of hope, house of charity.

He built the whole work on trust in Providence and called himself a laborer of Divine Providence. He liked to repeat the words of Saint Paul: “The love of Christ impels us.” The sick and the healthy, religious and lay people formed one family in the Little House, in which everyone had a task. He founded communities of sisters, religious brothers, and priests, and alongside the works of charity five monasteries of contemplative sisters and one of hermits, which he counted among his most important works.

Worn out by work and ill, he went to his brother’s house in Chieri near Turin. He died there on April 30, 1842, at the age of fifty-six. According to Benedict XVI, his last words were a plea for God’s mercy and a prayer to the Blessed Virgin.

Benedict XV beatified him on April 29, 1917, and Pius XI canonized him on March 19, 1934, in the Vatican Basilica. John Paul II visited the Little House in 1980, and in 2010 Benedict XVI prayed there at his mortal remains and met the sick.