Saint Joseph Cafasso

Saint Joseph Cafasso was a priest of Turin, a teacher of moral theology, a confessor and a formator of the clergy, and a pastor to prisoners and to people condemned to death. For a quarter of a century he was the spiritual director of Saint John Bosco. His memorial falls on June 23.

He was born on January 15, 1811, into a farming family in Castelnuovo d’Asti in Piedmont, the same village as Saint John Bosco. He was the third of four children; his youngest sister, Marianna, became the mother of Saint Joseph Allamano, founder of the Consolata Missionaries and the Consolata Missionary Sisters. In Chieri he completed secondary school and two years of philosophy. In 1830 he entered the seminary of the Archdiocese of Turin, which was located there, and in September 1833 he was ordained a priest.

Soon after his ordination he went to live at the Convitto Ecclesiastico of Saint Francis of Assisi in Turin, which Father Luigi Guala had founded in 1817 so that young priests from Piedmont could complete their preparation for pastoral ministry there. Cafasso remained there for the rest of his life: from 1836 he taught moral theology, and in time he became its rector. In the spirit of Saint Alphonsus Liguori and Saint Francis de Sales he taught priests how to be good confessors and spiritual directors, who make God’s mercy known without losing a lively sense of sin. He himself spent many hours a day in the confessional, and bishops, priests, religious, lay people, and ordinary folk came to him.

Among his disciples was Saint John Bosco, whom he guided spiritually from 1835 until his own death: first as a seminarian, then as a priest and a founder. Benedict XVI stressed that Cafasso never tried to make him a copy of himself, but helped him to discern God’s will. When he was offered a candidacy for parliament, he refused, saying that at the judgment the Lord would ask him whether he had been a good priest, not a good member of parliament.

For more than twenty years he visited the prisons of Turin, where conditions were inhuman. At first he preached there to all the prisoners; in time he chose personal conversations about trust in God, prayer, and the sacraments, above all confession. He gave special care to those condemned to death: he heard the confessions of 57 of them, gave them Holy Communion, and accompanied them to the scaffold. In Turin he was called the “saint of the gallows.”

He died in Turin on June 23, 1860, at the age of 49. His mortal remains rest in Turin’s Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, known as the Consolata.

Pius XI beatified him on May 3, 1925, and Pius XII canonized him on June 22, 1947, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, together with John de Brito and Bernardino Realino. In 1948 Pius XII proclaimed him patron of Italian prisons, and in the 1950 apostolic exhortation Menti nostrae he held him up to priests as a model of the confessor and spiritual director.