Saint Vincent Pallotti

Saint Vincent Pallotti was a Roman priest, a confessor and a servant of the poor, the founder of the Union of Catholic Apostolate and of the community of priests and brothers known today as the Pallottines. He taught that every baptized person is called to the apostolate. The Church commemorates him on January 22.

He was born in Rome on April 21, 1795, the third of the ten children of Pietro Paolo Pallotti and Maria Maddalena De Rossi. He was educated by the Piarists and at the Roman College, and from 1814 he studied philosophy and theology at the Sapienza University. He was ordained a priest on May 16, 1818, in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, and he celebrated his first Mass in Frascati.

After his studies he worked with students of theology at the Sapienza, but in time he gave up his university career for pastoral ministry. He spent long hours in the confessional, visited the sick and prisoners, and set up evening schools for young people. From 1827 he was spiritual director at the Roman Seminary, and later also at the college of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. He was a friend of Saint Gaspar del Bufalo, whose confessor he was and whom he assisted at his death.

On January 9, 1835, he conceived the plan of a work that he called the Catholic Apostolate, that is, the universal apostolate. Priests, religious, and lay people, women and men, were to form it together, in order to revive faith among Catholics, to bring the Gospel to those who do not know it, and to carry out works of charity. In that same year the plan was approved by the cardinal vicar of Rome, Carlo Odescalchi, and Pope Gregory XVI gave it his blessing. Pallotti chose Mary, Queen of Apostles, as patroness of the work.

In 1836 he began in Rome the solemn celebration of the octave of the Epiphany, conceived as a prayer for unity in faith. During the cholera epidemic of 1837 he ministered to the sick at the risk of his life. A year later he opened a home for poor girls, called the Pia Casa di Carità, from which the Pallottine Sisters grew. With Italian emigrants in mind, he sent several of his companions to London. His bold plans also met with distrust in Church circles, and many of them remained barely begun during his lifetime.

In 1844 Gregory XVI entrusted to his community the church of San Salvatore in Onda, by the Tiber. Vincent Pallotti died in Rome on January 22, 1850, before reaching the age of fifty-five. His tomb is in that same church.

The beatification process was opened in 1887 by Leo XIII. Pius XI called Vincent a forerunner of Catholic Action, and Pius XII beatified him on January 22, 1950, on the hundredth anniversary of his death. John XXIII canonized him on January 20, 1963, during the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II, who called his native Wadowice the cradle of the Polish Pallottines, recalled that the Council’s decree on the apostolate of the laity confirmed what Pallotti had proclaimed more than a hundred years earlier.