St. Bernardino Realino

Bernardino Realino was a Jesuit who spent forty-two years as a priest in Lecce in the heel of Italy, and his canonization in 1947 — three and a half centuries after his death in 1616 — was testimony to the consistency and depth of the local devotion that had preserved his memory without requiring any distant prompting.

He was born in 1530 at Carpi in the duchy of Modena, trained as a lawyer and served as a civil administrator in Milan and Naples before entering the Jesuits in 1564 at the age of thirty-four. The decision to enter religious life was not sudden — he had been moving toward it for years — but it was definitive: he abandoned a promising secular career at a point when it had already established him in comfortable prosperity. He was ordained in 1567 and assigned to Lecce, where he remained for the rest of his life.

The forty-two years at Lecce were, from a public perspective, entirely ordinary: parish ministry, confessional work, charitable works among the poor and the sick, the administration of a Jesuit college. What made them extraordinary was the practical intelligence of a trained lawyer and administrator brought fully to bear on the pastoral life — to the confessional, where the problems of married laypeople and merchants were as real as the problems of those called to holiness by extraordinary gifts; to the sick, whom he visited systematically; to the poor, toward whom he directed the college's charitable resources with institutional efficiency. He became, over four decades, indispensable to Lecce. When he was dying, the city's magistrates came to ask him not to die and, when that petition proved unavailing, to ask him to remember them before God. That deathbed scene is one of the more honest expressions in the hagiographical record of what a priest becomes when he stays.