⛪ Saint of the Day : November 05
Roman Catholic Saint. Founder of the Saint Francis Xavier Foreign Mission Society, Casalora di Ravadese born Monsignor Guido Maria Conforti was the eighth of ten children born to an agriculture family. Receiving his first education under the Brothers of the Christian Schools in Parma, on his way to school, he developed the habit of stopping to pray in front of a large Crucifix inside the church of Santa Maria della Pace. Feeling called to become a priest, he entered seminary in Parma, then under the rectorship of Andrea Carlo Ferrari, future cardinal archbishop of Milan and blessed. Experiencing a nervous related illness through which he would pass out for a few hours and seemed continuously out of breath, this condition almost precluded his priesthood ordination. While his classmates were ordained, he was asked to wait.
Guided by by the wisdom of Blessed Anna Maria Adorni, a holy religious woman who lived in Parma, Guido made frequent trips to the local shrine of Our Lady of Fontanellato, and after being eventually ordained on September 22, 1888, celebrated his first solemn mass there. Having read during his seminary years a life of Saint Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit missionary who died at the gates of China in 1552, he developed a missionary vocation but his requests to be accepted as a missionary by the Jesuits and the Salesians were to no avail due to his poor health. With his bishop assigning him to assist young seminary students, developing the idea of founding a community of missionaries, he wavered on with his wish even in the midst of social turmoil in Italy and the shortage of priests in the diocese. By the age of thirty, after knocking at the doors of missionary congregations, he officially began, with a small group of young students, a seminary for missionaries under the patronage of Saint Francis Xavier, leading on April 24, 1900, to the foundation stone of the new motherhouse of the Xaverian Missionaries in Parma after the foundation of the Xaverian Missionary Fathers on December 3, 1895. In May 1902, Conforti was named bishop of Ravenna by Pope Leo XIII, an appointment that could result into a deadly blow to his newly born congregation. In his conversation with the Pontiff, Conforti shared his dream of going to China.
The Pope told him that his field of work was Ravenna, "the China of Italy", continuing: "I summoned you to Rome in person so that you could hear from the mouth of the Pontiff himself what he asks of you. So be ready to do the will of God and He will give you the grace necessary for the fulfillment of His plan". Receiving his episcopal consecration on the following June 11 at the Roman basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls from Cardinal Lucido Maria Parocchi, as his health weakened gravely, Conforti was forced to resign from the pastoral government of his see shortly thereafter in October 1904, receiving the titular archbishopric see of Stauropoli. Moving back to Parma, when the latter see was vacated following the death of Bishop Francesco Magani, Pope Pius X chose Conforti as his successor. Celebrating two diocesan synods, he founded and promoted Catholic Action and sought the defense of the rights of workers. Assisting prisoners of war, children and families during the Great War, he paid visits to the wounded and took care of those displaced by the war, making sure that his seminarians, both diocesan and Xaverian, helped in the hospitals that were erected. Joining the Missionary Union of the Clergy of which he served as its first national president, he helped organize and attended mission congresses throughout Italy.
One of his last significant events was his journey to China, which he undertook "as a duty and a need of my heart", visiting his missionaries, having seen by the end of his life, twenty two departure ceremonies of his Xaverian missionaries to the said country. Draining his energy and still refusing to take things at a slower pace, on October 25, 1931 he ordained eight sub-deacons and was thereafter forced to bed feeling exhausted. Ten days later, worn out by his work and apostolic activities, he passed peacefully away, having received the Sacrament of the sick and Eucharist. Originally buried inside the cathedral of his diocese, in 1942 his remains were transported to the motherhouse of his congregation in the same city, with some thirty thousand people participating in the cortege notwithstanding the dangers of bombardments. When the motherhouse's sanctuary was completed in 1959, his remains were placed there, and eventually to their present spot in 1996 on the occasion of his beatification, which ceremony took place on March 17 that year, presided by Pope John Paul II. Pope Benedict XVI canonized Conforti on October 23, 2011. His liturgical memory is held on November 5.
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