Feast Day: March 25 Beatified: October 3, 2004 — Pope Saint John Paul II Order / Vocation: Order of Saint Benedict (Cassinese Congregation) — monk and priest of the Abbey of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, Rome Patron of: Monks · Spiritual directors · Those with malaria · Benedictines of the Cassinese Congregation
Ordained on the Day of the Annunciation
The coincidence was noticed. Placido Riccardi was ordained a priest on March 25, 1871 — the feast of the Annunciation. He would die on March 15, 1915, forty-four years into his priesthood, having spent every one of those years in the same monastery: the great Benedictine Abbey of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of the four major basilicas of the Eternal City, built over the tomb of the Apostle Paul.
He was born on March 28, 1844, in Trevi, in Umbria — a small hill town of the kind that dots central Italy in numbers sufficient to produce, in any given century, a handful of saints. His family was devout. He entered the Cassinese Benedictines, the observant branch of the Benedictine confederation that maintained the strictest interpretation of the Rule. He made his monastic profession and was ordained.
He suffered from malaria — a disease that in nineteenth-century Rome was endemic, carried by the mosquitoes of the Pontine Marshes, and which waxed and waned in the city depending on the season and the drainage. He bore it without complaint across years of recurrence. His patience in illness became one of the characteristic notes of his spiritual reputation.
He became, over the decades of his monastic life, a sought-after spiritual director. Among those who came to him was a young monk who would become one of the great figures of twentieth-century Catholicism: Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, later Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1996. The spiritual direction that the young Schuster received from Placido Riccardi was a formative influence on the man who would govern the Ambrosian Church through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century.
Placido Riccardi died on March 15, 1915. Pope John Paul II beatified him on October 3, 2004 — ninety-one years after his death, in a ceremony that recognized the consistent, quiet, monastic holiness of a man who had spent forty-four years in one monastery, borne malaria without complaint, directed the souls entrusted to him with care, and died in the place where he had been ordained on the day the angel came to Mary.
Prayer to Blessed Placido Riccardi
O God, who gave to Blessed Placido the stability of one monastery across forty-four years of priesthood, the patience of the man who bore malaria without complaint, and the depth of the spiritual director who formed Blessed Schuster, grant through his intercession that those who direct souls may do so with the same silent fidelity, and that those who suffer chronic illness may find in it the same school of sanctity he found. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Blessed Placido Riccardi, pray for us.
| Born | March 28, 1844 — Trevi, Perugia, Umbria, Italy |
| Died | March 15, 1915 — Abbey of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, Rome — malaria |
| Feast Day | March 25 (anniversary of his ordination on the Annunciation) |
| Order / Vocation | Order of Saint Benedict (Cassinese Congregation) — monk and priest, Abbey of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, Rome |
| Beatified | October 3, 2004 — Pope Saint John Paul II |
| Body | Abbey of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, Rome |
| Patron of | Monks · Spiritual directors · Those with malaria · Cassinese Benedictines |
| Known as | Padre Placido · Placido Riccardi OSB |
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