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"I looked at Him, and He looked at me, and it seemed He was telling me many things." — Guido Conforti, remembering the crucifix he visited as a schoolboy
Have you ever been told that the thing you want most to do with your life is the one thing you cannot do?
Guido Conforti wanted to be a missionary. He wanted it as a teenager, reading the life of Saint Francis Xavier, and he wanted it as a young priest. He asked the Jesuits to take him, and they said no. He asked the Salesians of Don Bosco, and they said no. The reason was the same both times: his body would not hold up. He had a condition that made him black out and struggle for breath, serious enough that it delayed his own ordination.
So he did something that is easy to describe and very hard to do. He stopped asking to go, and he started sending others.
He founded a missionary society, trained its first priests, and watched them leave for China while he stayed behind in Parma, running a seminary. Later the Church made him an archbishop and then a bishop, and he spent the rest of his life carrying two jobs at once: shepherd of a diocese in northern Italy and father of men on the other side of the world. He did not see the missions in China until he was sixty-three years old.
If you have ever had a calling you could not fulfill the way you pictured it, because of your health, your circumstances, your family, or a door that simply stayed shut, Conforti is a saint for you. His life says that being kept from the front line is not the same as being kept from the work.
A Farmer's Son in a Country Still Learning to Be Italy
Guido Maria Conforti was born on March 30, 1865, in Casalora di Ravadese, a farming community in the flat, rich land outside Parma. He was the eighth of ten children of Rinaldo Conforti and Antonia Adorni, and he was baptized the same day he was born.
The Italy of his childhood was very new. The country had been politically united only four years before his birth, and the union had come at a high price for the Church. Within his first years of life, the papal territories were taken over, and in 1870 the Italian army entered Rome while Pope Pius IX withdrew into the Vatican. For decades afterward, Catholic Italians lived with a painful divided loyalty between their country and the Holy See. Conforti would spend his entire adult life as a priest and bishop in that tension.
At home, the plan for the boy was practical. His father owned land, and the whole effort of the family's schooling was aimed at one goal: that Guido would grow up to manage the farm and its property. By every sign he could have done it well. He was sent to the school of the Christian Brothers in Parma, he was bright, and a respectable, prosperous life lay open in front of him.
The Boy Who Stopped Every Morning at a Crucifix
On the way to school, Guido passed the Church of Peace, in Parma's Borgo delle Colonne. Inside hung a large crucifix. He began to go in each morning, before class, and stand in front of it.
He was a small child. Nothing in the record suggests he understood what he was doing. But a habit formed, and the habit became a kind of conversation. Decades later, as a bishop, he described it in words he never improved on: he looked at the Lord, the Lord looked at him, and it seemed that Christ was telling him many things. "That crucifix gave me my vocation," he used to say.
The detail is worth holding on to, because it tells you what kind of missionary he would be. His zeal did not begin with an adventure or a map. It began with a child looking at a wounded man on a cross every day, and slowly realizing that the love in that face was meant for the whole world, not just for him.
At eleven, in November 1876, he entered the diocesan seminary in Parma. By then the pull toward the priesthood was real, and so was the collision with his father. Rinaldo had planned a farm manager, and his son was announcing a seminary. Guido's mother supported him. That, and the strength he drew from his daily silence in front of the Crucifix, carried him through.
Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen he read the life of Saint Francis Xavier, the Jesuit who carried the Gospel to India and Japan and died within sight of China. Something caught fire. From then on, the priesthood and the missions were, for Guido, one and the same desire.
Seminary life in those years was austere. He lived at a distance from his family, and his parents rarely came to see him.
The Seminarian Who Kept Fainting While His Classmates Were Ordained
Then his body began to fail him.
The official account of his life says he suffered from an illness with epileptic-type symptoms. In the plainer words of those who knew him in the seminary, he would lose consciousness for hours at a time, and he struggled to breathe. It was serious enough that the Church would not ordain him. His classmates went forward and were ordained. Guido was told to wait and get better.
Think about what that meant for a young man who had been preparing for the priesthood since he was eleven years old. He had given up the farm and his father's plans, and he had fought for this road. Now the road was closed, with no promise it would ever open. It was the first of many times that his health would stand between him and the life he had asked for.
The seminary, however, trusted him. Even while he waited, he was made vice-rector, and he proved to be a remarkable formator of younger students, leading them toward holiness not by lectures but by a visible life of faith.
During those months of waiting he made pilgrimages to the Marian shrine of Fontanellato, outside Parma, and he sought the counsel of Blessed Anna Maria Adorni, a holy woman of the city known for her care of the poor, the imprisoned, and women who had been exploited. He prayed to Our Lady for strength, and slowly his health recovered enough for the Church to proceed.
He was ordained a priest on September 22, 1888, at the age of twenty-three, and he celebrated his first Mass at the shrine of Our Lady at Fontanellato, the place where he had begged for the strength to reach that day.
Turned Away Twice, He Built the Door Himself
Ordination did not settle the question of the missions. It sharpened it.
Conforti applied to join the Jesuits, the order of his hero, Francis Xavier. He was refused on health grounds. He turned to the Salesians of Saint John Bosco, who were sending priests across the world. Again he was refused, and again the reason was his health.
It would have been easy to decide that God had closed the question. Many people would have. Instead, Conforti seems to have drawn the opposite conclusion: that the missionary vocation was real, that it was not meant for him in the form he had imagined, and that it needed a home in Italy where young men like him could be trained and sent.
Meanwhile the Church in Parma was putting him to work. He became a professor, then vice-rector, then director of the diocesan work for the Propagation of the Faith, and he rose quickly to vicar general. None of it dimmed the central desire.
On December 3, 1895, the feast of Saint Francis Xavier, he opened the seminary that would become the Xaverian Missionaries. Its purpose was narrow and total: the proclamation of the Gospel to people who had never heard it. Pope Leo XIII approved the work. In December 1898 it was officially recognized, and on March 3, 1899, in the chapel of the new seminary, Conforti said farewell to his first two missionaries leaving for China, Caio Rastelli and Odoardo Manini.
The man who could not go watched the first men go.
One Man, Two Dioceses, and a Mission on the Other Side of the World
Conforti never treated the Xaverians as a side project. He wrote their constitutions and spent years forming them, and in 1921 he completed a long letter that served as a kind of testament, presenting the rule approved by Rome. What he wanted for them was a spirit of faith, obedience, and brotherly love. He also tied the missionary life to the vows of religious life, believing that the two belonged together. In 1912 he consecrated Luigi Calza as the first Xaverian bishop, sent to China as vicar apostolic of Cheng-chow.
At the same time, he carried a full diocese. After the Ravenna years (see below), Pope Pius X asked him to take charge of Parma, and he governed it from December 1907 for nearly twenty-five years. He chose the motto In omnibus Christus: Christ in all things.
For Conforti, this was not a slogan. It meant that religious instruction came first. He established schools of Christian doctrine in every parish of the diocese, trained catechists with real courses in teaching and in the faith, and was the first in Italy to hold a catechetical week. He visited the parishes on foot, by road, and wherever he was needed. He held diocesan synods and organized Eucharistic, Marian, and missionary congresses. He put enormous effort into forming his priests.
He believed something that sounds simple but runs against the grain of most parish life: that a diocese which sends missionaries is a healthier diocese, not a poorer one. The announcement of the Gospel to non-Christians, he held, was the most effective way of renewing the faith of his own people.
That conviction carried beyond Parma. In 1916 he helped found the Missionary Union of the Clergy and served for ten years as its first president. He is said to have been the driving force behind Pope Benedict XV's 1919 letter Maximum illud, the document that reshaped the Church's missionary work in the twentieth century. When the First World War came, he stood with the Pope in the call for peace. When Parma was torn by the quarrels of those years between Church and State, between political parties, and later under Fascism, he declined to take sides and sought to mediate, and he stayed in his city. In 1907, when the Pope condemned the errors of Modernism, he asked his priests to reaffirm their fidelity to the Church.
Through all of it, he was a bishop whom the poor and the weak could reach. He was, in the words of the Church's own profile, a good shepherd with special attention for them.
The China of Italy: A Cold Welcome and a Quiet Retreat
The hardest years of his life came in the middle of all this, and they came because of a promotion.
In May 1902, Pope Leo XIII named Conforti Archbishop of Ravenna. He was thirty-seven years old. For the new founder of a missionary society, it could have been a death blow. When he told the Pope of his dream of going to China, Leo XIII answered that his field of work was Ravenna, "the China of Italy," and told him to be ready to do God's will and trust that God would give him the grace for it.
On June 11, 1902, in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, Conforti was consecrated a bishop. On the same day, he made his religious profession, including a vow to give himself without reserve to the proclamation of the Gospel among the nations.
He arrived in Ravenna with a plan, and the clergy met him with coldness and, in places, hostility. He was young, he was unknown to them, and he had been placed over them from outside. Worse, his body gave out. After two years, his strength had collapsed so badly that he could no longer carry the diocese. He resigned, and on October 6, 1904, Pope Pius X accepted the resignation, reluctantly.
Imagine that homecoming. He had been given one of Italy's historic sees, and he was leaving it after two years, defeated by his own health. He returned to Parma and to the small mission seminary he had founded, where he spent his energy forming the young candidates and drafting the constitutions of his society. By all accounts, his return was not greeted with celebration, and he accepted it as a humiliation. He did not argue with it. He went back to work.
Three years later, the Church asked again. In September 1907, Pius X wrote to him with the request that he help the dying Bishop of Parma and succeed him. The Pope began with words that Conforti must have read more than once: there were two of them asking this great favor, and it was a service to be accepted at any cost and personal sacrifice. Conforti said yes. "On the tomb of the Apostles," he answered, "I now vow to die on the Cross."
It is a startling sentence. He was not speaking about martyrdom in a far-off country. He was promising to wear himself out, in an ordinary diocese, in ordinary pastoral work, until the end. He kept the promise.
Sixty-Three Years Old and Finally in China
In the fall of 1928, Conforti, then sixty-three and unwell, set out for China. He went, he said, as a duty and a need of his heart.
For the founder, it was the first time he saw with his own eyes the men he had trained and the Christian communities they had built. The size of the country astonished him. "We don't need three thousand missionaries in China, but fifty thousand!" he said. He told them that he hoped one day to see the whole of China called a Christian nation.
Before he left, he spoke to his missionaries. He told them he hoped his visit would deepen their love for one another and give all of them fresh courage to work for the missions willingly and without letting up. Then he said what must have been the truest thing he had ever said aloud about his own life: he was amazed at what they had accomplished for the good of the Chinese people, and how he wished he could be young again and give all his strength to them.
He had waited thirty years to say it. He came home in December.
The Last Visits and the Last Blessing
The doctors told him to rest. He did not. In the final year of his life, Conforti set out again on pastoral visits through the parishes of Parma, and wherever he went, he spoke about China. The visits drained him, and he refused to slow down.
On October 25, 1931, he ordained eight subdeacons. When the ceremony was over, he went to bed, exhausted, and he did not get up again.
He lay ill for just over a week. On November 5, 1931, worn out by his work, he received the Anointing of the Sick and Holy Communion as Viaticum. He made a public profession of his faith. Then he prayed for God's blessing on his priests and his people, and he died in peace. He was sixty-six.
He was buried on November 8. A procession five miles long followed him to his resting place, and the city that had once received the cold, ailing young priest back from Ravenna now turned out almost to a person. In the funeral eulogy, a fellow bishop asked whether this was the funeral of a man cut down by death or the triumph of a saint raised to the glory of heaven.
A Saint Offered to the Church on World Mission Sunday
Conforti was declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II on February 11, 1982. The same Pope beatified him in Saint Peter's Square on March 17, 1996, in the same ceremony in which he beatified Daniel Comboni, another founder of a missionary community. The miracle accepted for the beatification was the healing of a twelve-year-old girl in Burundi in 1965, who was cured of cancer through his intercession. A second miracle was approved by Pope Benedict XVI in December 2010, and on February 21, 2011, at a public consistory, the Pope announced that Conforti would be canonized.
Pope Benedict XVI canonized him on October 23, 2011, in Saint Peter's Square, on World Mission Sunday. The date was chosen well. He was canonized alongside two other founders, Luigi Guanella and Bonifacia RodrΓguez de Castro.
His body rests in the apse of the church of the Xaverian motherhouse in Parma, the house where he spent his life training the men he could not join. The Church makes no claim that it is incorrupt.
His patronage is a clear and honest one: he is the patron of the Xaverian Missionaries, the society he founded in 1895, which today counts hundreds of priests and brothers serving in some two dozen countries on several continents. They carry his motto, Christ in all things, and his conviction that the Church is missionary by her very nature. In the years after his death, a women's community, the Xaverian Missionary Sisters of Mary, also took up the same spirit. Beyond the Xaverians, the Church has not assigned him other formal patronages, and we will not invent them. But he has become, in practice, a companion for anyone whose calling has been redirected by weakness, illness, or an obedience they did not choose, and for any bishop or pastor trying to care for a local church while keeping his eyes on the whole world.
Prayer to Saint Guido Maria Conforti
Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, you looked on young Guido from the cross and spoke to his heart. Through his prayers, teach us to look at you and to let you look at us.
Give us his zeal for those who have not yet heard your name. Where our health, our work, or our circumstances close one door, help us to trust you and to serve you through the door that is open.
Saint Guido Maria Conforti, bishop and missionary, pray for us, that Christ may be all in all, in our homes, in our parishes, and to the ends of the earth.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Sources
- Pope Benedict XVI, Canonization Mass of October 23, 2011, Biographical Profiles of the Blessed (Libretto of the Papal Chapel, Vatican)
- Vatican City State, Saint of the Day: November 5, Saint Guido Maria Conforti, Bishop
- Agenzia Fides, "On Mission Sunday the canonization of Msgr Conforti, Bishop of Parma" (October 2011)
- Xaverian Missionaries, The Life of Our Founder; Early Years and Priestly Formation; Archbishop of Ravenna; Bishop of Parma; Visit to China and Death of a Saint
- EWTN Library, Biographies of Saints Canonized 1993 to 2018 (entry on Saint Guido Maria Conforti)
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