Feast day: June 23

St. Joseph Cafasso

Priest · 1811–1860

Patron of Prisoners

A small, hunchbacked Italian priest and brilliant moral theologian who trained generations of priests — among them St. John Bosco — and ministered tenderly to condemned prisoners.

Joseph Cafasso was born in 1811 in a Piedmontese village, a small and physically frail man with a curvature of the spine, but possessed of an extraordinary spirit. Ordained a priest, he became a teacher of moral theology at a college in Turin, where he trained a generation of priests in the practical wisdom and gentleness of the confessional.

He himself was one of the most sought-after confessors and spiritual directors of his city, guiding clergy, religious, and laypeople with a rare blend of firmness and mercy, steering souls away from both harsh rigorism and easy laxity. Among the young priests he formed and mentored was St. John Bosco, who became his lifelong disciple.

Cafasso's most striking apostolate was among prisoners. He visited the grim jails of Turin to bring comfort, instruction, and the sacraments to men society had given up on, and accompanied the condemned to the scaffold — over the years preparing many a man, whom he affectionately called his 'hanged saints,' to die at peace with God. It was these visits that first awakened Don Bosco's own concern for abandoned youth.

Worn out by his labours, he died in 1860, only forty-nine. Canonized in 1947, he is honoured as a model of the priestly ministry of mercy and as a patron of prisoners.

He accompanied dozens of men to the gallows, won them to repentance at the last, and called them affectionately his 'hanged saints.'

Image: Enrico Reffo (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20100630.html