VATICAN 1972 - Centenary of the birth of Don Luigi Orione and Lorenzo Perosi

Centenario della nascita di don Luigi Orione e di Lorenzo Perosi

50L       Don Luigi Orione

180L     Lorenzo Perosi

Luigi Orione was born in Pontecurone, diocese of Tortona, on 23 June 1872. At thirteen years of age he entered the Franciscan Friary of Voghera (Pavia), but he left after one year owing to poor health. From 1886 to 1889 he was a pupil of Saint John Bosco at the Valdocco Oratory (Youth Centre) in Turin.

On 16 October 1889, he joined the diocesan seminary of Tortona. As a young seminarian he devoted himself to the care of others by becoming a member of both the San Marziano Society for Mutual Help and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. On 3 July 1892 he opened the first Oratory in Tortona to provide for the Christian training of boys. The following year, on 15 October 1893, Luigi Orione, then a seminarian of twenty-one, started a boarding school for poor boys, in the Saint Bernardine estate.

On 13 April 1895, Luigi Orione was ordained priest and, on that occasion, the Bishop gave the clerical habit to six pupils of the boarding school. Within a brief span of time, Don Orione opened new houses at Mornico Losana (Pavia), Noto - in Sicily, Sanremo and Rome.

Around the young Founder there grew up seminarians and priests who made up the first core group of the Little Work of Divine Providence. In 1899, he founded the branch of the Hermits of Divine Providence. The Bishop of Tortona, Mgr Igino Bandi, by a Decree of 21 March 1903, issued the canonical approval of the Sons of Divine Providence (priests, lay brothers and hermits) - the male congregation of the Little Work of Divine Providence. It aims to “co-operate to bring the little ones, the poor and the people to the Church and to the Pope, by means of the works of charity”, and professes a fourth vow of special “faithfulness to the Pope”. In the first Constitutions of 1904, among the aims of the new Congregation, there appears that of working to “achieve the union of the separated Churches”.

On 29 June 1915, twenty years after the foundation of the Sons of Divine Providence, he added to the “single tree of many branches” the Congregation of the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity who are inspired by the same founding charism. Alongside them, he placed the Blind Sisters, Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament. Later, the Contemplative Sisters of Jesus Crucified were also founded.

Following the First World War (1914-1918), the number of schools, boarding houses, agricultural schools, charitable and welfare works increased. Among his most enterprising and original works, he set up the “Little Cottolengos”, for the care of the suffering and abandoned, which were usually built in the outskirts of large cities to act as “new pulpits” from which to speak of Christ and of the Church - “true beacons of faith and of civilisation”.

Don Orione's missionary zeal, which had already manifested itself in 1913 when he sent his first religious to Brazil, expanded subsequently to Argentina and Uruguay (1921), Palestine (1921), Poland (1923), Rhodes (1925), the USA (1934), England (1935), Albania (1936). From 1921-1922 and from 1934-1937, he himself made two missionary journeys to Latin America: to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, going as far as Chile.

He enjoyed the personal respect of the Popes and the Holy See's Authorities, who entrusted him with confidential tasks of sorting out problems and healing wounds both inside the Church as well as in the relations with society. He was a preacher, a confessor and a tireless organiser of pilgrimages, missions, processions, live cribs and other popular manifestations and celebrations of the faith. He loved Our Lady deeply and fostered devotion to her by every means possible and, through the manual labour of his seminarians, built the shrines of Our Lady of Safe Keeping in Tortona and Our Lady of Caravaggio at Fumo. In the winter of 1940, with the intention of easing the heart and lung complaints that were troubling him, he went to the Sanremo house, even though, as he said, “it is not among the palm trees that I would like to die, but among the poor who are Jesus Christ”. Only three days later, on 12 March 1940, surrounded by the love of his confreres, Don Orione died, while sighing “Jesus, Jesus! I am going”.

His body was found to be intact at its first exhumation in 1965. It has been exposed to the veneration of the faithful in the shrine of Our Lady of Safe Keeping in Tortona ever since 26 October 1980 - the day in which Pope John Paul II inscribed Don Luigi Orione in the Book of the Blessed.

FROM VATICAN.VA


Monsignor Lorenzo Perosi (21 December 1872 – 12 October 1956) was an Italian composer of sacred music and the only member of the Giovane Scuola who did not write opera. In the late 1890s, while he was still only in his 20s, Perosi was an internationally celebrated composer of sacred music, especially large-scale oratorios. Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland wrote: "It's not easy to give you an exact idea of how popular Lorenzo Perosi is in his native country."  Perosi's fame was not restricted to Europe. A 19 March 1899 New York Times article entitled "The Genius of Don Perosi" began: "The great and ever-increasing success which has greeted the four new oratorios of Don Lorenzo Perosi has placed this young priest-composer on a pedestal of fame which can only be compared with that which has been accorded of late years to the idolized Pietro Mascagni by his fellow-countrymen."Gianandrea Gavazzeni made the same comparison: "The sudden clamors of applause, at the end of the [19th] century, were just like those a decade earlier for Mascagni." Perosi worked for five Popes, including Pope St. Pius X who greatly fostered his rise.

FROM WIKIPEDIA.ORG

VATICAN 1972 - Celebrating Bramante

Celebrazioni Bramantesche

25L                  Progetto della cupola di San Pietro - Design of the dome of St. Peter

90L                  Ritratto di Bramante - Portrait of Bramante

130L                Sezione di scala - Section of scale

Biography:


Donato Bramante (b. 1444, Monte Andruvaldo, d. 1514)
Bramante was the leading architect of the High Renaissance in Italy. He was born in Monte Andruvaldo, near Urbino. Bramante was trained as a painter. His architectural career began in Milan, where he settled in 1482. In his design for the Church of Santa Maria presso Santo Satiro (1488), he used false perspective in the painted apse to create a feeling of depth-the first time this device had been used in architecture. Bramante left Milan in 1499 and settled in Rome, where, until the end of his life, he was employed almost exclusively by Pope Julius II. Here, under the influence of classical antiquity, his style became more monumental and less ornamented.

His two greatest projects, which occupied his most creative years but which did not reach completion, were his plans for the rebuilding of Saint Peter's Church and the Vatican Palace. His design for St. Peter's called for a large square building surmounted by a central dome, plus four smaller subsidiary domes and four towers. The piers and arches that were to support the dome were actually built, but before the structure could be finished, the design was radically altered by both Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno; St. Peter's was completed by Maderno in its present form of a longitudinal, rectangular basilica. Bramante's plan for additions to the Vatican Palace, on a 275-m (900-ft) sloping site, consisted of three successive courts surmounted by grandiose tiered landings. The plan was notable for its innovative axial arrangement and for its wonderful spaciousness, but it was never fully executed, and later additions completely spoiled its proportions.

Bramante stands with Michelangelo and Raphael as one of the artistic giants of the High Renaissance in Italy. Successfully fusing the ideals of classical antiquity with those of Christian inspiration, his sculptural, expressive grandeur paved the way for the more elaborate baroque school of the next century. He died in Rome on March 11 or April 11, 1514.

JRR Tolkien

1892

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is born on 3 January to British parents, Mabel and Arthur Tolkien , in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State (now South Africa).

1896

Arthur Tolkien dies, Mabel Tolkien, visiting England with her two sons, decides to remain there; they move to the hamlet of Sarehole near Birmingham, where they will live for four years.

1900

Mabel Tolkien converts to Roman Catholicism; Tolkien himself will be a devout Catholic all his life. He begins to attend King Edward's School in Birmingham. Already he shows an aptitude for languages.

1904

Mabel Tolkien dies, and Father Francis Morgan, a Catholic priest, becomes guardian of her sons.

1908

Tolkien meets Edith Bratt, his future wife.

1911

Tolkien visits Switzerland. He goes up to Exeter College, Oxford to study Classics, but in 1913 will change his course to English Language and Literature.

1915

After achieving first-class honours in his final English examinations , Tolkien enlists in the Army. He is commissioned a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. His poem 'Goblin Feet' in Oxford Poetry 1915 is his first publication in a book.

1916

Tolkien and Edith Bratt are married; between 1917 and 1929 they will have three sons and a daughter.

Tolkien serves in the Battle of the Somme; after a few months he is sent home with 'trench fever'. Two of his closest friends die in the war.

1917

Tolkien begins to write The Book of Lost Tales, the first prose version of his 'Silmarillion' mythology.

1919-20

Tolkien is on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, and more Oxford undergraduates.

1920-25

Tolkien is Reader in English Language and then Professor of English Language at the University of Leeds.

1921

A Middle English Vocabulary, Tolkien's first major academic work, is published.

1925

Sir Garvain and the Green Knight, co-edited by Tolkien is published. Tolkien becomes Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

1936

Tolkien delivers his landmark British Academy lecture, 'Beowulf': The Monsters and the Critics'.

1937

Tolkien's children's story The Hobbit is published with pen drawings and a dust-jacket by the author. A second printing this year adds colour illustrations by Tolkien. Asked for a sequel he begins to write The Lord of the Rings.

1939

Tolkien delivers an influential lecture, 'On Fairy-Stories', at the University of St Andrews.

1945

Tolkien is elected merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford.

1948

Tolkien finishes the narrative of The Lord of the Rings at last. He now begins to write its Appendices.

1954

The first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers) are published in July and October. Although a single work, it has been divided into three to spread the cost.

1955

The final volume of The Lord of the Rings (The Return of the King) is published in October.

1959

Tolkien retires from his Oxford professorship.

1962

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is published. This is a book of miscellaneous poems by Tolkien, which he now relates to The Lord of the Rings.

1965

In response to an unauthorized American paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien revises the work. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings now achieve cult status in the U.S.A.

1968

Tolkien and his wife move from Oxford to Poole on the south coast, partly for the sake of Edith's health, but also to escape the attention of fans.

1971

Edith Tolkien dies.

1972

Tolkien returnsto Oxford. He is awarded the CBE. Oxford University confers upon him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.

1973

JRR Tolkien dies in Bournemouth on 2 september. An edition of his life's-work, The Silmarillion, will be published in 1977.