Saint Leonard of Port Maurice

Paolo Girolamo Casanova was born in Porto Maurizio — today Imperia — on December 20, 1676. His father was a shipowner and a seafaring man; his mother died when he was two. At twelve he went to Rome to study with his uncle, and there he joined the Reformed Franciscans, taking the name Leonard. Soon afterward he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis and was sent back to Liguria to die; against all expectations he recovered, and lived for more than forty years after that. He was the greatest popular preacher of eighteenth-century Italy. For forty-four years he crossed the whole peninsula on foot preaching missions: Tuscany, Lazio, the Kingdom of Naples, Corsica — where the pope sent him to bring peace to the island in revolt, a task no one ever pulled off. But the thing we remember him for is something else, and it has made its way into almost every church in the world: he was the one who spread the Way of the Cross in the form we know, with its fourteen stations. He set up more than five hundred of them himself. The last, in 1750, he planted inside the Colosseum — which at the time was a stone quarry and a pasture — and that gesture saved the amphitheater from demolition. He died in Rome on November 26, 1751, having come back on purpose because he wanted to die in his own friary. Pius IX proclaimed him a saint in 1867. If your name is Leonard, today is your name day.