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James Alberione | Thecla Merlo | Pauline Spirituality & Mission | Formation | E-mail Us

Father James Alberione

He was born in the squalid room of a small farmhouse in S. Lorenzo di Fossano,
Italy on April 4, 1884. He died in a room of Franciscan simplicity on the second
floor of the General House of the Society of St. Paul, Rome, on November 26th, 1971. Death
came at 6:25 in the evening. He ahd not recognized the visitor who had knelt
at his bedside two hours before, Pope paul VI.

He was thirty years of age when he founded his first Religious Congregation. At his death he left five religious congregations, plus four aggregated Secular Institutes and the Union of pauline Cooperators. No one before him in the centuries-old history of religious orders and congreagations gave as many or as diverse oundations to the Church.

Remarkable as this may be, this multi-colored prolificness does not reveal the true
image of this country boy, the son of peasant farm folks. ( As an unsteady 16-year-old seminarian, his father once grumbled: "Come home and dig like the rest of us!")

It does not reveal the image of this priest, who was not a priest like others; of this
pioneer, who at the right moment, inspired from on high and driven by native genuis and an
indomitable will went beyongd the ordinary to effect something "different." It was a "differentness" that had little to do with exhibitionism. On the contrary, it seemed
to him the solution to certain determined problems of his day, up to then
handled badly.

This pushed him on a path which effectively and realistically, if also
uncomfortably, would achieve the purpose in which he believed and for
which he was to gamble his whole life. In a word, he threw himself with
absolute and total availability into a lifework of concretizing his idead. That Father
Alberione achieved his "differentness" was recognized by the same Pope Paul VI. When
bestowing the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontefice on him on June 28th, 1969.
He asserted that "our Father Alberione had given the Church new instruments by which
to express herself, new means for giving vigor and breadth to her apostolate, a new
capacity and awareness of the validity and possibility of her mission in the modern
world with modern means."

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