St. Leonard of Port of Maurice

St. Leonard was born December 19th, 1676, the son of Domenico Casanova and Anna Maria Benza. He was given the name Paul Jerome Casanova. His father was a ship captain whose family lived in Port Maurice on the northwestern coast of Italy. At 13, Leonard went to Rome to live with his uncle Agostino and study at the Jesuit Roman College. He was a good student and destined for a career in medicine. In 1697, however, he joined the Friars Minor, much to the dismay of his uncle who promptly disowned him. Later that year he received the Franciscan habit and took the name Brother Leonard, after a relative who had been kind to him. After making his novitiate at Ponticelli in the Sabine mountains, he completed his studies at the monastery of St. Bonaventura on the Palatine at Rome.

After his ordination he remained there as a professor, and expected to be sent on the Chinese missions, but became ill with a bleeding ulcer and was sent to his hometown monastery of the Franciscan Observants in 1704. After four years he was restored to health and was sent out to preach in Porto Maurizio.

Once freed from his ulcerative condition, Leonard began giving missions in San Miniato near Florence among the people of Tuscany. Travelling with a group of Franciscans, they lead austere and penitential lives. In 1710 he founded the monastery of Icontro, on a peak in the mountains about four miles from Florence, where he and his assistants could retire from time to time after missions, and devote themselves to spiritual renewal.

Alphonsus Liguori, another great saint called Leonard "the great missionary of the 18th century" because he attracted large crowds everywhere he was invited to preach. Leonard spent over forty years preaching retreats, Lenten sermons, and parish missions throughout Italy. His missions typically lasted 15 to 18 days, and he often stayed an additional week to hear confessions.

In 1720 he crossed the borders of Tuscany and held his celebrated missions in Central and Southern Italy. Everywhere Leonard made conversions and was very often obliged both in cities and country districts to preach in the open, as the churches could not contain the thousands who came to listen. Pope Clement XII and Pope Benedict XIV both called upon him to preach in Rome with Benedict XIV appointing him to several complex diplomatic assignments. Even though he was highly esteemed by popes and peasants alike, he remained a humble, shoeless, and penitent friar who won people over through the sincerity of his faith.

Leonard founded many pious societies and confraternities, and exerted himself to spread devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. He also began to insist that the concept of the Immaculate Conception of Mary be defined as a dogma of the faith, long before it was promulgated by the church.

The Franciscans had been the custodians of the Holy Sites in the Holy Land, including the "Way of the Cross" since 1343. Though many saints were devoted to the Stations of the Cross, few if any did more to promote them than Leonard. As a Franciscan priest, he preached the Way of the Cross at missions for forty-three years and reportedly set up Stations in over five hundred locations throughout Italy, including the Colosseum in Rome.

From May to November 1744, he preached in Corsica, which at that time belonged to the Republic of Genoa and which was torn by political strife. In November of 1751, when he was preaching to the Bolognese, Pope Benedict XIV called him to Rome because of his declining health. The strain of his missionary labors and his mortifications had completely exhausted his body. He arrived on the evening of November 26th, 1751, at his beloved monastery of St. Bonaventura on the Palatine and expired on the same night at eleven o'clock at the age of seventy-four.

Pope Pius VI pronounced his beatification on June 19th, 1796, and Pope Pius IX his canonization on June 29th, 1867. The Franciscan Order celebrates his feast on November 26th, but it is often celebrated on the 27th in the rest of the church.

The partly incorrupt body of Leonard is kept in the high altar of the church of St. Bonaventure monastery in Rome, where he died.

He is the patron saint of preachers and missionaries.