St. Bartolo Longo

Bartolo, Who?

From Satanist Priest to our Newest Saint

Today, October 19, Pope Leo XIV will canonize Bartolo Longo.  He was born in 1841 to a devout Catholic family near Brindisi, Italy. A brilliant, but mischievous kid, Bartolo began to lose his way at the age of ten after his mother died. His adolescence was a time of great upheaval in Italy. By the time Bartolo entered law school at Naples, many of his professors were preaching nationalist venom against the Church. He was quickly caught up in their fervor. “I, too, grew to hate monks, priests and the Pope,” he wrote. He became involved in the occult which led him into outright Satanism. Consecrated a satanic priest he promised his soul to the devil. For the next year, he presided over satanic services and to preach more boldly against God and the Church. 
His distraught family turned to Vincenzo Pepe, a Catholic professor for help. Pepe eventually convinced Bartolo to see a Dominican priest, Fr. Alberto, who after three weeks received him back into the Church. Pepe surrounded Bartolo with faithful Catholics. Each day for two years, as a voluntarily imposed penance, Bartolo worked in a Hospital for Incurables. He became a lay Dominican and made a promise of celibacy to serve God. He would return to his Satanist hangouts, holding up the Rosary and publicly renouncing his former ways. Still Bartolo could not see how God could ever forgive him.
 
One day, while in Pompei for legal affairs of a client, Countess Mariana di Fusco, he saw the people’s dire poverty, ignorance, moral vice, and dependence on witchcraft. God helped him to see both how he could be saved and how he could spend his life saving others. He heard Fr. Alberto repeating the words of the Virgin Mary: ‘One who propagates my Rosary shall be saved.’ Falling to his  knees he exclaimed: ‘If your words are true…I shall not leave this earth without propagating your Rosary.'” He spent the rest of his life, beginning in Pompeii, promoting the Rosary.
 
With the financial support of the Countess, he built Pompeii’s famous Basilica of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, founded elementary schools and orphanages, technical schools to give the children of convicted criminals the chance of a better life. He wrote books and prayer manuals. It was from Bartolo’s writings that Pope St. John Paul II found the idea of luminous mysteries of the Rosary. He died in 1926 at Pompeii and was beatified 1980.