Praised be Jesus and Mary.
St. Leonard of Port Maurice was born in 1676. He was one of the great preachers of his century, in the 1700s especially. And when he was only two, he lost his mother. It was his father's second wife who taught him how to serve God. Even so, grace worked as well in his life.
He stood out for his piety and for his filial devotion to the Blessed Virgin.
When he was 12, his uncle invited him to come to Rome, where he studied at the Roman college run by the Jesuits. He began thinking about religious life. One day, he saw two Franciscans from the retreat of St. Bonaventure on the Palatine Hill. He was struck by their singular modesty and decided to join their community, which had been founded by Blessed Bonaventure of Barcelona. This branch of Franciscans was dedicated especially to prayer and penance in their retreat houses. He was closed at the habit on October 2, 1697, and professed solemn vows exactly a year later, as was then the custom. He wanted to be a missionary, to go and preach to the pagans, but his mission would instead be in Italy. He was ordained to the priesthood on September 23, 1702, and immediately began teaching philosophy to his community's seminarians. However, he soon had to stop because he had tuberculosis. For the next couple of years, he was moved around from one place to another in the hope that a better climate or some treatment would help him to recover his health, but all human remedies failed. He then turned to the Blessed Virgin, promising that he would dedicate himself body and soul to converting people if he was healed. His prayer was granted, and he preached from 1708 to his death. For 47 years, he enjoyed good health, even though he never ate meat, fish, or eggs. He always considered himself a living expodo of Our Lady. You know, an expodo is one of those things that you offer to a shrine or a statue in thanksgiving for a miracle, and so he was a living testimony to the miraculous power of Our Lady.
He preached 343 missions in addition to his other preaching engagements.
From 1709 to 1730, he worked mainly in Tuscany, and after 1730, he worked mainly around Rome, but he also preached throughout the Papal State, in the Republic of Genoa, and in part of the Kingdom of Naples. He brought people to Corsica, ending old feuds. The method of his missions was this. His missionaries performed penances in order to obtain the grace of conversion for the people to whom they would speak. Their first sermon was on the Most Holy Name of Jesus, urging people to honor it and place the monogram in their homes. In this way, he was following the example of Saint Bernardine of Siena. The second sermon was about Our Lady, and the third about the souls in purgatory. After the sermon on hardness of heart, he had the Ave Maria of the obstinate sinner rung every evening. When the Ave Maria bell rang an hour after sunset, all the families were to kneel and pray three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys for the conversion of sinners resistant to the call of grace. He never left a parish without erecting the stations of the cross. In many cases, he also established perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The missionaries, when their work was done, would leave in silence and without prior notice to avoid demonstrations of gratitude and honors. All this preaching, prayer, and penance was highly effective. Much of the congregation was moved to tears and repentance. There were so many confessions that not only the missionaries but also the other priests of the locality were kept very busy. Even people who were so deep in sin that it seemed impossible to convert them were totally changed by the mission. To maintain the fruit of the mission, Saint Leonard would set up the stations of the cross before he left. He erected about 600 in his life. He did more to spread this devotion than anyone else. He explained the reason for this. He said the cause of all evils for us must be sought in the fact that no one thinks about the realities that should constitute an object of continuous meditation. It's no wonder a complete moral disorder follows. The first thing to be forgotten is the eschatological truths.
Death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Then one thinks neither of God's benefits nor of what a painful passion Jesus Christ underwent for us. The way of the cross remedies this, leading us to meditate the passion and this shows us the love of God and the consequences of sin. He also found time to write books on spirituality and to write hundreds or perhaps probably well over a thousand but hundreds of letters or five letters of spiritual direction. His works fill 13 volumes in the 1853 to 54 edition. He wanted to spend all of his energy for the good of his neighbor. One day late in life he said the donkey, that's him, is old and can't last much longer. Nevertheless as long as it draws breath it keeps going. I will enjoy dying with the sword in my hand against hell. 1750 was a jubilee year. Pope Benedict XIV called Saint Leonard to Rome the previous year to prepare people to receive its graces. The grace of the jubilee is above all the pardon for sins, pardon for sins and their punishment so that you can be so that you won't have to spend a long time in purgatory.
But in order to receive those graces you need to be repentant, fully repentant in the case of the plenary indulgence. He preached five sermons or rather five missions and two trinitums in the public churches. The pope had him stay on for the holy year to confess pilgrims that year and to preach to religious communities. He erected the stations of the cross in the Colosseum on December 27th 1750. So that tradition that now the pope makes the way of the cross of the Colosseum every year on Good Friday, he's the one who began that. He spent the year after the jubilee preaching missions in the diocese of Lucca and Bologna. After he was finished in November he set off for Rome because the pope had asked him to come back and during that journey he fell gravely ill.
In Foligno his companion wanted him to spare himself the effort of saying mass every day but the saint replied, my dear brother one mass is worth more than all the treasures of the world.
He had called it the hidden treasure in his book about that about the mass and had written the mass is the son of Christianity, the soul of faith, the center of the Catholic religion, the condensation of all that is good and beautiful in the church of Christ. For my part he wrote I am persuaded that if it were not for the holy mass the world would long since have tottered from its foundations, crushed beneath the enormous weight of its many accumulated iniquities. He managed to preach or to reach rather in his journey the retreat priory of Saint Bonaventure in Rome where he had begun his religious life so many years before. He died there on November 26, 1751 having lived 75 years, 53 of which he spent in religious life.
Pius the sixth baptized him in 1796. Blessed Pius the ninth canonized him in 1867 and Pius the 11th named him the patron of missionaries in Catholic countries in 1923.
May saintly obtain for us the strength to walk the way of the cross through pains and sorrows it leads to eternal triumph. Praised be Jesus and Mary.
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