Saint Giuseppe Benedetto Cottolengo

Giuseppe Benedetto Cottolengo or Joseph Benedict Cottolengo (3 May 1786 – 30 April 1842) was the founder of the Little House of Divine Providence and is a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo was born on 3 May 1786, into a middle-class family, in Bra, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. The eldest of twelve children (six of whom died in infancy), on 2 October 1802 he became a Franciscan tertiary. In 1805, he entered the seminary at Asti. Two years later it was closed, and he was forced to continue his studies at home. Cottolengo was ordained a priest on 8 June 1811. Assigned as a curate to Corneliano D'Alba, he completed his doctorate in theology in Turin, and in 1818 was accepted as a canon of the Basilica of Corpus Domini in Turin. Cottolengo donated all his gifts, donations, fees for preaching, and Mass stipends to the poor. At the time, Turin was still recovering from the French occupation and under the pressure of intense immigration from the countryside, which caused serious social problems and poverty. The city was rife with pauperism and beggary, illiteracy and recurrent epidemics, numerous illegitimate births and high infant mortality. At the age of forty-one, after reading the life of Vincent de Paul, he came to understand that his true vocation was that of charity. At this time Cottolengo attended to a family travelling from Lyons to Milan. The pregnant mother was ill and was not accepted at the Maggiore Hospital because she had tuberculosis. Neither could she go to the maternity hospital because she was ill with fever, and the regulations proscribed admitting anyone who might be infectious. Cottolengo gave the mother the last rite and baptized her child before it died. Affected by the scene and the cries of her surviving children, Cottolengo went and sold everything he owned, including his cloak, and rented two rooms. He began his new work on 17 January 1828, offering free accommodation to an elderly paralytic.