Saint Giuseppe Maria Tomasi

Joseph Mary Tomasi CR (Italian: Giuseppe Maria Tomasi di Lampedusa; 12 September 1649 – 1 January 1713), also known as the "Saint Duke", was an Italian Catholic priest, scholar, reformer and cardinal as well as a member of the princely Tomasi family. His scholarship was a significant source of the reforms in the liturgy of the Catholic Church during the 20th century. He was a member of the Theatines. Tomasi was beatified by Pope Pius VII in 1803, and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1986. Tomasi was born at Licata, in the Kingdom of Sicily, part of the Crown of Aragon, to Giulio Tomasi, the first Prince of Lampedusa and his wife, Rosalia Traina. His life was oriented toward God from his first years. Formed and educated in the family home, where they did not lack riches or moral training, he gave proof of a spirit very open to study and to piety. His parents cared greatly for this and for his own Christian formation and his instruction in the classical and modern languages, above all in the Spanish language, because he was destined by the family for the royal court of Madrid, as he was bound to inherit from his own father, as his title of nobility, that of Grandee of Spain. But Tomasi's own spirit aspired, even from youth, to be small in the Kingdom of God, and to serve not the kings of the earth but the King of heaven. He cultivated his pious desire in his heart until he obtained the consent of his father to follow his vocation to religious life. After having renounced, by means of a notarized document, the principality which belonged to him by birth, in favour of his younger brother, as well as his very large inheritance, Tomasi was admitted into the Theatines, a religious Order founded by St. Cajetan of Tiene in 1524, as a reform movement in the Catholic Church, and noted for the simplicity of life followed by its members. He joined the Order on 24 March 1665, and finally made his religious profession in the Theatine house of St.