Blessed Luigi Monti

Luigi Maria Monti, CFIC (24 July 1825 – 1 October 1900) was an Italian Catholic religious brother and the founder of the Sons of the Immaculate Conception. He was referred to as "Father" despite not being an ordained priest. Monti served as a nurse for most of his life and aided the ill in the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome while he was there and also worked to tend to ill people during the Brescia cholera epidemic in 1855. Monti also considered entering the religious life and joined the order of Lodovico Pavoni for a brief period of time. The beatification cause for opened under Pope Pius XII in 1941 and he became titled as a Servant of God, the first stage in the process for sainthood. Pope John Paul II named him as Venerable on 24 April 2001 on the account of his heroic virtue and later beatified him at St. Peter's Square on 9 November 2003. Luigi Maria Monti was born in 1825 in Milan as the eighth of eleven children to Angelo (d. 1837) and Teresa Monti. His father died when Monti was twelve. Monti formed a small group of craftsman and farmers at the store he managed devoted to the Sacred Heart. He made a private vow of obedience and to remain chaste to God on 8 December 1846. He and the other members of his group were charged with meeting to conspire against the Austrian forces who were in the area and in 1851 were jailed in Milan for ten weeks. The group was released when it became obvious that the latter was a religious group and not a political one; the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan Bartolomeo Carlo Romilli also intervened to secure their release. His spiritual director became the priest Luigi Dossi and the two first met in September 1843. He enlisted in the order that Lodovico Pavoni founded in 1830 and spent six weeks with them as a novice while he studied to become a nurse.